MANILA, Philippines -- Although still an emerging offshore market, Malaysia remains years behind the Philippines and is yet to match the size of outsourcing companies here, according to Frost and Sullivan.

The two countries, along with outsourcing pioneer India and emerging player China, are regarded as high growth markets and forecasted to rake in more than half of the outsourcing business in Asia Pacific in five years.

Malaysia has lately been trying to establish itself as an offshore destination in similar fashion to how the Philippines was at the start of the decade.

"Three years ago, nobody thought of Malaysia as an offshore destination," said Shivanu Shukla, industry manager for Frost and Sullivan, in an interview with INQUIRER.net.

Frost and Sullivan is currently holding a regional customer contact center summit here, attended by representatives from Malaysia's outsourcing industry.

"They have the skills sets but not yet scale. You won't find a call center with 10,000 seats in Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia is where the Philippines was four or five years ago," Shukla said.

In contrast, a number of major players present in the Philippines such as call center players PeopleSupport, Convergys and even Accenture each have grown their existing workforce to almost 15,000 employees.

Shukla, however, believes the Philippines already has a niche in high-end customer services while Malaysia is just starting out as a market player.

"The industry in Malaysia is very domain-specific and caters to certain vertical markets like oil and gas, for example. Shell, for one, has set up support centers there because of the oil refineries present in Malaysia," he explained.

Shukla believes Malaysia caters more to a Pan-Asian market while the Philippines remains very US-centric.

"What Malaysia can do is slowly build scale among its players catering to the near shore market. Malaysia has the right language skill sets but geared towards Asian markets like China and Arabic countries," he said.