The multinationals that hold service centers from the north to the south of the country have already created more than 55 thousand work places in Portugal. The data is from the Agência para o Investimento e Comércio Externo de Portugal (AICEP) and represent more than 1% of the countries jobs.

This is the sum of the work places of the 134 foreign service centers in, whether they are shared services, operational services or that provide administrative services to companies (BPO), skills centers, IT centers or software development, research centers, innovation centers, engineering centers, digital and technological centers…

The truth is that this strongly boosted sector by the foreign direct investment, is no longer reduced to call centers, increasingly mobilizing more sophisticated skills that crosses areas such as engineering, architecture, design, IT, management consultancy, legal and financial services with the logistics, recruitment and infrastructure and rental aspects.

“Google, Cisco and Vestas are only recent examples of how the service centers are a driving force on the unemployment reduction and the creation of the major opportunities for the most qualified people to stay in Portugal, including top engineers and financiers”, said the president of AICEP, Luís Castro Henriques. “Today are 55 thousand employees , but tomorrow will be more. The numbers are constantly changing. In 2014, we had already five companies and today we are keeping track of 30 potential projects of service centers that could create more than five thousand work places. The growth has been overwhelming”.

In fact, more than a half these service centers arrived in Portugal since troike has gone. Only in 2017 arrived 25 and in 2018 more 14. The president of AICEP expects that “2019 could be one more great year on the attraction of service centers with more software and engineer”.

Read the full article HERE.

By Expresso, April 2019