The Philippines has been a favorite destination of many American companies to offshore their call center and BPO work, largely due to the cultural affinity and the American English spoken by Filipinos. But with Europe steadily emerging as a big market, it is time to target that market in a focused manner, feel the local companies.

Despite the ongoing political noise in the country, the government has reported that its recently concluded business mission in Europe generated significant BPO investment commitments. Philippine companies joining the European business mission that included contact centers like Advanced Contact Solutions, Vision X, and Teletech Holdings; contact-center solutions and technology providers like Alliance Technologies and Diversified Technology Systems; financial services and accounting, publishing and transcription firms SPI Technologies; and SENCOR; and architectural- and engineering-requirements outsourcing companies, Environments Collaborative and Invent Asia, have apparently found the business potential “encouraging”.

Currently, an estimated 90 per cent of all BPO deals have been with the US companies, while the rest have been contracts from the UK and some Asian companies. The mission was a serious collective step by the industry to go beyond the US, its traditional source of BPO contracts.

The Center for International Trade Expositions and Missions (CITEM), the Philippines’ lead promotional agency for IT and IT-enabled services, reporting that about a dozen European companies are keen on doing business with the Philippine companies dealing in IT and IT-enabled solutions. “We have to keep the business community in Europe on our radar if we are to remain competitive in the BPO space,” the CITEM, said in a statement.

While CITEM was mum on actual contracts or commitments in terms of dollars, Felicitas Agoncillo-Reyes, Philippine Trade Undersecretary and CITEM Executive Director, speaking to Global Outsourcing said, “It’s a little bit difficult to immediately quantify our gains as the normal gestation period for a business lead to be concluded would be about eighteen months.”

BPO is one of the Arroyo government’s highly-touted business sectors and is seen as one of the major keys to pump life in an otherwise ailing economy, in terms of investments, and job generation.

Estimates put the projected offshore spending of Western Europe to grow to 3.5 billion euros in 2009, with the UK taking 76 per cent of that amount.

Some of the potential business leads gathered from the mission were, business-processing deals with Logica CMG, Express Gifts, and the Emirates Group, she added. Logica is a major global force in IT services and wireless telecom, with around 21, 000 people across 34 countries. In the Philippines, Globe, and Sun Cellular are among Logica’s clients for SMS and MMS. The company has an offshore development center in India serving verticals of telecom, financial services, energy, and utilities.

Express Gifts is also looking at opening a 200-seat contact center in the Philippines to take order calls for home shopping and other call types. Other business prospects for the Philippines gathered during the mission were a 500-seat contact center requirement for outbound calls; payroll services for an insurance company with offices outside the UK and a networking relationship with Digital Port Rotterdam as link to ICT users with outsourcing requirements.

Perhaps more important than short-term contracts are long-term partnerships with European agencies and companies that the Philippine government is also seeking to maintain.

Reyes said the government, through the CITEM, has re-affirmed its partnership with the Dutch government’s Centre for the Promotion of Imports from Developing Countries or CBI. The CBI currently has an ongoing BPO program for the Philippines, Indonesia, and India covering five years until 2010. The program targets medium-sized exporters from developing countries; export-promotion agencies and European importers.

The CITEM meanwhile reported that to date, Dutch companies with outsourced processes in the Philippines are Getronics, ING Group, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, and ABN AMRO. British companies with outsourcing operations in the country are Standard Chartered Bank, Sykes, and Ambergris Solutions.

In 2004, the Netherlands was the Philippines’ third largest trading partner while the UK is the 16th largest. The Philippines is the third largest English-speaking nation in the world outside the US and the UK.

The Philippines has the largest pool of quality accountants in Asia, with 105,000 graduates of finance, accounting, and management every year, increasing by about 3,000 yearly. During the first quarter of 2005, there were about 113, 300 licensed accountants in the country.