ZAMBOANGA CITY--With Davao and Cagayan de Oro well on the way to becoming business process outsourcing hubs, other Mindanao cities are also working to attract BPO locators in search of a sustainable supply of trained workers and low overhead.
The Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) says in its recently completed industry roadmap that the country’s BPO sector and its allied information technology and engineering sectors have the potential to grow by 40 percent annually through 2010.
To succeed in this, BPAP says, the Philippines must “develop the 75 percent of all available talent that presently resides outside the National Capital Region, which is not being fully leveraged by the industry.”
This could “raise total direct employment to 900,000, meaning 600,000 new jobs,” BPAP states.
XMG Asia Pacific, in a recent study on the global BPO industry cited by various news organizations, has classed Davao with other emerging offshoring cities like Jakarta in Indonesia and Montevideo in Uruguay. Both Davao and Cagayan de Oro have attracted leading call center operators, such as Link2Support, Inc. Other Mindanao cities are looking to benefit from the rapid growth of the BPO industry in these two hubs, as firms continue to search for trained labor and cheap locations.
To maintain the Philippine industry’s momentum, BPAP advocates a more balanced geographic spread for locators, to help mitigate overhead costs and salaries, “and even rates of attrition.”
Promising locations in Mindanao include General Santos, Zamboanga, Cotabato City, Marawi and Iligan, according to USAID’s Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM) Program, which is helping to expand employment opportunities and improve IT infrastructure in the region
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