Telecom provider Vodafone opened today (July 2) a new shared services center in Romania, where it will employ 750 people this year, and 2,000 people in the next three years.

The center will offer IT and client relation services for clients in UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and Ireland. The center will also provide IT services for the Vodafone Group headquarter in London.

The inauguration ceremony was attended by Prime Minister Victor Ponta, communication minister Razvan Cotovelea, and Ravinder Takkar, CEO of Vodafone Romania. This was the first public event in which Takkar appeared since taking over as CEO of Vodafone’s local business, in March 2014.

“We have been very happy with the activity of the Danubius Network Operation Center we have in Bucharest, which was opened in 2013 and now has 500 Romanian engineers who serve nine countries. We have been very happy with the quality of the Romanian employees and their multi linguistic skills as well as their technical skills so we decided to add to that and to open this new Shared Services Center in Bucharest,” Takkar said.

How does this Service Center work? Imagine a Vodafone customer in the UK who needs support. He will call and an employee in Romania will answer and guide him through the process. This requires good language skills but also knowledge about the business in the respective country.

When deciding to open this center in Romania, Vodafone looked mainly at three things: the skills of the individuals, both technical and in customer interaction, multilingual skills, but also the passion of the people for the work they do, according to Steve McCrystal, group director for Shared Service Centers for Vodafone Group.

He leads a network of service centers spread in various countries around the Globe, such as Hungary, India, Egypt, Portugal, and now Romania, with a total of 13,000 employees. These centers are servicing the Vodafone customers or other Vodafone business segments on various areas of expertise: customer relations, IT, financial and others. “We need more capacity for these service centers, we need more multilingual capabilities. This led us to opening this center in Romania,” McCrystal explained.

Prime Minister Victor Ponta said that he’s thankful for the new jobs created by this service center. “Many young Romanians will benefit from jobs that offer them working conditions and development opportunities similar to those in more developed countries, without them having to leave Romania,” he said. He pointed out that the Romanian Government encourages the business environment by offering tax exemption on reinvested net profit, starting July 1, 2014. “I wish to Vodafone large profits so they will have more money to reinvest,” Ponta said.

Vodafone also benefited from a state aid for the investment in the new service center, for the IT services part. The exact amount of this aid was not revealed.

Vodafone’s investment in the new center is about EUR 6.2 million, which covers both for the equipment and technology, but also for the training of the new employees.

The shared services center is part of Vodafone’s business center, located in the Obor area of Bucharest. So far, the center employs 100 people. It started operations three months ago.

This is the second such center opened by Vodafone, after Danubius NOC, which was opened last year. The Danubius center services some 90 million Vodafone customers in Netherlands, Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Greece, Albania, Malta and Italy, on network related issues.

The activity of these service centers does not generate revenues for Vodafone Romania, the company’s representatives said. Vodafone Romania last year made EUR 746 million revenues and a net profit of EUR 98 million.

The company has some 3,000 employees, but the total number of employees of the Vodafone group in Romania, including the service centers is currently 3,500. This will grow to more than 5,000 in the next three years, due to the new service center.

 Andrei Chirileasa, andrei@romania-insider.com