India's Reliance Communications has announced plans to cull its headcount by around 6,000 by outsourcing its call center and shared services operations.
The company plans to sign deals with two third-party providers worth nearly 7 billion rupees ($116.9 million) to outsource the operations, the Economic Timesreported.
The deals will involve the transfer of around 37% of RCom's 15,000 employees to the third party providers, according to the report, which cites a top company official.
According to the official, the operator's BPO and shared services business were operating inefficiently and not adding any bottom-line value to the company.
As a result, RCom has made the decision to outsource the operations and concentrate more closely on core telecom issues such as customer acquisition, as well as sales, distribution and marketing.
Outsourcing the two functions will allow the company to save nearly 2 billion rupees in annual salary costs alone, the official said.
RCom is currently struggling under a debt burden of around 340 billion rupees, and has been pursuing ways to reduce operating costs to address this issue.
As part of this push, the company last year signed billion-dollar network management outsourcing deals with both Alcatel-Lucent .