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living miserably and more miserable are the 20 million who are living in the villages, who are providing you food. Their destination not changed. They are as bad as they were. Independence or no independence does not mean for them. I used to visit upper Sindh mostly because in some NGOs, which are working upper Sindh, I used to visit the lower Sindh as well, but the conditions of people overall there, because we have recently started poverty score card system introduced by the world bank and where we are now counting the poverty where I found that almost 50% of those 20 million are around poverty line, poverty line means less than dollar a day and another 10 million are in the poverty score card which is from 1-18 that is they are below poverty line. What the government, the civil society we people here sitting here in Karachi, what we have thought about those people, what is wrong, system is wrong, politicians, civil society. I take all of those societies, the segment of the society responsible for those people because they are doing their best. Still Pakistan is the country, the backbone is agriculture and in our Sindh our backbone is agriculture. This is I think only country of the world which exports rice as well as wheat, last two years we are exporting wheat, but the people who are growing this crops what they are that we must think when we talk about the entrepreneurship, we have to talk about these people. We have to fix the responsibilities. We have to see the governance, we have to see the environment. I think Jahangir will be more talking about this subject and also I will talk more after we have heard the panelist. I am thankful to Jahangir and Masood and other friends, let them talk it and then I will try to cover it up rest, thank you very much. Mr. Jahangir Siddiqui [Urdu version] Mr. Asim Kaghzi: Thank you very much, I would request Mr. Masood to come over and share his experience. He is a young fellow, he does not have a background in computing or any of the services, but he truly has made it his business obviously and let’s hear him out. Mr. Masaood Baloch: Assalam-O-Alaikum, Thank you Dr. Valeed Sahab, thank you Ada Asim. I think we have already taken lunch so we can talk of business. I believe business opportunities are like buses because there is always an other one coming; that is why I believe and that is the reason I started business; maybe I am kidding. My brief background, introduction, I did my intermediate from Cadet College Petaro, did my MBA from Quaid-e-Azam University Islamabad, PACS and COPC certified, prestigious healthcare and call center related American certifications. Fifteen years of experience in business process out-sourcing, did couple of jobs in private sector at senior positions the last being Vice President, AMZ Technologies then finally I decided to start my own business. Luckily, I got in touch with an American who I partnered with to start outsourcing business in Pakistan that is how I started. Started in April 2006, hired one room apartment in Gulistan-e-Jauher, bought couple of computers and started running operations with three people without ACS in the scorching heat of May, June, July and August. I had a limited budget so did not even keep the office boy. The team did the cleaning and tea-stuff themselves. They did a wonderful job in satisfying the clients. We added some clients, grew and shifted to a bigger place. We kept on Alhamdulillah adding up the clients, we grew more and we shifted to Shahra-e-Faisal a business hub. Incorporated company as ACS (Arizona Computer Services Private Limited) in September 2007, became CEO and am still. Our parent company Arizona Computer Services Inc. is based out of Phoenix, AZ, established in 1970 being run by a team with 300 years of cumulative experience and being looked after by my partner Bruce Westenberg. Primarily we started as medical billing and transcription company, but now
Alhamdulillah we have the diversified portfolio with eLearning, eHealth services and solutions along with document management system, web design and development and training services. We did some project in Egypt also sponsored by government of Egypt, started participating in international exhibitions, has been a regular participant as an exhibitor in Gitex Saudi Arabia and Gitex Dubai and soon InshaAllah we will be there in CeBIT Germany and Arab Health as a regular exhibitors. Along with US, now we have a presence in Italy, Spain, Egypt and we are also trying to establish our presence in different parts of the world like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Australia and some other countries of Europe. The whole idea is to get the outsourcing business in Pakistan. Now what is outsourcing What is BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) And how it can help us, how it can help Sindhi people particularly people living in the rural areas. I would say outsourcing basically is getting the non-core business process activities of any organization done from another entity, be it an individual or an organization, it is called the outsourcing. If there is an airline, the core job would be to sell tickets to the passengers and not to develop the MIS system. Physicians sitting in America, their core job would be to examine patients not worry about as how the claims would be submitted with the insurance company and how to make the followup or to worry about their electronic medical records. Radiologist sitting in Saudi Arabia or maybe in any part of the world, their core job is to interpret the reports and not to develop any PACS system. The job of a court is to hear the cases, not to build document management system to archive their documents. Bill Gates says: “Personal computers will be window to everything that we are interested into and everything that we would need to know.” So here comes in the opportunity because with the advent of internet and information technology, the organizations are trying to get their back office work outsourced to the areas where it could be done at cheaper rates. It runs around 300 billion dollar industry that is addressable. One in nine out of US IT jobs were to be outsourced by 2010; people estimate that by outsourcing there could be cut of cost by 40%. So that is the reason that our main focus and our future vision revolves around outsourcing. We just want to establish a sustainable outsourcing business model and expanded it into the rural part of the country at the district, subdivision and village level. We will start with one province, Sindh Province and one village. Why because you know the rural areas are going to be the attractive out-sourcing destinations. By integrating the technology and the trained source in the rural areas, we would like to capitalize on this opportunity. And there could be another important leverage out of this that is you know developing the local entrepreneurship in the rural areas, that is very important. Now how can we do that We have about close to 23 districts in Sindh and 97 subdivisions excluding the thickly populated districts, five in Karachi and one in Hyderabad, we will be left with 16-18 districts and 75 subdivisions. If we establish the outsourcing units by giving the connectivity to 16 districts, 75 subdivisions and 10,000 villages, we can calculate the figure. Consider that 50% of them employ 20 people each and they give salary to tune of $300 per person per month. We will have you know employment opportunity to 100,000 people and that is very good number. The employment and the outsourcing in the rural areas will have a significant impact on the
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Good morning - Sindhi Association of North America

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