Philippines Getting Ahead of India in BPO
The Philippines is poised to overtake India as the world’s top provider of business process outsourcing services as industry players firm up their strength and marketing efforts.
Cesar B. Bautista, co-chairman of the National Competitiveness Council (NCC), told the Philippine Daily Inquirer that the Indian cyber services sector was losing its edge as telecommunication infrastructure get saturated and costs go up.
“At the same time, our BPO sector has started strengthening their organization into something like India’s Nasscom [National Association of Software and Services Companies], which can represent the members as a bigger and more influential entity,” Bautista said.
He was alluding to the Business Process Association of the Philippines, which he said could now be more decisive because it had reformed its structure, unlike the “weak” group it had been in the past years.
Bautista, a former trade secretary who now represents the private sector in the NCC, said it was only expected that the Philippines would emerge as a leading provider of BPO services despite coming into it later than India did.
He noted that information technology-enabled services had become the fastest growing sector in the economy, which is expected to be providing some 400,000 jobs by the end of this year compared to 8,000 in 2000.
