The Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (Ibpap) will be considering early next year the impact of domestic conflict in achieving targets in their industry road map.
Newly installed Ibpap President and CEO Rey Untal acknowledged the rising incidence of security concerns at the local front has been a contributing factor to the challenges the multibillion-dollar industry is facing this year.
“I will not minimize those [security concerns]. Those are contributing to the headwinds that we are dealing with. It is unfortunate we have the Marawi incident, and we are really looking forward that things may go back to normal soon,” Untal said at a news briefing on Wednesday.
The Ibpap head, however, said that while investor and existing members opted for a “wait-and-see” stance earlier this year, things have seen a gradual improvement.
“We see many of our locators on wait-and-see attitude, but that has been changing; I’m not at liberty to disclose our members’ plans but there’s growth,” Untal said.
While no recalibration on the industry’s IT-BPM Roadmap 2016 to 2022 will take place immediately, these concerns may be factored in during the group’s annual assessment.
“While we do have those concerns, I don’t think it’s timely for us to make a quick count on where we stand. This is the first year of our road map and early next year [and] we’ll have a reckoning of exactly how much we have grown and once we have that empirical data, that’s the best time for us to make a call for recalibration, if need be,” Untal added.
The IT-BPM road map assumes an average yearly growth rate of 9 percent from 2016 to 2022, or from an estimated $23 billion last year to close to $40 billion in six years’ time.
Head count, on the other hand, is seen to grow 8 percent annually, from 2016’s 1.15 million to 1.8 million by 2022.
Cathy Ileto, vice chairman of the Ibpap board of trustees, underscored that in Mindanao, specifically in Davao, there are 40,000 full-time employees in the industry.
A factor that has helped in improving the region’s competitiveness in business-process outsourcing (BPO) is the exemption of these BPO employees from the martial-law curfew, Ileto said.
Contact Center Association of the Philippines (CCAP) Chairman of the Board of Trustees Benedict Hernandez said the industry is still seen to achieve its target.
The industry’s contribution to the country’s gross domestic product is approximately 17 percent in 2016, and it is now the Philippines’s second-largest net foreign-exchange earner after remittances from an estimated 10 million overseas workers.
