The O&O Inventory™ will answer queries such as which companies are operating in the country, where are they located, how large are their facilities, and what are their primary activities. This inventory will provide data about penetration relative to the absorptive capacity of an area. It will also indicate to investors what activities are underway in the country (as one indicator of the country’s ability to support a particular segment).

Specifically, the inventory is a database of O&O companies in the Philippines classified by sector—BPO (business process outsourcing), ITO (IT outsourced services), and ESO (engineering services outsourcing)—and subsector. Non-voice BPO companies, for example, are further classified by segment such as human resources, finance and accounting, transcription, and knowledge process outsourcing. These classifications make it possible to illustrate the relative sizes of sectors and segments of the entire Philippine O&O industry as well as how these are spread across the country.

Road Test the O&O Inventory™: How large of an O&O presence can these cities support and how much of the talent pool is already tapped?

By comparing the number of current number of full-time employees (FTEs) in a city to the absorptive capacity of the city, the investor can assess existing headroom for growth. The O&O Inventory™ provides the number of FTEs in an area. To assess the potential for growth, we estimated the absorptive capacity of a city, i.e., the number of FTEs a city can support assuming current graduate flow, other labor sources, and industry yield rates. The analysis for metro cities shows how O&O activity in Metro Manila is outstripping absorptive capacity and solving the issue by drawing on neighboring talent pools. Similarly, it shows that the activity level in nonmetro cities is well below the absorptive capacity, indicating significant headroom for growth.