Offshore IT Rates

Just got email email from some company in the UK providing outsourced IT from India. I would have immediately tagged the email as spam but the rates they provided looked interesting:

We are currently dealing with 45 IT / Web Development Companies in the U.K. and USA. We provide resources of different skills set (Skills and Costs Mentioned Below) according to your project needs. Instead of hiring an employee in the UK you are getting the same services at less than half of the cost and you dont even have to worry about office space and other employee needs. Our employees will be always available on MSN/ Email/Skype/Phone and they will send you the time sheets or status reports according to your needs.

Please see the cost below and you will find a major difference in costs:

Web Designer (Skills : Dreamweaver/Adobe Photoshop/Flash MX) : 450 Pounds/ Month

Web Developer (Skills : PHP/MySql) : 750 Pounds/ Month

Web Developer (Skills : ASP/HTML/VBSCRIPT/JAVASCRIPT/SQL SERVER) : 750 Pounds/ Month

Web Developer (.NET) ( Skills : ASP.NET/SQl SERVER) : 800 Pounds/ Month

Application Developer ( Skills : VB/VB.NET/SQL SERVER) : 800 Pounds/ Month

Java Developer (Skills : J2EE/ JSP/JBOSS/TOMCAT/MY SQL ) : 800 Pounds/Month

SEO Executive (Skills : Link Exchange / Keyword Planning/ Paid Activities) : 650 Pounds/Month

Data Operator (Skills : MS Office) : 300 Pound/ Month

Note all the prices are exclusive of VAT.

The rates are in UK pounds so you need to multiply them with 1.7 to convert to US dollars so the Data Operator actually costs USD $510PHP 29,930INR 43,222EUR 486CNY 3,712 (Php 26,000USD 443INR 37,560EUR 422CNY 3,227) and the .NET Developer is USD$1,360 (Php 69,000USD 1,176INR 99,677EUR 1,120CNY 8,563).

Of course, the company gets a chunk of that before they pay off their developers. Decent rates for an offshore development work though the .NET developer seems to be a little undercut. Local salaries for the same ranges somewhere from Php35k (1 year exp) to Php80K (3 years exp). A former officemate’s wife is working directly with an Australian company from home and gets Php 90k (net) for it.

Does that mean skilled Indians are cheaper to hire then Filipinos?