IT/BPO industry gears up for US$ 1 billion revenue in 2015

Plans to create 100,000 graduates to meet demand

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Sri Lanka’s IT/BPO industry is gearing up to cash in on massive demand by creating 100,000 graduates, raising income to US$ 1 billion in another five years and targeting 15% of GDP by 2020.  

The country can target to have its IT/BPO industry contributing 15% towards to overall GDP by 2020, noted Executive Vice President of BCI Sanjeeva Shukla.

Meanwhile, the Vice President of Virtusa Madu Ratnayake stressed on the importance of the industry picking up the pace to produce employable graduates in order to meet the rapidly increasing demand for a skilled workforce in the next couple of years.

With the IT/BPO sector being the fifth biggest export revenue earner in the country at the moment, bringing in $ 400 million per annum, it has been estimated that the industry should look towards creating at least 100,000 employable graduates in order to meet the massive demand that will arise within the next few years if this income is to be raised to $ 1 billion by 2015.

These views were aired at a panel discussion held at the official launch of the Lanka BPO Academy’s (LBA) operations to offer the world’s leading BPO certifications in Sri Lanka. LBA is currently the country’s first and only Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) capacity building organisation that offers exclusive international BPO certification programmes.

The academy also unveiled its partnership with the Texas-based BPO Certification Inc. and 12 state-of-the-art international BPO training programmes that they will make available.

“Sri Lanka doesn’t have the demographic advantage of other BPO giants like India; therefore it cannot look to make billions from giant call centres. The country is also a fairly late entrant to the industry, but can make up for this by not falling into the pitfalls those other countries have fallen into in the past,” asserted Shukla.

President of SLASSCOM Dinesh Saparamadu commended the launch of an academy of this sort as building capacities is a very important aspect on SLASSCOM’s agenda and felt that Sri Lanka’s late entry should be seen as an opportunity instead of a disadvantage as it would allow the country to leapfrog over the rest, avoiding errors made previously.

There are currently over 190 countries competing in the BPO industry and not all of them are from the low income category, with some of these countries boasting high GDPs. Sri Lanka should concentrate on having an industry-specific BPO programme in the country first, was the ICTA Private Sector Development Programme Head Fayaz Hudah’s suggestion.

UN Ops Head of National Portfolio Development, Sri Lanka and the Maldives Rohantha Athukorala felt that as BPOs mainly target the West, the last thing Sri Lanka should look to do is portray itself as a run-of-the-mill BPO hub and instead brand itself as one that produces ethical and sustainable services in order to capture the market.