The country's mega business process outsourcing firms are expected to spearhead the production of roughly 124,000 new full-time jobs in 2014, Pasig City Rep. Roman Romulo said yesterday.

Romulo said in a press statement that, “based on sectoral projections, they are confident that BPO firms will be able to add an average of 124,000 well-paying jobs annually from 2014 to 2016, or a total of 372,000 new posts over the next three years.”

“This will help address unemployment, especially among college-educated Filipinos,” Romulo, who is chairman of the House committee on higher and technical education, said.

A previous survey by Pulse Asia Research Inc. showed that “creating more jobs” is one of the top five urgent national concerns, along with fighting official corruption, controlling inflation, improving the pay of workers, and reducing poverty.

Romulo said they are counting on the bigger BPO players to continue to drive the formation of new jobs.

Based on their 2012 revenues, Romulo named the country's 36 BPO firms, to include the in-house outsourcing units of global corporations as Accenture Inc. (P28.104 billion in revenues); Convergys Philippines Services Corp. (P17.281 billion); JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A–Philippine Global Service Center (P10.805 billion); and 24/7 Customer Philippines Inc. (P7.711 billion);

Others are Telephilippines Inc. (P7.241 billion); TeleTech Offshore Investments B.V. (P6.978 billion); Sutherland Global Services Philippines Inc. (P6.805 billion); Stream International Global Services Philippines Inc. (P6.738 billion); Sitel Philippines Corp. (P6.364 billion); Deutsche Knowledge Services Pte. Ltd. (P5.754 billion).

There were 36 firms named that raked in some P192 billion in combined revenues in 2012, based on data received by Romulo.

Romulo is author of the Data Privacy Act, which has helped to entice global corporations to either establish new in-house outsourcing units here in Manila, or to relegate their non-core, business support activities to highly specialized independent BPO firms operating in the country.

The law mandates all entities, including BPO firms, to protect the confidentiality of personal information collected from clients and stored in information-technology systems, in accordance with rigorous international privacy standards.

The Philippines' highly labor-intensive, BPO and IT-enabled services industry includes contact center services; back offices; medical, legal and other data transcription; animation; software development; engineering design; and digital content.

The IT and Business Processing Association of the Philippines sees the industry directly employing some 1.3 million Filipinos by 2016.*PNA

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