Cebu City (Mindanao Examiner Photo)
CEBU CITY (Mindanao Examiner /Dec. 12, 2013) – Cebu in the central Philippines is fast becoming a center for information and technology just as other highly urbanized areas in the country and competitively for that.
Because of this, House Assistant Majority Leader and Cebu Rep. Gerald Anthony Gullas Jr. said he strongly favors the launch of new tax-advantaged information technology (IT) parks in highly urbanized areas, especially those outside Metro Manila like Cebu, saying this will help spur stable economic expansion all over the country.
“New IT parks in Cebu and elsewhere will help promote balanced economic development countrywide, and provide gainful employment to thousands of college graduates in the provinces who are out of work,” said Gullas, also the vice chairman of the House committee on higher and technical education.
He said highly labor-intensive and technology-enabled business process outsourcing or BPO firms are the locators in IT parks registered with the Philippine Economic Zone Authority. Gullas specially cited the new Megaworld Corporations’s P20-billion mixed-use Mactan Newtown project in Lapu-Lapu City.
Like the 17-hectare ‘Eastwood City’ in Quezon City, at the core of the 20-hectare Mactan Newtown is a cyberpark – a BPO-targeted complex of up to 10 office towers with an aggregate leasable space of 150,000 square meters.
Megaworld sees BPO firms at Mactan Newtown Cyberpark employing more than 40,000 workers by 2018. “Cebu in particular and Central Visayas in general can readily supply the human resources required by BPO firms that will set up shop at Mactan Newtown and other new IT parks in the region,” Gullas said.
Central Visayas is comprise of the provinces of Cebu, Negros Oriental, Bohol and Siquijor. Cebu now has 25 fully functional IT parks and centers and a dozen more are being developed, providing plenty of office spaces and advanced connectivity to new BPO firms, according to Gullas.
He said BPO firms in Central Visayas, mostly in Cebu and Negros Oriental, already employ over 100,000 full-time workers, and generated some $516 million in revenues in 2012. Among them are Accenture Inc., Convergys Philippines Services Corp., TeleTech Customer Care Management Philippines Inc., JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A.-Philippine Global Service Center, Stream International Global Services Philippines Inc., IBM Corp., Sykes Asia Inc., Aegis PeopleSupport Inc., NCR Cebu Development Center Inc., and Wipro BPO Philippines Ltd. Inc.
Mactan Newtown Cyberpark’s first locator – The Results Companies – a contact center services provider, set up shop only last August at the One World Center, the project’s first office building. As planned, Mactan Newton will also have a lifestyle mall, residential towers, and a Richmonde hotel, Gullas said.
The BPO industry in the Philippines is projected to produce $25 billion in revenues and directly employ some 1.3 million Filipinos by 2016. With a labor force of 780,000, the industry posted $13 billion in revenues in 2012, up by $2 billion, or 18 percent, from $11 billion in 2011.
This year, the industry is expected to generate $16 billion in revenues and increase full-time employees to 926,000, according to the IT and Business Processing Association of the Philippines. The industry encompasses contact center services; back offices; medical, legal and other data transcription; animation; software development; engineering design; and digital content.
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