Quelle: CIO, Asia

Watch out India, you have competition. Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was in the U.S. in May, partly to chat about the world's problems with George Bush, but also to speak with local enterprises about the benefits of outsourcing their key business and technology processes to the Philippines.

India is presently the world's leading destination for IT-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO): the lion's share of U.S. outsourcing business goes to this country, says Forbes, a U.S. business magazine. And the U.S. alone accounted for 59 percent of the worldwide spend on outsourcing in 2001, says International Data Corp. (IDC), an IT and telecom consultancy.

The good news for the Philippines is that the global outsourcing business has a long way to go before it hits slowdown. IDC expects this business to grow at an annual compound rate of 11 percent during the next four years. And the Philippines is sharpening its tools to slice off a large portion of this expanding pie, because, says Mar Roxas, the Philippine Secretary of the Department of Trade and Industry, his country has the qualities to become an outsourcing powerhouse: a large pool of English-speaking, moderately-waged skilled professionals, a service-oriented culture and a reliable telecom infrastructure.

The AMERICAN link

The key selling point that the Philippines enjoys over India is its close historical relationship with the U.S. It was an American colony for 50 years and, previous to this, a Spanish one for 400 years. In fact it was the Spaniards who introduced Roman Catholicism to the Philippines, which is the religion of the majority of Filipinos. All this has placed it culturally closer to the U.S. as compared with India. "This exposure has made many Filipinos [fairly] competent in engaging an American in a conversation, because he/she can speak in the American idiom and understand American slang," says Roxas. This, in turn, has given the Filipinos a slight edge over the Indians in providing services to U.S. clients, that require direct customer interaction, such as of the type needed at call centres and in telemarketing. "The success we've had with our telemarketers cold-calling potential American customers is [substantially] attributable to this factor: they can engage the other side in a conversation, explaining the variety of products, leading to a close of sale," says Roxas.

This, however, does not mean that India will be washed out in call centre and telemarketing operations. In fact, the call centre business is India's largest and fastest growing outsourcing segment. But, given the cultural edge that the Filipinos enjoy, they are generally cheaper to train than their Indian competitors. This is partly because Indian agents and telemarketers need to be put through more voice training: their accents are heavier.