Pejfar's bookkeeping is not helping Czech clients. His expertise is meant for companies like the French chemical giant Rhodia and the big German software group SAP.
Prague is turning into a center for outsourcing white-collar jobs like bookkeeping, data crunching, and even research and development. The Czech Republic and other Central European countries, including Poland, Hungary and Slovakia, are clamoring to serve the needs of multinational corporations--and themselves.
The United States may turn to India to fill many of its call center jobs and the like. But Western Europe is turning more frequently these days to its own backyard, transforming a few urban centers of the former Communist bloc into the Bangalores of Europe.
American companies are cashing in as well. In recent years, IBM, Dell and Morgan Stanley, among others, have outsourced services to Eastern Europe or helped other American companies do so.
To be sure, Eastern Europe, with an outsourcing business estimated at about $2 billion this year, represents just a fraction of the global outsourcing market, estimated this year at nearly $386 billion. But Robert H. Brown, an outsourcing analyst at Gartner, expects growth in Eastern Europe to outstrip the rest of the market in the next four years, expanding close to 30 percent by 2010, compared with 25 percent for the global market.
What is unusual about Eastern and Central Europe is that their most advanced cities offer a potent mix of attributes that even Bangalore cannot rival: a highly educated, multilingual pool of talent in an increasingly affluent consumer market--all barely a stone's throw from its prime clients.
Outsourcing is booming as this region moves more quickly to integrate itself economically with its more affluent neighbors to the west, reflecting progress that is reducing the high unemployment that plagued these countries for years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire.
It is also feeding a real-estate boom in high-rise office space. Despite high unemployment in much of Europe, Western European companies are pressed by labor shortages in several important occupations, encouraging them to turn to their eastern neighbors to ease the strain.
"Yes, there is a trend, and it started a few years ago," said Miroslaw Proppé, the director for the Warsaw office of KPMG, the accounting firm. He added that it was "not necessarily based on low labor costs but on the potential of young Polish graduates."
Commerzbank of Germany does its data processing in Prague, and Siemens, the electrical giant, does bookkeeping, as well as research and development, in the city. Royal Philips Electronics, the Dutch electrical conglomerate, operates a shared services center outside Warsaw.
Last summer, Morgan Stanley announced that it was opening a business services and technology center in Budapest that would supplement a mathematical research center the company established there in 2005.
The company employs about 200 people there, said Hugh Fraser, a spokesman, and will employ about 450 when fully up and running. He said the choice of Budapest in both cases was made because of the "availability of high-quality talent."
The reasons for Central Europe's new attractiveness for outsourcing are not limited to promising talent at cheap prices. Central and Eastern European countries also remain some of the world's great untapped markets for services and consumer goods.
But there is no doubt that low wages in the region appeal to Western companies. Employees in Hungary and the Czech Republic earn a quarter of what employees in Western Europe make; Slovakia's pay runs only a fifth as much, the statistical agency Eurostat says.
If that does not make the region attractive enough, governments also offer incentives like simplified tax structures and subsidies for office construction.
Unlike other regions that compete for outsourcing work, like India or the Philippines, where English is the sole operating language, employees in Accenture's Central European business speak a variety of languages, giving clients access to people who speak English, French, German, Russian and local languages.
"The key thing is language," said Andrew Grech, an Australian native who directs Accenture's operations here. "The other factor is a stable political and economic environment. The Czechs are in the European Union and NATO."
The growth of these jobs is helping stanch a hemorrhaging of workers from Central and Eastern Europe to the West in search of jobs. And it is exerting some influence on decreasing the unemployment rate across Eastern Europe, Proppé said.
In the Czech Republic, unemployment fell by the start of this year to 7.1 percent from 7.8 percent in 2002; in Poland, joblessness dropped to 13.4 percent from 20.2 percent five years ago; and in Slovakia, to 11.6 percent from 19.7 percent, according to Eurostat.
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