New investments in the contact center industry slowed in the first quarter of the year, a result of various factors that could possibly include the anticipation of the fiscal change in the country, a top official of the Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) said.
CCAP president Jojo J. Uligan told reporters yesterday that the exact figures would be announced once the industry group has finalized its performance report for the first half of the year, noting that investments usually picked up in the third and fourth quarters.
“It’s slow in a way, I would say. But there’s still growth. We are still on track although there are factors that would affect that. There are many factors, [such as in] the the socioeco-political arena where there is a bit of a challenge,” he said in a mix of Filipino and English.
“We are a big industry now. Even 1- or 2-percent growth is already high for us because of the base. Normally, our growth happens in the third and fourth quarter,” he added, noting that they were transitioning toward high-value services.
Contact centers in the country hit a combined total of $15 billion in revenue last year, accounting for the biggest chunk of nationwide revenues in the information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) industry that collectively got $22.9 billion.
CCAP said that this was expected to reach $20.4 billion in 2022, which would be more than half of the $38.9-billion revenue target of the entire IT-BPM industry.
With CCAP not yet disclosing exact figures, the scale of the slowdown in new investments remain to be seen. However, data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) would suggest that the entire IT-BPM industry has had a sluggish start.
Collecting all applications gathered in seven investment-promotion agencies, PSA reported that pledges in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector fell 34 percent to P4.18 billion in the first quarter from P6.34 billion in the same period last year.