The ICT and the BPO sector in Sri Lanka has generated more than US$ 400 million in export income last year, a release from the newly established Institute of Business Process Outsourcing (IBPO) set up by the Youth Affairs and Skills Development Ministry in collaboration with the National Youth Corps (NYC) said.

According to a scientific research found in Statista, the future target for this industry in Sri Lanka is to reach US$ 1 billion by 2015 and US$ 5 billion by 2020 and at some point become the largest foreign exchange earner for the country.

Driving the ICT and BPO industry growth is something that cannot be done in isolation but needs to be part of a much wider initiative where the success of all components is intrinsically linked together, the report said.

Outsourcing involves the contracting of business processes to third parties in order for businesses to avoid certain costs, such as taxes.

In 2012, business process outsourcing contributed a much larger proportion of the industry’s global revenue than information technology outsourcing, generating 62.6 billion and 36.5 billion U.S. dollars respectively. Financial services and manufacturing generally constitute a great share of the global outsourcing market.

Advancing from the 29th position in 2007 to 16th position in 2009, Sri Lanka has shown great promise in technical knowledge for the BPO industry to be in line with international standards.

The consulting giant, A.T. Kerney’s Global Services Location Index (GSLI) index identifies the top 50 countries for outsourcing globally as the best destinations for providing outsourcing services, including IT services and support, contact centers, and back-office support. As Sri Lanka is currently trying to match the global BPO trend, the Sri Lankan Association of Software and Service Companies (SLASSCOM) have extended its support in achieving it.

The emergence of BPO industries has had an enormous impact on the country’s unemployment rate.

Sri Lanka is emerging as among the lowest riskmarkets, both in terms of personal safety and business security and offers a unique mix of extremely low costs among the lowest anywhere, combined with a highly educated English speaking population (91% adult literacy and 90% secondary school enrollment) with sophisticated technical skills and a business environment and infrastructure that is superior to most low cost countries.

The Institute of Business Process Outsourcing (IBPO) is Sri Lanka’s first fully-fledged training institute for Business Process Outsourcing, which is planned to spread its network all around the country within the next two years and is on the mission of attracting many youth to the BPO industry.

The IBPO program focuses on building employability in functions like back office operations, customer care, finance and technical support in industries such as hotels, travel, telecom, BPO, call centres and financial services and the coursesit offers comewith the assurance of 100% job placements in reputed BPO companies.