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KPO – hype, Reality and Future

It is surprising that this topic has not come up for discussion as yet! Around 4 years back, when I joined this industry, there was a lot of hype around the sheer size that this industry would grow to. A tag of USD 17 billion worldwide and India’s share of 72% i.e. USD 12 billion by year 2010, was the most quoted figure. However, the reality looks much lesser than the magical number, maybe one tenth!
At USD 50,000 per person revenue productivity, USD 12 billion revenue would equate to 600,000 people employed – which I guess is where the whole BPO industry is at this point. KPO industry, in my view, at best employs about 100,000 people. The question therefore is that how much is the KPO business in India today? What is the global size? What challenges have resulted into the huge potential not getting realized and more importantly, what is the future going to look like and what is needed by the industry to catalyse the growth of the KPO business.

Posted by Rahul Shah on November 4, 2009 3:40 AM |

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Hi Rahul:
The total no of employees in KPO in India would not be more than 30000 and the total billing would be about USD 1 billion.

How fast this nos grow would be dependent on how fast some of the KPO employees today go and work with the customers on their pay roll to take care of the KPO related projects.

In india, the Marketing reserach industry took almost 25 years to achive Rs 400 crore size. But when many of the marketing researchers joined in the client companies in their product management, brand management and other marketing services groups, the size went upto about Rs 1000 crore in 4-5 years.

Regards
Suvendu

Posted by: Suvendu | December 17, 2009 5:55 AM

Hi

Rahul, while directionally you may be right,your own numbers add up more impressively than you think they do. @$50K per person the number of people required to be employed for a $12 billion size are 240,000, not 600,000. And if we're already at 100,000 people then we're billing $5 billion already! That's not so bad.

Posted by: Ash Bishnoi | February 27, 2010 2:55 PM

I believe KPO sector derives its dynamic nature from the number services which is covered by it. Any field, including marketing, accounting, legal, can fall under KPO, by virtue of the entities specialized in performing these services. This phenomenon is helped by the fact that India produces a large number of qualified, English speaking professionals, who can perform the outsourced high-end services in various fields.

Posted by: Sayuj Banerjee | November 25, 2010 10:24 AM

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