IT-BPO growth to be sustained, revenues to reach $16B in 2013

Major players in the information technology – business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) industry forecast that their business’s strong growth will be sustained next year with a 20 percent growth in revenues and employment generation.

 

Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) sees industry revenues reaching $16 billion in 2013 or $2.6 billion higher than the projected revenues of $13.6 billion for 2012. This growth is similar to the expected 2012 growth from 2011’s $11 billion.

 

In terms of job generation, BPAP expects 926,000 full-time employees next year from about 772,000 this year and 638,000 in 2011.

 

BPAP chairman Alfredo Ayala said the country’s IT-BPO industry is making good progress towards achieving the targets under the Roadmap 2016. The roadmap expects the industry to register a compounded annual growth rate of 20 percent hitting $25 billion by 2016 or about 10 percent of the $256-billion global IT-BPO market share and 1.3 million direct hires.

 

Ayala, who is also president and chief executive officer of LiveIt Investments Ltd, said the Philippines is likely to be the preferred choice of both voice and non-voice segments of the IT-BPO industry by 2016.

 

“We aim to become the world’s number one destination not just for call centers but other select non-voice segments of IT-BPO, generate a total of 4.5 million direct and indirect jobs, and achieve cumulative revenues of $96 billion for 2012-2016,” he stressed.

  

According to research and consultancy firm Everest Group, the global offshore services market is growing at a healthy pace. It will more than double by 2016 to $250 billion. Also, IT research and advisory company Gartner, Inc. reports that by 2016, the Asia-Pacific market for BPO excluding Japan would reach $9.5 billion. 

 

Pool of talent

 

Joel Villanueva, director general of the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA), said the Aquino administration would ensure a steady pool of talent to be able to achieve the 1.3 million workers needed by the industry by 2016.

 

“I believe that this is part of our work in TESDA because of a larger number of our population are facing outsourcing jobs without higher or advanced degrees. That’s why we have liberalized access to our training programs by removing barriers in entry requirements and promulgated new training regulations,” he said.

 

He added that the agency has innovative programs to address the supply of talent in the IT-BPO industry as 76,533 individuals are benefiting from the P500 million expansion of the IT-BPO industry-based Training for Work Scholarship Program (I-TWSP). — DVM, GMA News