Two BPO firms to expand capacity this year
abs-cbnnews.com | 04/23/2008 12:12 PM
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By JUDITH BALEA
abs-cbnNEWS.com
Two business process outsourcing (BPO) firms are expanding capacity this year and are confident of brisk business despite the impact of the strong peso on their operations.
US-based call center Convergys plans to increase its sites in the Philippines by 50 percent this year, according to its general manager Marife Zamora. The company currently has 13,500 employees operating in nine local sites.
Zamora remains upbeat on the contact center industry, saying that the sector "has been doing well" amid a slowdown in the US and appreciation of the peso, which continues to hurt dollar revenues.
"We have been structuring financial agreements with clients to mitigate our risks," she said.
Meanwhile, SPi Technologies Inc., the BPO unit of telecommunications giant Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT), will add up to 250 seats this year.
"Right now we have over 1,500 seats in US, India and Philippines. Here, we have about 500 and we want to increase this by 50 percent, depending on the volume of work," said SPi chairman Ray Espinosa.
Espinosa said the company expects more demand for health care-related services such as medical transcription.
"There will be more demand because of rising costs of these services in the US."
He noted that revenue of the medical transcription sector went up by $100 million last year and is expected to climb another 15-20 percent this year even as the peso continues to rise.
Oscar Sañez, chief executive of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), said that the offshoring and outsourcing industry is likely to hit its revenue target of P7 billion in 2008.
The amount is 43-percent higher than $4.9-billion revenue recorded in 2007.
