Benefits of nearshoring software development to South Africa

After a wave of offshoring at the end of the 20th century, many businesses are now reconsidering the practice. While it’s possible to save greatly on wages by relocating to India, China, Vietnam, or other offshore destinations, there are also inherent challenges. These difficulties tend to result in much lower productivity, particularly in software development and the broader IT field. Nearshoring software development to South Africa may be the perfect middle ground solution to these problems.

What is Nearshoring?

Businesses in wealthy nations tend to face the dilemma of procuring services in their home nation at high expense or from the other side of the world at low expense. Compared to offshoring, nearshoring aims for nations that are fairly close, but much cheaper as opposed to domestic work.

While expenses on wages will be greater than an offshoring destination, geographic, cultural, and linguistic proximity can offer domestic efficiency. South Africa is a highly educated nation that’s closer to the United Kingdom than you’d think, in more ways than one.

Cut Costs and Maintain Efficiency: Nearshore Software Development to South Africa

The first concern of a business that’s considering nearshoring or offshoring is wages. South Africa has much lower costs of living than the United Kingdom, as well as much lower wages.

South African is a nation with a surplus of skilled, educated people who are emigrating in great numbers to pursue opportunities abroad. Not only can you save dramatically by choosing South Africa for your software development, but you can do so while offering great local wages that will attract the best talent. That’s the advantage of nearshoring to South Africa vs relying on domestic companies, but nearshoring also holds many benefits over offshoring.

High English Fluency

Almost five million South Africans speak English as their home language, as it’s one of the eleven official languages of the nation. The rest of the nation generally relies on English as a second language and is highly fluent in it. Out of the gate, this solves many problems related to translation and miscommunication.

Smaller Cultural Gap

Cultural differences often cause issues for western companies that offshore to regions such as East Asia. It’s common for people of these countries to prize formality, respectfulness, and subtlety in a way that can clash with Western frankness.

A Western manager might make a mistake that his offshoring employees won’t point out because they believe doing so would be disrespectful. South Africa is a culturally unique place. However it is one with a great deal of British and Dutch influence which helps to bridge the gap of cultural understanding.

Narrow Time Difference

The United Kingdom and South Africa are over 6,000 miles apart, but only two timezones separate them. Working with offshored developers can be taxing and reduce productivity simply because of the vast time difference. On the other hand, professionals in the United Kingdom and South Africa can easily work alongside each other.

Find Out More

There is huge potential to turning to South Africa for developers-as-a-service? Contact us to find out how we can help your business thrive by nearshoring software development to South Africa.

About SovTech:

SovTech is a custom software development company providing a complete software design and development service. We design, build, deploy and maintain innovative custom software that gives our clients the opportunity to start, run and grow world-class businesses. SovTech believe technology will be at the core of businesses of the future. We aim to connect businesses across all industries to innovative software, technological development, solutions and services, in a manner that’s faster, easier and better than ever before. To date, we are operating across continents and have offices in Johannesburg, Cape Town, London and Dubai.

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business and technology nearshoring

Benefits of nearshoring software development to South Africa

What is Nearshoring?