India's (third-party) business process outsourcing (BPO) exports reached $4.6 billion (Rs 20,890 crore) during 2006-07, registering a growth of 47% says Dataquest's 20th annual survey of the Indian IT Industry. This makes the BPO chunk over 55% of the entire BPO-ITeS pie as estimated by Nasscom.The survey also revealed its list of the top 20 BPOs, which contributed nearly three-fourth of the total BPO exports---$ 3.57 billion (Rs 16,094 crore), while recording a growth of 59.4%. While Genpact topped the list with a revenue of Rs 2,220 crore, Transworks, IBM Daksh, TCS BPO and Cambridge Solutions followed with revenues of Rs 1,510 crore, Rs 1,260 crore, Rs 1,107 crore and Rs 1,000 crore, respectively.Revealing the churn, WNS Global Services took the fifth place with Rs 990 crore, followed by Convergys India (Rs 890 crore), Firstsource (Rs 809 crore) and HCL BPO (Rs 746 crore).The study also identified that during the year, the top 20 BPO companies added 57,784 new employees to take the employee base to 216,967 people.Identifying that third party exports from India have overtaken the exports of captive BPO firms, Dataquest analyst and executive editor Shyamanuja Das said, "This change has happened because of two reasons. One, captives have not really grown much. And two, the revenues of large Indian third party providers like Genpact, Transworks, and TCS include significant onshore components now, because of acquisitions."The knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) sector also poses huge opportunities for the players with companies like Infosys BPO, WNS Global Services and EXL Services entering the KPO space through organic as well as inorganic means. Companies like IBM Daksh, Aegis, MphasiS, Intelenet, HTMT Global, Sitel India also increased their domestic focus.The survey also noted that the much-awaited leveraging of IT for BPO started happening in a major way. While the IT services firms have maintained that this is their competitive advantage, on the ground, Genpact and WNS, two BPO players, stole a march over others in offering platforms.
