The Philippines’ IT-BPO (Information Technology and Business Process Outsourcing) sector expects to hit $20 billion in revenues in 2014 as more outsourcing firms in the country are moving into high value services and generating more revenues.

During the recent quarterly CEO briefing of the Information Technology and Business Process Association of the Philippines (IT-BPAP), IT-BPAP senior executive director Gillian Joyce Virata told the press that achieving the industry’s $20 billion baseline target can be done by next year, at the earliest, and by 2015, at the latest.

Based on Philippine IT-BPO’s revised 2013-2016 roadmap, the sector’s total revenues is projected to reach $15.8 billion in 2013, higher than last year’s $13.2 billion. To achieve its $25 billion target by 2016 and its goal of generating 1.3 million jobs, an improvement over the current 770,000 jobs, the country’s IT-BPO sector has to post a conservative 17 percent yearly growth in three years.

Virata said that the sector’s growth is currently being fueled by the move of a number of IT-BPOs into high value services. The IT-BPAP exec said that almost 50 percent of the total number of IT-BPO firms in the Philippines earned 80-100 % of their revenues from high value products or services.

In a report published in Manila Bulletin, Virata added, “More BPO firms are really going into the high value products although it is misinterpretation to say that voice is a low value product because there are pure voice products that are high value.”

She pointed out that voice service in the Philippines is a high value product. The customer service representatives or frontline personnel in the country, for example, are knowledgeable and are experts on responding to customers that they are a “goldmine for information and data” for customer relations services.

“So clients can leverage for analysis and data, making this kind of customer service a high value product,” Virata said in the Manila Bulletin report.