Philippine Call Center Acquires
U.S. Transcription Firm

MANILA, Philippines - PeopleSupport Inc., a leading Philippine call center operator, has just acquired Rapidtext Inc., a transcription and captioning services firm based in the United States, for about US$ 10 million.

According to Cebu Congressman Eduardo Gullas, the acquisition would put the Philippines in an excellent position to grab a bigger share of the global market for highly labor-intensive outsourced transcription services.

"It is a foregone conclusion that PeopleSupport will eventually relocate Rapidtext's transcription service operations to the Philippines and tap our more cost-effective skilled labor," Gullas said.

PeopleSupport, a publicly traded company (Nasdaq), acquired Newport Beach, California-based Rapidtext Inc., and its subsidiary, The Transcription Company, for US$ 9.75 million in cash and PeopleSupport stock last January 9.

In its Nasdaq filing, PeopleSupport said Rapidtext and The Transcription Company specialize in high-value transcription and captioning services for clients in insurance, law enforcement, entertainment, education, and medical markets.

Rapidtext also offers advanced, custom voice-to-text solutions for fast-turnaround transcription, realtime and offline captioning, timecoding, indexing, and translation.

The company has additional offices in Burbank, California, as well as a virtual team of over 300 independent transcriptionists and captionists.

Meanwhile, PeopleSupport's clients are large American corporations in a variety of industries, including travel and hospitality, technology, telecommunications, retail, consumer products and financial services.

At present, PeopleSupport is one of the largest business process outsourcing (BPO) providers in the Philippines with over 4,000 college-educated, fluent English-speaking Philippine personnel.

As one of the first firms to establish a Philippine call center, PeopleSupport offers customer management, accounts receivable management, and additional voice and non-voice services provided principally from its facilities in Makati City.

"Among all publicly listed BPO providers in the United States, only PeopleSupport has 100-percent of its call center operations based (in the Philippines)," Gullas pointed out.

PeopleSupport is expected to report later this month at least US$ 60.4 million (P3.2 billion) in revenues and a net income of at least US$ 12.1 million (P642 million) from its Philippine operations in 2005.

Posted January 18, 2006
Source: Business News Sunday.

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