BPO sector revenues grow 26% to $8.9 B last year

MANILA, Philippines - The country’s business process outsourcing industry (BPO) generated revenues of $8.9 billion in 2010, a year-on-year growth of 26 percent, the industry association reported Wednesday.

Its biggest sub-sector, the contact center, grew over 21 percent to $6.1 billion last year, overtaking India’s revenues and making the Philippines number one in the world, the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) said.

“We achieved robust growth in all major sectors of the industry: voice-based BPO, non-voice business support and complex services, and information technology,” said BPAP chairman Alfredo Ayala.

“The Philippines now leads the world in voice-based customer service,” added Benedict Hernandez, president of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP).

BPAP said the BPO industry employed a total of 525,000 skilled workers and professionals in 2010, up 24 percent from 2009.

Over the next five years, the industry is expected to grow by about 15 percent, translating to over two million in direct and indirect jobs and $20 billion in revenues.

“But with greater collaboration from all stakeholders, including government and the academe, we have the potential to grow at 25 percent a year. This would create 1.3 million direct jobs, 3.2 million indirect jobs, and $25 billion in export revenues,” Ayala said.

“The numbers also show that our non-voice BPO sector, including back- and mid-office business support and high-value knowledge process outsourcing (KPO), grew fastest at an impressive rate of 30 percent in 2010. We now employ more than 100,000 professionals in this sub-sector-with many of these BPO employees coming from financial and accounting, legal, and medical sciences backgrounds,” he added.

Data on the relatively smaller outsourcing sectors of IT, transcription, animation, and game development revealed that these sectors have recovered from the global financial crisis as markets in buyer countries placed orders and started implementing stalled contracts in 2010. All sectors, except engineering services outsourcing (ESO), reported positive growth figures for employment and revenues.

The health care BPO sector, as reported by the Healthcare Information Management Outsourcing Association of the Philippines employed 14,000 health care professionals by end-2010 and earned $102 million.

The industry’s creative outsourcing sectors, animation and game development reported 18 percent growth in revenues to $142 million in 2010.