BPO sector eyes new markets

MANILA, Philippines—Not wanting to rely on the United States for all of its business, the local business process outsourcing sector is stepping up its push to enter new markets, including untapped clients in the US and potential customers in the United Kingdom and Asia-Pacific.

According to Gillian Joyce Virata, executive director for information and research of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines, the Asia-Pacific region, in particular, is an area of very huge potential.

“Because of the growth in the Asia-Pacific region, there’s now a big demand (for BPO services). We’re trying to capitalize on our language capabilities. The biggest demand is for Mandarin, Japanese, Thai, Bahasa and Korean,” she said.

She said that because of the country’s big population of Filipino-Chinese and native Chinese, it was not very difficult to find Mandarin speakers. Also, the influx of Koreans studying English in the country could also be used to the industry’s advantage by tapping them for jobs with Korean language requirements.

For clients requiring Japanese speakers, he said Japanese companies and organizations were conducting their own language training, but mainly to support Filipinos that were already working in Japan.

Maulik Parekh, president of PLDT BPO firm SPi Technologies, said it was about time to spread the Philippines’ wings to other locations.

“For the last 10 years, more than 80 percent of BPO revenues have come from the US. Now we have to look at where else to get the revenue,” he said. “For India, it has experienced higher growth rates in the Asia-Pacific, particularly Malaysia and Singapore. Australia, New Zealand and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries are growing at a faster rate as well.”

Apart from new geographies, Virata said BPO players were also increasingly turning to non-voice services, which earned far higher yields than voice.—Abigail L. Ho