Many of the workers are like Mark, 26, who answers tech support calls from employees of an American chemical company. He studied engineering but dropped out of college to support his parents and two younger siblings. He now makes 26,000 pesos ($600) a month, about the same as his father, who has a small school-bus business. (The average Filipino family earns 17,000 pesos a month.)
He spoke on the condition that his full name and the name of his employer were not revealed because he was not authorized to talk to reporters. His office is in a new development known as Eastwood City, east of Manila that, locals said, used to be fields a few years ago. Now, it is home to companies like I.B.M. and Dell, and has McDonald's, Starbucks and bars where happy hour starts at 6 a.m. for call center workers who want a beer after their shift.
Mark is trim and has sharp features. He wears stylish canvas shoes and a striped shirt. His accent is more middle America than eastern Manila. He said his parents made him watch American movies and TV shows, read English books and speak the language starting at age 5. Still, he said he was fired from his first call center job after just two weeks because customers said they could not understand him.
"Sometimes, they would insist on being transferred to an American agent," he said. "After a year, I was able to speak in an accent that they would like to hear."
But now he is tiring of answering phones and is thinking about trying his hand at acting because he has a little money in the bank and his siblings have college degrees and are working.
The call center boom has also benefitted his country, previously a laggard among Southeast Asia's tiger economies - its most popular exports were nurses. Last year, revenue from outsourcing, which also includes things like health insurance processing, animation development and software programming, totaled $9 billion, or 4.5 percent of the Philippine gross domestic product, up from virtually nothing in 2000. The government has tried to support the industry with tax breaks and subsidies.
In spite of its recent growth, the Philippines is a much smaller destination for outsourcing more broadly - India earns about 10 times as much revenue from outsourcing. That is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future given India's 1.2 billion people, 31 percent of whom are 14 years old or younger. (The Philippines has 93 million people, about 35 percent of them 14 or younger.)
Executives expect the Philippines to continue growing at a fast pace and move up to higher-value services like accounting or the processing of insurance claims. But, like India, companies are grappling with higher costs and losing their best workers because of high domestic inflation and a shortage of skilled professionals. In the last two years, the Philippine peso climbed nearly 10 percent against the dollar, to 42.14, before weakening recently.
If the peso appreciates to 35 to the dollar, many of the call centers in the Philippines will not survive, said Narasimha Murthy, president of HGS USA, the American arm of an Indian outsourcing company that employs 4,000 people here. But things look upbeat for now, and Mr. Murthy was recently in Manila with a prospective American client.
Five years ago, he said, many clients would ask him if customer calls could be handled in the Philippines. "From that," he said, "it has gone to 'How well will you do it?' "
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