nearshoring

pp.

Restructuring a company's workforce by moving jobs to a nearby foreign country. Also: near-shoring.

—nearshore v., n.

Example Citations:

One route around the offshore obstacles is nearshoring to developed or nearby developing countries.

John Boyd sees growing interest by in-house call centers in nearshore locations. He cites Canada, Northern Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico and Spain for the US Spanish-speaking market.

— Brendan B. Read, "The Lure of Offshore," Call Center Magazine, April 1, 2004

Wait — isn't writing software for foreign companies India's specialty? By the numbers, yes. The outsourcing business there totaled an estimated $ 12 billion in 2003 out of $ 25 billion from low-cost locales worldwide. But Bulgaria, Romania, and other locations on the outskirts of Europe are plying a new twist on the craze for sending technology development offshore. They're pushing what pundits call ''near-shoring,'' or shifting work to countries that cost less but are only a short hop away. Finnish companies farm out IT work to Estonia, Germans use contractors in Poland, and Italians ship projects to Serbia. For a lot of European companies, ''India seems an awfully long way away,'' says information technology services analyst Ian Marriott of researcher Gartner Inc.

— Andy Reinhardt, "Forget India, Let's Go to Bulgaria," Business Week, March 1, 2004

Earliest Citation:

"We want to help the companies by managing their entire IT spend with sourcing strategies. We would like to be part of big companies and help them manage sourcing, decide portfolio of whether to go for outsourcing or nearshoring or onshoring, apart from negotiating on their behalf with providers," he said.

— "Neoit.com offers to manage outsourcing," Business Line, July 4, 2002

Notes:

The following glossary includes two more "X-shoring" terms of interest — multishoring and twoshoring:

Offshoring — Sending work to an overseas location.

Multishoring — Sending outsourced work to several overseas locations. choosing between them based on the job to be done and the relevant skills available.

Twoshoring — Using an offshore location and a domestic one.

Nearshoring — Sending outsourced work to a nearby locale — Mexico or Canada (for the U.S.), or Eastern Europe for a Western European country.

— "An outsourcing glossary," Financial Executive, September 1, 2003

Related Words:

corporate anorexia

capsizing

downaging

dumbsizing

inshoring

offshorable

rightshoring

unsourcing

Categories:

Globalization

Layoffs and Firings