Microsoft games firm outsources to Portugal

Microsoft games firm outsources to Portugal - Portugal Business News

Portugal tech investment news - Microsoft video-game company Activision Blizzard will outsource its activities to Portugal as part of their new business plan.

Activision Blizzard, that is one of the largest video-game companies globally, was purchased by Microsoft for USD 75.4 billion on October 2023. The company, that is now part of the Microsoft Gaming Business Unit, owns a number of popular videogames including Call of Duty, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, Warcraft, Diablo, StarCraft, and Overwatch.

In January 2024, tech giant Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees working for Activision Blizzard and the layoffs represented around 8.6% of the company’s total gaming workforce of 22,000 people. In March 2024, the Activision Blizzard employees working for its Irish office in Cork are being laid-off as the company announced its intention to outsource its activities to Lisbon and Cairo to outsourcing firms such as Teleperformance. Outsourcing its activities will enable the Microsoft company to scale up or down according to the service-level demand for a sustainable cost structure.

Teleperformance in Portugal is well positioned to provide services for this new market as the company invested 1.2 million euros in the videogame industry with a new virtual reality lab and the construction of Portugal’s first Esports arena in 2022, thus gearing towards providing digital integration services from Portugal.

This business move from the Microsoft company towards outsourcing to Portugal signals a trend from tech giants towards outsourcing their services to countries where the levels of tech expertise and English proficiency meet the relatively low costs, such as in the case of Portugal where a cost-benefit analysis shows the country emerging as a key destination for tech companies.

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