Northern secretary Peter Hain has announced the creation of 1,000 call centre jobs for Northern Ireland by Indian company ICICI OneSource.
The jobs boost follows a trade mission that Mr Hain led to India in April. The company will operate from two centres in the North, one in Belfast and another at a location yet to be chosen.
The Belfast centre will be based at Linenhall Plaza and is expected to be operational by the end of next month as recruitment is already under way. The second centre is planned to open later this year.
Invest Northern Ireland is providing £8 million (€11.7 million) in financial support for the project, which, Mr Hain said, will deliver £28 million in annual wages to the Northern economy by autumn of next year.
ICICI OneSource is among India's leading customer service contact companies. It provides customised business process management to the banking, financial services, telecommunications, media and healthcare sectors. The company currently employs over 8,000 across 10 centres in US and India.
Mr Hain said Northern Ireland was clearly the most competitive option for companies seeking a base in Europe to service western European markets. "This is the first Indian-based BPO (business processing outsourcing) company to directly invest in Northern Ireland and the second investment to result from the successful Invest NI business mission I led to India in April," he added.
"This investment illustrates the international confidence in and the high growth potential of Northern Ireland's contact centre sector. This is a key target growth sector and the jobs created will provide a broad range of career and training opportunities in a number of areas including customer service and IT support," said Mr Hain.
The chief executive officer of ICICI OneSource Ananda Mukerji said: "Our Northern Ireland centres will be our first outsourcing operation based in Europe. We have a strong market presence in the UK and we see significant demand for high-end business processing, which our Northern Ireland centres will be ideally placed to fulfil."
This is the second Indian call centre to open in Northern Ireland. HCL took over a centre in Belfast from BT in 2002, while last year it took over the Answercall Direct operation in Armagh, employing around 2,000 people at the two locations.
