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InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5
MANILA, Philippines -- The country needs to step up its efforts in moving beyond the call center business and venturing into other outsourcing services, research firm IDC said.
According to IDC, the country also needs to emerge from the shadow cast by rival destination India, which is known as a business process outsourcing (BPO) powerhouse in Asia.
The Philippines last year overtake India as the world's call center capital, with over 400,000 workers fielding calls from multinational companies located around the world.
But the Philippines’ leadership in this sector risks foregoing overall leadership in the IT-BPO industry, particularly with the emergence of a "more competitive environment for voice and non-voice services coming from India and other emerging destinations," IDC said.
"To compete successfully in this industry, the Philippines will need to step up their efforts to transform and grow," the research firm said.
IDC also noted how "labor pool sustainability" could become a problem for the country's burgeoning outsourcing industry, an issue that the government, in cooperation with the private sector, is trying to address with a P500-million stimulus fund for call center training under state-run Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA).
Overall, IDC sees a sharp 12 percent hike in the Southeast Asia IT services market this year to reach a stellar $9.1 billion, despite the looming threat of another economic crisis and general market volatility.
Expanding to other segments
These issues, however, are not lost on BPO-focused government agencies and private sector organizations as they race against other outsourcing destinations to penetrate higher-value service markets, such as healthcare.
According to Information and Communications Technology Office (ICTO) Deputy Executive Director Alejandro Melchor, the Philippines could easily grab the lead in healthcare information management (HIM) outsourcing this year, owing to the abundance of licensed healthcare professionals in the country.
HIM is one of four areas that the Philippines is looking into for expansion, alongside finance and accounting, HR, and animation and creative process outsourcing.
“Medical information outsourcing is the most promising of the four sectors we are targeting for growth. In fact, the Philippines is the de facto number one this year, not in the total number of seats but in terms of being a destination of choice,” Melchor said.
He said the steady growth of the "baby boomers" segment in the US, coupled with the recently signed healthcare law, could prove beneficial for outsourcing players like the Philippines.
“Industry estimates that at least $530 billion is needed to implement the measure and that means business for outsourcing players like the Philippines given our readily-available pool of certified medical workers,” Melchor said.
To use the thousands of healthcare professionals--such as nurses--that graduate in the country every year, Melchor said "a little retooling of skills" is necessary to make them more technology-savvy.
The HIM Outsourcing Association of the Philippines had 14,000 full-time employees in its sector in 2010, which was expected to have doubled last year.
Overall, the Business Process Association of the Philippines expects employment in the local IT-BPO industry to balloon to 1.3 million by 2016, with export revenues reaching $25 billion.
