BPOs stick to $25-B revenue goal by 2016

MANILA, Philippines - The country’s outsourcing industry has retained its revenue goal of $25 billion by 2016 amid the strengthening of the peso against the dollar as it decided to reflect the broad range of information technology and business process management services.

Outgoing president and chief executive officer Benedict Hernandez said in a statement that the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) has been renamed to Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) to accurately reflect the complete range of services provided by the country.

“IBPAP will continue to work to drive favorable outcomes across multiple areas to achieve the $25-billion revenue goal by 2016,” he stressed.

He said the move to rename the group represents the association’s strong commitment to the entire outsourcing sector where buyers are looking increasingly at bundled IT-BPM services options.

“Changing our name to IBPAP will help preserve as well as expand the Philippine industry’s brand. The new name also emphasizes the less-known fact that we provide the whole spectrum of world-class services from here including corporate and complex services, creative processes and products, customer relations and health care information management, and software product development,” he stressed.

The country’s IT-BPO industry is making good progress towards achieving the targets under the Roadmap 2016 wherein the industry is expected to register a compounded annual growth rate of 20 percent, hitting $25 billion by 2016 or about 10 percent of the $256-billion global IT-BPO market share, and 1.3 million direct hires.

This year, the IT-BPO industry is expected to grow 20 percent to $16 billion from about $13.6 billion last year and the workforce hitting 926,000 from about 772,000 this year.

Late last year, major players in the industry pushed for the review of the revenue goals as well as projected workforce as the peso continued to weaken against the dollar, even breaching the 40 to $1 level amid the country’s strong macroeconomic fundamentals as well as the economic problems in advanced economies that continue to drive speculative foreign funds to the Philippines.

Revenues of the industry denominated in US dollars contracted due to the continued strengthening of the peso against the greenback.

For his part, Information and Communications Technology Office of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST-ICTO) deputy executive director Alejandro Melchor, earlier urged major players in the industry to revise upwards the targets under the Roadmap 2016.

Hernandez encouraged its 300 industry members, five partner association as well as other stakeholders to work together to ensure an enduring supply of high-quality labor, support service innovation and country visibility.

“Guided by our industry roadmap, there were a lot of things we accomplished in 2012. We now have a breadth of IT-BPM voice and non-voice services that continue to grow year in, year out. For 2013, we must keep building our momentum and continue to provide the right business environment,” Hernandez said.