BPO industry remains bullish – BSP survey

The local IT-BPO industry continues to be one of the most bullish sectors of the economy as it posted an estimated $8.3 billion in revenues in 2009, according to a 2010 Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) survey released Wednesday. This constitutes a 30.6 percent rise from $6.3 billion in 2008, the BSP said. The survey also noted that industry exports went up by 45.9 percent to reach $7.7 billion, comprising 93.4 percent of total revenues last year. Equity investments, meanwhile, reached $2.6 billion, a vast majority of which were from foreign equity. 'Stable' outlook Outlook for the local IT-BPO industry remained so optimistic that the Japan Credit Rating Agency (JCR), one of the key credit rating agencies in Japan, on Wednesday announced it has upgraded the Philippine credit outlook to positive from stable. "The JCR revised its outlook for the Philippines primarily due to the very fast growth of our IT-BPO industry, aside from strong OFW remittances," said Monchito Ibrahim, commissioner of the CICT, in a phone interview with GMA News Online. The rapidly growing BPO industry is proving to be another economic pillar for the Philippine economy aside from OFW remittances, according to the JCR release acquired by GMA News Online. "As BPO is likely to become one of the pillars that support the country’s economy along with remittances, JCR will keep a close watch on its future development," the agency said. Shift to non-voice Contact centers continued to dominate the industry in terms of revenue share, accounting for half of the BPO receipts and contributing 21.6 percentage points to the industry's growth rate. Despite this, the BSP noted, transcription and animation services continued to rise in the IT-BPO sub-sector ladder, due to the expansion of such firms in the country. The transcription sub-sector, in fact, posted a high 96.1-percent export-to-revenue ratio in 2009. In the face of this high growth in contact centers, CICT's Ibrahim said the agency is moving to encourage the industry to augment the growth in non-voice services. "The revenue-per-employee rate for non-voice services is actually three times that of voice," Ibrahim noted. Non-voice BPO services include back-office processing, accounting, transcription, animation and software development, among others. He said that since the Philippines had already surpassed India in terms of voice-based services, "the industry's strategy is to leverage that leadership to shift the market and convince the world that we are able to do non-voice services also." "With non-voice BPO services, employees will be able to use the skills and knowledge they have acquired from their studies, since these services need specialized skills," he added. The local IT-BPO industry continued to employ 444,811 workers in 2009, up 25.3 percent from the previous year. Total compensation paid for these employees reached $2.8 billion that year, while average annual compensation fell 1.2 percent to $7,686 (P366,122). — VS, GMA News