10 Successful Offshoring Examples
The offshoring examples worth studying are the ones you can verify. Skype was built by a development team in Tallinn. Google's Latin American engineering center started as a Brazilian startup acquisition. Slack's original interface was designed by an agency in another country.
Most published lists repeat the same handful of claims without checking any of them. This one separates the cases with a documented source from the ones that fall apart when you look.
TL;DR
- Verified: Skype's software was written by Estonian developers in Tallinn, and as of 2011 most of the division's development team sat in Tallinn and Tartu (Wikipedia, 2026; Baltic Times, 2005).
- Verified: Google entered Brazil in 2005 by acquiring Akwan Information Technologies in Belo Horizonte, now its Latin American engineering center (Google, 2025).
- Verified: Slack hired the agency MetaLab in 2013 to turn its early prototype into a finished product (Wilkinson, 2015).
- Not verified: the widely repeated claim that Google bought a Ukrainian company called CloudSimple. CloudSimple was based in Santa Clara, California (Wilson Sonsini, 2019).
- The pattern in every verified case: the offshore team owned a product outcome, not a task queue.
Table of Contents
- What Is Offshoring?
- Why Most Offshoring Example Lists Are Unreliable
- Offshoring Examples That Check Out
- Offshoring Claims That Do Not Check Out
- What the Verified Cases Have in Common
- Offshoring vs Outsourcing vs Nearshoring
- Offshoring Examples at Small Business Scale
- How to Apply These Examples to Your Own Business
- Conclusion
- Frequently Asked Questions
- References
What Is Offshoring?
Offshoring is moving a business function to another country while keeping it under your own control. You still direct the work, set the standards, and own the output. Only the location changes.
That last part is what separates it from outsourcing, where a different company takes over the function and runs it with its own people and methods. The two often get used as synonyms and they are not.
A company can do both at once. Hiring your own engineer in Mexico is offshoring. Paying a studio in Poland to deliver a product is offshore outsourcing. Both appear in the examples below, labeled as what they are.
Why Most Offshoring Example Lists Are Unreliable
Search for offshoring examples and you get the same roster on nearly every page: the same companies, the same countries, the same one line explanation. Almost none of them cite a source.
We checked the claims that appear most often. Some hold up against original sources. Several do not, and one of them is a straightforward factual error that has been copied across dozens of pages.
That matters for a reason beyond accuracy. If you are deciding whether to build a team abroad, a false case study teaches you the wrong lesson about what made it work.
Offshoring Examples That Check Out
1. Skype: a Product Built by an Offshore Development Team
Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom of Sweden and Janus Friis of Denmark, but the software itself was written by Estonian developers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus (Wikipedia, 2026).
The split lasted. The company registered in Luxembourg and ran marketing from London, while the main development team stayed in Tallinn (Estonian World, n.d.). As of 2011, most of the division's development team and 44 percent of all its employees were in Tallinn and Tartu (Wikipedia, 2026).
eBay bought Skype in 2005 in a deal valuing it around 2.6 billion USD, and reporting at the time put roughly 130 of about 225 employees in Estonia doing software development, service development, and customer service (Baltic Times, 2005).
Lesson: the offshore team was the product team, not a support function bolted on afterward.
2. Google in Brazil: Offshoring Through Acquisition
Google entered Brazil in 2005 by acquiring Akwan Information Technologies, a search startup founded in Belo Horizonte by professors and students from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Google, 2025).
Two decades later Google describes that site as its Brazilian engineering center and reports expanding it. Family Link, its parental control app, was created in 2017 with participation from that team, and its main features are currently developed from Belo Horizonte (Google, 2025).
Lesson: Google bought a team already rooted in a university pipeline, then handed it real product ownership. The output followed the ownership.
3. Slack: Offshore Outsourcing of Design
Slack's founder emailed the design agency MetaLab in July 2013, and the agency was hired in late 2013 to turn an early prototype into a polished product. MetaLab's founder describes the prototype he was shown on day one as looking like a rough browser version of IRC (Wilkinson, 2015).
MetaLab operates from Victoria, British Columbia, while Slack built its company in San Francisco. Strictly this is cross border outsourcing rather than offshoring, since an outside firm did the work, and it belongs on the list because almost every list miscategorizes it.
Lesson: a defined deliverable with a clear brief is the kind of work an outside firm abroad does well.
4. Offshoring to Fill a Skill You Cannot Hire Locally
The pattern underneath the first three cases is not cost. It is access to a specific group of people who already exist somewhere else: a set of peer to peer engineers in Tallinn, a university search lab in Belo Horizonte, a design shop with a particular taste.
Lesson: when you offshore for access, you look for a named team. When you offshore for cost alone, you look at a price list. The first produces case studies and the second produces churn.
5. Offshoring Daily Operations Rather Than Engineering
Most offshoring is not frontier engineering. It is the recurring work that keeps a business running: inbound calls answered, leads followed up, files moved, books closed, inboxes managed.
These cases rarely get written up because no acquisition announcement follows. They are also the version most readers of this page can actually act on.
Lesson: the seat that repeats every week is usually the one worth filling first. The top roles to hire for remote teams page shows where that demand concentrates.
Offshoring Claims That Do Not Check Out
Three claims appear constantly in offshoring roundups and do not survive a check against original sources.
| The Claim | What the Sources Say | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Google acquired CloudSimple, a Ukrainian company | CloudSimple was based in Santa Clara, California, and was acquired by Google in November 2019 (Wilson Sonsini, 2019) | False on the country |
| WhatsApp offshored creative and operational teams to Eastern Europe before its 19 billion USD sale | The Facebook acquisition is well documented; the offshoring claim appears without an original source | Unsupported |
| Named companies saved an exact percentage by offshoring | Published savings figures rarely state what they were measured against or who produced them | Not verifiable |
We previously repeated the CloudSimple claim on this page. It was wrong and it has been corrected.
The broader point for anyone researching this decision: treat an uncited company example as a story, not as evidence. Ask where the number came from before you plan around it.
What the Verified Cases Have in Common
Strip away the logos and the verified cases share four decisions. None of them is about which country was cheapest.
| Decision | Skype | Google Brazil | Slack |
|---|---|---|---|
| The offshore team owned an outcome | Built the product itself | Owns shipped product features | Owned the finished design |
| The team already existed as a group | Four engineers who had worked together | A university founded startup | An established agency |
| The work was defined before it started | Build a working VoIP client | Search and product engineering | Turn a prototype into a product |
| The arrangement lasted | Development stayed in Estonia for years | Twenty years and expanding | Design handed off and kept |
The fourth row is the one most companies miss. Every verified case is a long relationship. The failed offshoring stories, which nobody publishes, are mostly short ones.
Offshoring vs Outsourcing vs Nearshoring
These three terms describe different things and get used as if they were interchangeable.
| Model | Who Directs the Work | Where | Winner For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Offshoring | You do | A distant country | Building a team you control at lower cost |
| Outsourcing | The provider does | Local or abroad | A defined deliverable you do not want to manage |
| Nearshoring | You do | A nearby country sharing your hours | Work that needs same day feedback |
| Offshore outsourcing | The provider does | A distant country | A packaged service run end to end |
The row that matters for most US companies today is the third. Nearshore staffing keeps the cost advantage of hiring abroad while keeping live conversation available, which overnight arrangements cannot do. The fuller comparison of staff augmentation, outsourcing, and managed services covers which model fits which function.
Offshoring Examples at Small Business Scale
You do not need an acquisition budget to copy what these companies did. The same four decisions scale down to a single hire.
| Function | What Offshoring Looks Like | What You Can Count |
|---|---|---|
| Appointment setting | One setter working your hours in your CRM | Dials, conversations, appointments booked |
| Transaction coordination | One coordinator owning files end to end | Files moved per week, deadlines missed |
| Bookkeeping | A bookkeeper closing your month | Days to close, reconciliation errors |
| Design and video | A designer owning the asset pipeline | Assets shipped, revision rounds |
| Customer service | A representative owning the inbox | First response time, tickets resolved |
Companies that build a team of vetted remote professionals this way describe the same arc in the client testimonials: one seat first, measured weekly, then a second.
How to Apply These Examples to Your Own Business
- Pick the outcome, not the task. Write what the person must achieve in ninety days before you write a job post.
- Choose the function that is capping growth, not the one that is cheapest to hand off.
- Decide the weekly number you will check, and confirm it already exists in your systems.
- Keep the work inside your own tools, so you can manage and audit it.
- Match hours before you compare rates. Overlap changes what kind of work is possible.
- Plan for a long relationship. Every verified case on this page is years long, not months.
Step one is where most of the result is decided and the one most often skipped.
Conclusion
Offshoring examples are easy to find and hard to trust. The three that hold up here share a structure worth copying: a team that already existed, a defined outcome handed to them, ownership of real work, and a relationship measured in years.
The cost saving came second in every one of them. Book a discovery call to work out which function in your business fits that pattern.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are examples of offshoring?
Documented examples include Skype, whose software was written by Estonian developers in Tallinn while the company registered in Luxembourg, and Google, which entered Brazil in 2005 by acquiring the Belo Horizonte startup Akwan Information Technologies and still runs an engineering center there (Google, 2025; Wikipedia, 2026).
What is offshoring in simple terms?
Offshoring means moving part of your business to another country while keeping control of it. You still set the direction and own the output. If an outside company takes over the function instead, that is outsourcing, which is a different arrangement.
Which situations are examples of offshoring?
Opening a development office abroad, hiring your own staff in another country for daily operations, building a research center overseas, or relocating a support function while keeping it on your own systems. The common thread is that you keep direction of the work.
What is the difference between offshoring and outsourcing?
Offshoring changes where the work happens and keeps you in control of it. Outsourcing changes who controls the work and can happen in your own city. A company that hires a foreign agency to deliver a project is doing offshore outsourcing, which combines both.
Did Google acquire a Ukrainian company called CloudSimple?
No. CloudSimple was based in Santa Clara, California, and Google announced the acquisition in November 2019 (Wilson Sonsini, 2019). The claim that it was Ukrainian appears on many offshoring roundups and is incorrect.
Is offshoring only about saving money?
Not in the cases that are documented. Skype, Google in Brazil, and Slack all went abroad for access to a specific group of people with a specific skill. Cost was a consequence rather than the reason, and the arrangements lasted for years.
What makes an offshoring arrangement fail?
Usually the setup rather than the location: no written outcome, a pile of unrelated tasks instead of a defined role, work kept outside your own systems, no overlapping hours, and no number checked until something breaks.
References
Baltic Times. (2005, September 21). Skype shakes up the way. https://www.baltictimes.com/news/articles/13963/
Estonian World. (n.d.). Skype and the Estonian start-up ecosystem. https://estonianworld.com/technology/skype-estonian-start-ecosystem/
Google. (2025, August 28). 20 anos do Google no Brasil: inovacoes da engenharia brasileira para o mundo. Google Brasil Blog. https://blog.google/intl/pt-br/produtos/20-anos-do-google-no-brasil-inovacoes-da-engenharia-brasileira-para-o-mundo/
Wikipedia. (2026). Skype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype
Wilkinson, A. (2015). Slack's 2.8 billion dollar secret sauce. https://www.neverenough.com/essays/slacks-2-8-billion-dollar-secret-sauce
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. (2019, November 18). CloudSimple to be acquired by Google. https://wsgr.com/en/insights/cloudsimple-to-be-acquired-by-google.html
