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By Elaine Ramos Alanguilan, Manila Standard Today
December 2, 2008
The Philippines is aggressively positioning itself as the outsource destination of Japanese IT companies with English-speaking markets.
Trade Undersecretary Elmer Hernandez told reporters that the Philippines’ comparative advantage in e-services took center stage during the recent roadshow in Japan hosted by the Asean Japan Center.
“Even Ambassador Nobutoshi Akao of the Asean Japan Center was one with me in saying that the IT investments in the Philippines are very promising because of our comparative advantage in human resources, including the quality of manpower, which is the best in Asean,” said Hernandez, who represented the Trade Department in the Tokyo and Sapporo legs of the roadshow.
About 120 Japanese companies with interest in IT attended the seminar in Tokyo. The country’s capabilities in e-services, including contact centers, business and knowledge process outsourcing, engineering design, software development, animation as well as medical and legal transcription, were showcased during the roadshow.
“In light of the global financial crisis, one of the most efficient way to cut on costs would be to outsource and offshore for purposes of surviving and becoming more efficient. We have a good number of investment leads but these are very exploratory of this time, extreme interest was generated,” said Hernandez.
He said he had meetings with representatives of Mitsubishi Corp., Mitsui Co. Ltd., Marubeni Corp., Sojitz, Itochu Corp. and Mizuho Corporate Bank Ltd. and its client, TranscCosmos Inc., for possible IT investments to support their Philippine operations as well as other markets outside of Japan.
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