MANILA, Philippines — ePLDT, the IT services unit of the PLDT Group, reported P10.1 billion in total revenues for 2007, driven by its business process outsourcing (BPO) businesses.

ePLDT’s yearend revenues rose by nearly 60 percent from the previous year, according to the PLDT Group’s 2007 financial report.

Under ePLDT are Ventus, PLDT’s call center brand, and SPi, previously an independent company acquired by PLDT in 2006. SPi provides back-office service adding into the parent firm’s BPO portfolio.

Consolidated call center revenues grew 24 percent to P3.3 billion resulting from increased utilization of capacity, according to ePLDT. Ventus at present operates nine facilities with a total of 6,400 seats.

SPi, which has operations overseas including the US, India and Vietnam, generated total revenues of P5.3 billion last year.

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NEW DELHI: Faced with rising real estate costs, crumbling infrastructure and intense competition for skilled labour in major centres, BPO firms are looking at smaller cities as sites for new operations. This phenomenon has the potential to substantially reconfigure India’s economic landscape. Let us discuss this as below.

In part, this trend is the price of success, as the BPO industry is growing strongly to $8.4 billion worth exports in FY 2006-07, up 35% from the previous year. Growing price competition from countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America, appreciating Rupee value and dominance of big software sector over infrastructure – land and labour, have forced BPO firms to look at alternatives. By this process, so-called tier I cities of Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Chennai are beginning to lose investment to new locations.

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Democratic US Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has joined party rival Barak Obama in promising an end to tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, playing to the gallery on the hot-button issue of outsourcing as she tries to resuscitate her White House bid.

“. . . we are going to rid the tax code of these loopholes and giveaways. We’re going to stop giving a penny of your money to anybody who ships a job out of Texas, Ohio or anywhere else to another country,” Hillary said during a debate with Obama at University of Texas in Austin.

Hillary, who had in the past refused to join the anti-outsourcing bandwagon, has been perceived as a fence-sitter on the issue till now.

Continuing to play the anti-outsourcing card, Democrat presidential front-runner Barack Obama on Wednesday said while America cannot “shy away” from globalisation, it would have to take measures to ensure that jobs are not shipped overseas.”We have to stop providing tax breaks for companies that are shipping jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that are investing here in the United States of America,” Obama said in during a debate with rival Senator Hillary Clinton in Cleaveland, Ohio.