UiPath Stock: Why Has It Been Falling Down?

The old “John in Mumbai” joke heralds back to the days when Indian support desk agents were given Western-sounding names which didn’t manage to fool anyone. These days that slight accent you hear when calling a support desk is the twang of Tagalog, the predominant language spoken in the Philippines. We’ll just say what everyone is thinking – Rosie in Manila is a whole lot more enjoyable to conversate with and slightly less recipe-driven than John in Mumbai. While support functions will never completely disappear, a lot more effort is going into automating the customer support function and tiering it based on how valuable a customer is.

Moving to Manila wasn’t just a function of customer experience, it was also about cost. Wage inflation has soared in India over the years and continues to:

A WTW survey of about 5,700 companies across 27 Asia-Pacific markets found that India is likely to see pay increases average 9.2% this year, one of the highest rates in the region and exceeding the 8.7% rise last year. 

Credit: Nikkei Asia, Mar 13th 2022

This is driving companies to reconsider outsourcing back-office functions to “emerging market centers of excellence” and simply automating them, which means companies like UiPath (PATH) have robotic process automation (RPA) solutions that pretty much sell themselves. So, why is the stock price falling?

Why is UiPath Stock Falling Down?

Loss aversion is an interesting phenomenon to observe.