Raphael Bohne
Research expert covering professional services
Services industry in Latin America – statistics & facts
In recent years, Latin America’s services sector has become increasingly attractive due to its competitive costs and diverse, talented workforce, whose culture is fitting to the neighboring United States. Globally, the outsourcing industry has reached its highest revenue of the decade in 2019, with the Americas accounting for the world’s largest outsourcing market twice in a row. Although the service industry was one of the economic sectors most affected by the coronavirus outbreak in Latin America, services related to retail and digital shopping were able to profit from the increase of e-commerce revenue in the region during the pandemic.
A BPO boom
Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) is an additional wing of the service industry, where companies contract external service firms to perform certain work processes, including, but not limited to, IT services, telemarketing, and accounting. BPO has also been making an impact in Latin America, predominantly in the Mexican and Colombian markets, where hundreds of millions of BPO workstations have been erected in recent years, mainly by call center operators. Taking a glance at Mexico, two of the country’s top BPO companies, Teleperformance and Atento México, have been responsible for over ten thousand workstations each. Brazil's BPO sector, in turn, has been experiencing a slow but steady growth since 2016, demonstrating the continuing potential for such services’ development within the region.Stability through facility management
Be it an office, a school, or a hospital, organizations owe much of their abilities to function even on a basic level to their facility management. These unsung heroes behind most institutions are responsible for keeping those environments safe, clean, and organized either as in-house employees of the organizations, or contracted, outsourced workers. The largest facility management market across several Latin American countries has been in-house, whose value by far trumps that of the outsourced segment, including integrated facility management. While it may be small compared to the North American or European markets, outsourced facility management in Latin America has nonetheless been visible on a global scale, accounting for four percent of the worldwide market.
