The local contact center industry expects 4-percent revenue growth in 2019 following a 5.1-percent expansion in 2018.
Contact Center Association of the Philippines president Jojo Uligan said the industry continued to show signs of recovery. “We’re working on the figures. That’s the normal thing we do. We’re still verifying the information we got from members,” he said in a news briefing Friday in Makati City.
CCAP chairman Benedict Hernandez said the recovery was evidenced by an uptick in BPO real estate take-up in the first four months of 2019.
“In the first four months, we took up 126,000 sqm of space. And when you look at this figure, it’s back to more historical deals we had before. Usually, we consume 400,000 to 450,000 sqm a year,” he said.
Many BPO companies usually take up four to seven floors of a Peza-registered BPO building at any given time.
“And so it’s a good lead indicator. If our members and investors are buying real estate, that means they want to create more jobs. We’re trying to work on this initial information while the contact association survey and result are still ongoing,” Hernandez said.
The business process outsourcing sector reported a 5.1 percent growth in 2018, below the 8-percent annual growth target under Roadmap 2022.
The Philippines BPO sector, however, continued to grow faster than the average global market growth of 3 percent to 4 percent in 2018.
The BPO industry ended 2018 with 1.23 million employees in the Philippines.
Texas-based Everest Group said the Philippines continued to account for 16 percent to 18 percent of the estimated IT-BPM market of $83 billion.
Uligan said the contact center group remained committed to help the government develop provincial locations for IT-BPM centers.
He said CCAP would continue to support the “hub and spoke” model for investors as locators need Metro Manila as their first landing destination in the country before they start expanding to the provinces.
CCAP will stage Contact Islands 2019 Conference in Mactan, Cebu on July 24 to 25, 2019.