There is a growing inclination among businesses to outsource routine and standardised functions like customer service to BPO providers. This frees up resources and time for businesses to focus on core and value-added activities such as product development and marketing strategy, thereby ensuring better business scalability.
“Beyond this organic trend, Malaysia is also a potential beneficiary of trade diversion broadening out to services. According to Forbes and Business Today, Malaysia is ranked 3rd best BPO destination in the world,” said Kenanga Research (Kenanga) in a recent report.
Also, Data Bridge Market Research projects the Asia Pacific BPO market to grow at 8.6% compounded annual growth rate between 2023 and 2030. These tailwinds are poised to favour Scicom, which generates 70% of its revenue from BPO services.
The economy has seen and felt the evident stage-one impact of reopening. Having satiated the long-restrained desires, it’s time to face reality – transitioning from remote work to returning to office, and from travelling around the world to resuming work or studies.
“This leads us to anticipate the stage-two economic impact of reopening – including a return to physical classes versus on-line for the education sector,” said Kenanga.
Interestingly, Scicom is the platform provider for student visa applications under Education Malaysia Global Services (EMGS), which
contributes 30% to its revenue.
“According to EMGS’ website, new students’ applications in 4QCY22 jumped 12% despite a 14% decline in applications from China. With China’s recent full reopening, we foresee resurgence in new applications from 2HCY23 onwards,” said the research house.
Generative artificial intelligence (Gen AI) has emerged as a vital asset in the digital era, and has the potential to elevate customer experience (CX), enhance employee productivity, and optimise task mix between human and AI.
According to IDC, the leading use cases of AI are in sales and customer service functions. These use cases will see investment from nearly every industry and will collectively account for more than a quarter of all AI spending.
This therefore is a defining moment for Scicom which offers outsourced customer services to explore the feasibility of incorporating AI into its daily operations or service offerings.
AI aside, Scicom is also developing its proprietary medical tech (Medtech) platform, creating an e-TPA (third party administrator) to replace
traditional methods used in the medical insurance space. This will allow for price transparency, quicker processing time and overall improved efficiency.
Risks identified by Kenanga include unexpected cancellation of contracts and failure to extend existing concessions.
