Singapore firms keen on Philippine IT-BPM

MANILA, Philippines - The growing Philippine information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) sector is gaining a lot of interest from Singaporean investors, the Department of Trade and industry (DTI) said.

According to the DTI, 12 Singapore companies recently visited the country and expressed interest in the Philippines’ business process outsourcing space.

“Some of them expressed keen interest in exploring future partnerships with the Philippines for competitive IT-enabled services to support operations in Singapore and the region,” the agency said.

The Philippine IT-BPM sector has grown at an annual rate of 30 percent over a decade, faster than the growth of the global offshore services market.

In addition, the industry has diversified significantly in scale, and maturity of services from contact center to back office, IT, healthcare, engineering, finance and accounting, animation and game development.

According to the DTI, the Philippines remains to be a competitive provider and destination for IT-BPM services because of the country’s English-speaking and skilled talent pool, competitive cost, government support and record of accomplishments.

“For Singaporean firms, sharing the same time zone with the Philippines is an advantage,” it said.

At present, over 40 of the 2014 Fortune 1000 and other large global organizations have a global in-house center in the country.

These firms have built sizeable scale in the Philippines and have been driving the growth of non-voice and complex services.

The Philippine IT-BPM Roadmap 2016 aims to generate $25 billion in revenues and 1.3 million direct employees by the end of the year from $21.5 billion revenues and 1.5 million employees last year.

The country is crafting a new industry blueprint called IT-BPM Roadmap 2022 which will be a comprehensive six-year plan to chart the growth course of the industry as it faces fast-evolving technology, shifting political and regulatory environment, and changing preferences of clients.

Roadmap 2022 also seeks to identify how the country can continue to push more investments and job creation outside of Metro Manila.