Market Overview

The business process outsourcing (BPO) market size (total of IT BPO and non-IT BPO), based on the sales from relevant businesses, was estimated at 5.0786 trillion yen in FY2024, a 4.0% increase from the previous fiscal year. Within the total market, sales of IT BPO increased by 5.9% year over year to 3.1220 trillion yen, while sales of non-IT BPO increased by 1.0% 1.9566 trillion yen.

In recent years, as more companies have striven to achieve digital transformation by renovating and automating work processes with digital technology, they have begun to concentrate their management resources on core business and new business development, reassigning human resources accordingly.
This shift has increased momentum for external resources for non-core tasks. Additionally, outsourcing has become used not only for individual services but also for integrated services that cover strategy planning, core business processes, and consulting.
In this context, Japanese companies have particularly increased their demand for BPO services, which aim to further enhance global competitiveness (price competitiveness) and improve work processes.
Public service sectors and local governments have also become willing to outsource ever since commissioning pandemic-related work. This has also contributed to market expansion.

Noteworthy Topics

High Demand for Peripheral Work, Which Associate with Organizing Network Environments, Reviewing System Operations, and Shifting to Cloud

In recent years, many BPO businesses have started offering “digital BPO,” which combines human tasks with digitally powered work. This increases efficiency, service speed, and labor-saving capabilities. It also solves labor shortage problems and improves the service quality, enabling BPO businesses to expand their business scope. Consequently, the digital BPO boosts demand in the BPO market.

Additionally, there is high demand for peripheral work related to organizing networking environments and reviewing system operations to minimize human labor in business processes, a.k.a. NoOPS, as well as for migrating file servers to the cloud.   

Future Outlook

In addition to the continuous expansion of BPO services, from major companies to SMEs in recent years — often in conjunction with the introduction of low-priced, cloud-based systems — BPO services have steadily expanded into the public sector and local governments, following the pandemic. As the practical application of generative AI-powered BPO services progresses, the BPO market is expected to continue growing robustly in FY2025.

Research Outline