The homegrown business process outsourcing firm SPi Global Holdings, Inc. is set to open an office in Latin America to cater to Spanish-speaking customers mostly in the United States. Maulik Parekh and Chief Executive office of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. unit says in a press briefing, Mr. Parekh, they cannot disclose the exact location but it will be a 200 people operation. The expansion comes on top of its network of offices already existing in Vietnam, India the United States and Europe manned by a total of 14,000 employees. Mr. Parekh said that they are also looking at China as a potential location or partner, since it is becoming a strong competition in attracting non-voice BPO firms. He clarified that most of the operations will continue to be conducted in the Philippines despite the spate of expansion abroad. He said about the 14,000 employees worldwide, 11,000 are in the Philippines that despite of the current and planned expansion, bulk of the employees will always be from the country.
He said that the flow wherein most will be from the Philippines. For instance, the dense has recently added 900 new seats in its facility in Dumaguete and also 20% more seats in its facility in Iloilo. The non-voice transactions consist of 67% of the firm’s income while the 33% voice transactions. BPO non-voice transactions include supporting finance, accounting and procurement services and other industry peculiar services while voice transactions refer to call center services.
Mr. Parekh says that the SPi Global’s non-voice transactions are mostly industry-specific concentrated on health care, interactive markets, content solutions or publishing. He also said that by the year 2016, the local BPO dense should look into providing more non-voice transactions as a global trend leaning towards more of that as compared to voice transactions. The official went on to disclose the company plans to grow its health care services training program to cover more participants. The company plans to increase the umber of trainees to 200 in the next 12 to 24 months from the present 50. The employees are given professional coding program training, web based continuing education and mentor training.
The SPi Global launched an academy under its SPi Healthcare unit to offer back office services for medical insurance users. The employees will assists support in revenue cycle management of US based hospitals and clinics. Parekh said that the unit will help clients maximize their revenues by going through existing insurance contacts and the like and find out what is best for the client in terms of getting higher profits. The developments should support the firm’s targets of hitting 14% growth in revenues. The revenues from non0voice transactions are seen to grow by 16%-17% and profits from voice transactions are seen to grow by a little below 14%.
According to Mr. Parekh, the trend globally is the BPO market, it getting more competitive with the revenues growing 20%-25% year on year. There are lot of BPO destinations which include the Latin America, South Africa, China and Vietnam from the original India, Ireland, Philippines, Mexico and Canada.
By the year 2016, the local BPO sector is expected to bring in $25 billion in revenues and employ 1.3 million. The BPO sector is seen to bring in profits of $124 billion in the year 2016 from $45 billion in 2010. The Mediaquest Holdings Inc. is a unit of the beneficial trust fund of PLDT, it has a minority stake in BusinessWorld. The PLDT has consolidated its business process outsourcing companies SPi Technologies, Inc. and ePLDT Ventus, Inc. into SPi Global in year 2010.
REFERENCE:
http://tcdn04.abs-cbnnews.com/business/03/15/11/spi-global-plans-entry-latin-america-2011
