The Philippines has been increasingly gaining traction as an offshoring destination especially in niches like call centers, animation, medical transaction ,legal and publishing services over the last few years. Since 2005, the valuenotes has been researching and analyzing the Indian publishing offshoring industry. Some of them with decades of experience with over 100 service providers, the Indian publishing especially in the STM or scientific, technical and medical segment, service providers in countries like Philippines and CHina have been around for quite some time. They estimate the revenues of Publishing BPO industry to be approximately $100m in 2008.
SPi Global Solutions, Asiatype Inc., Innodata Isogen among the 20-25 vendors have been the early movers and have been in existence for two decades or more. All service providers have a strong focus on Scientific, Technical and Medical publishers, and we are now beginning to look at the educational and or corporate publishing segments.
Most large and mid-sized players in the Philippines have been growing at approximately 20-30% per year for the last couple of years. There is a huge difference in the growth patters while publishing BPO industry in the Philippines and India began at the same time. In terms of manpower, the Philippines industry is approximately one fifth of that of the Indian publishing BPO. The two popular Philippines player are comparable to the leading Indian players. The SPo with an over 5,000 strong workforce in the Philippines is one of the largest publishing BPOs in the world. But, while almost 80% of the Indian revenues are contributed by the top 10-12 vendors; in the Philippines top 2 vendors comprise 80% of the total revenues.
The Philippines vendors landscape is marked by an absence of a strong mid tier. India has developed tremendous capabilities in automation and technology. While the attributes like cultural proximity to the US, design and copy editing skills are some of the strong capabilities within Philippines, there is a need to rise to the next level. In the Philippines, there is currently an undeveloped mid tier vendor landscape in the Philippines. To the industry leaders, several of the mid tier companies are subcontractors. In order to capture the huge opportunity in publishing outsourcing it is imperative for these Philippines BPOs to build differentiators in their service offerings.
REFERENCE:
http://www.kittelsoncarpo.com/outsourcing-philippines/news-articles/publishing-bpo-in-philippines
http://www.outsourceit2philippines.com/news/Publishing-BPO-in-Philippines-Need-to-create-differentiators.htm
