The National Statistics Office (NSO) has released a special report on the Business Processing (BPO) Outsourcing sector, particularly on Information and Communication, and Administrative and Support Service Activities, based on the 2010 Annual Survey of Philippine Business and Industry.
Business Process Outsourcing is the leveraging of technology or specialist process vendors to provide and manage an organization's critical and/or non-critical enterprise processes and applications.
The most common examples of BPO are call centers, human resources, accounting and payroll outsourcing. BPO may involve the use of off-shore resources.
The major components of the Philippine BPO industry are contact/call centers, software development, animation/creative service, data transcription, back office processing and engineering design.
Of the 1,868 establishments in the two sections, Information and Communication (537) and Administrative and Support Service Activities (1,331), 506 or 27.1 percent of were engaged in BPO activities.
Almost half (226 or 44.7 percent) of the BPO activities were engaged in call centers activities.
This was followed by computer programming activities with 169 or 33.4 percent. Data processing with 39 establishments shared 7.7 percent.
Meanwhile, employment generated by BPO activities with 212,990 in 2010 comprised 42.8 percent of the total employment of the two sections (497,116) which had 85,998 for Information and Communication and 411,118 for Administrative and Support Service Activities.
The bulk of the jobs were in call centers activities (voice), which employed more than three fourths of the total BPO workforce or 164,897 workers.
Far second were establishments engaged in data processing with 20,557 personnel or 9.7 percent followed by computer programming activities with 17,620 employees or 8.3 percent of the total workforce for BPO activities.

Source: Manila Bulletin- December 24, 2012