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As globalization continues to reshape the business landscape, the use of Business process outsourcing services and activities is gaining significant popularity among businesses. The exact services and activities that benefits and create a sustainable competitive advantage to organizations remain underexplored and few studies have been conducted in the Southern Africa developing countries including South African mobile operators. The main purpose of this study was to redress the existing knowledge gap by ascertaining the actual services and activities that the mobile telecom operators are outsourcing for sustainable competitive advantage. A structured closed-ended questionnaire was used to collect raw data from 210 employees. Overall, the results indicate that some of the key services and activities outsourced for sustainable competitive advantage included building and managing network infrastructure, network roll-out and management, manufacturing of mobile network equipment, monitoring the mobile network on capacity overload and breakdowns and assembly operations, maintenance of the base stations of mobile network, manufacturing of hard software components and resolving software problems and fleet management. The practical implications of the findings, assist organizational management in making informed and structured decisions through the identification of critical activities and services that contribute to the attainment of a sustainable competitive advantage and performance improvement of the mobile telecom operators.

Economics of business and increased focus on operating efficiencies are leading mobile telecom service providers to outsource non-core business process elements, infrastructure systems, and customer service, although the trade-off on the influence of business process outsourcing (BPO) on the firm’s productivity is still inconclusive. Few empirical studies or research have been conducted to analyze the influence of BPO on the firm’s productivity levels in the mobile telecom operators of Southern African developing countries. This research tries to redress the existing knowledge gap and the limited body of literature by providing both descriptive and empirical evidence on the influence of BPO on the firm‘s productivity levels of mobile telecom operators. A structured closed-ended questionnaire was used to collect raw data from 210 employees. Descriptive and chi-square tests were conducted to establish the statistically significant relationship between business process outsourcing and the firm’s productivity levels. The results reflect a statistically significant relationship between the implementation of BPO and the firm’s productivity. The study has practical implications for service and industrial practitioners, managers, scholars, and government policymakers in that they can strategically plan their BPO practices and link those practices to the organizations' productivity performance. Further research can be conducted in other industries in order to do comparison studies confirming lessons gained across industries on the effect of BPO on a firm’s productivity levels.