Monday, April 14, 2008 [ philstar.com ]
The Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry is expected to be a $6- billion industry by June this year.
In an interview, Business Process Outsourcing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) president Oscar Sañez said the outsourcing and offshoring (O&O) industry is on track to meet its goal of a 40-percent market growth.
“We will be posting 40-percent growth for three years in a row,” Sañez said.
Under the roadmap 2010, the local O&O industry is expected to generate $13 billion in revenues by 2010, representing 10 percent of the global O&O market.
In terms of employment generation, Sañez said there was a 27-percent increase in manpower last year with 320,000 workers. In the next three years, Sañez said the industry needs to hire 600,000 more workers to achieve its employment goal of 920,000.
For the first quarter alone, Sañez reported a number of investments in the industry.
In particular, Nestle and India based GENPACT doubled their operations here.
For the rest of the year, Sañez said investments will mainly be for expansions. “I think eTelecare and Teletech are looking at expanding their facilities,” Sañez noted.
Meanwhile, BPO companies are now looking at tapping the European market as dollar depreciation continues to make serving the North American market more expensive.
“The European market is now significantly larger than that in North America and is growing fast,” David Barrett, chief executive of Procuritas Limited said.
Procuritas Limited is an advisory company engaged in engineering sourcing transactions with customers and BPO suppliers.
According to Barrett, Philippine companies are better equipped to serve the European market. Aside from the steady supply of competent English speaking staff, Barrett said the legal system in the country is acceptable to European firms.
“Clearly, the Philippine BPO industry is going from strength to strength and local companies are making great strides. There’s plenty of opportunity to work with Philippine companies to address penetration in these markets,” Barrett said.
The United Kingdom alone represents 20 percent of the BPO world market.
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