The BPO industry is looking at $18 billion in revenues this year or another 17 percent growth from the 2013 level of $15.5 billion.
Jose Mari Mercado, President of the Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP), said the industry is also looking at attaining 1,000,040 employment this year from 900,000 jobs this year.
This growth rate will make the industry on track to hit its target of $25- billion by 2016 Mercado said.
Growth will always be driven Filipino knowledge workers that make industry clients to keep coming back for more and more work to be done here.
According to Mercado, the so-called “captives” or the in-house support for multinational firms’ global needs for finance and accounting work. are a big thing now in the BPO operations in the country. “These are companies that set up operations in the country.
“They do their own work like accounting for all their branches in world in the Philippines.
That has been a growing sector for the past years.
There’s even voice, back and front office,” Mercado said.
“Our 3,000 COA graduates can now find gainful employment,” he added.
Aside from accounting and finance, Mercado said the healthcare sector is expected to be growing very fast this year also.
“The engineering sector is another fast growing sector we’re looking at,” Mercado added.
In fact in the last two weeks alone, he said he already met with two companies, a Japanese and an American, that are 95 percent sure to set up operations in the country.
The US firm will handle finance and accounting jobs for American firms while the Japanese firm will be primarily on healthcare.
“We’re looking initially at 200-300 people for both companies,” he said.
An existing Australian company is also expanding to another site in Cebu and will be employing 600 people for the insurance services market.
The familiarity with the American accounting standards is of great help but Mercado that there is still the need to understand the general accounting principles to identify what kind of training the local talents need in order for them to be at competency level to be able to support the UK market.
“Together with education department we could develop the course. We are looking either via TESDA or CHED and how it can be implemented and how can it be institutionalized. Usually these are short vocational courses,” he said.
BPAP is thinking of having it a part of the K to 12 basic education.

Source: Manila Bulletin- February 16, 2014