BACOLOD City is among the cities in the country capable of shifting to knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) aside from Cebu, an official of Colliers International said.
Joey Bondoc, research manager of Colliers International, said in a statement Wednesday, June 21, that Bacolod City is a key hub for health information management.
“KPO companies offer higher value outsourcing services such as medical transcription or health information management, software engineering, and finance and accounting,” Bondoc said.
Neighboring Iloilo City, on the other hand, is being groomed as a prime location of game development services. Other key cities include Clark, Davao, and Sta. Rosa in Laguna.
Colliers International, a global real estate services company, reported that Cebu remains to be the largest and most practical choice for KPO firms looking for viable locations outside Manila due to its diverse and skilled labor pool.
Colliers said the share of KPO employees to Cebu’s outsourcing workforce has grown from a mere 10 percent in 2008 to nearly 30 percent in 2015.
“We see Cebu’s shift to higher value outsourcing being sustained by an ample supply of graduates with relevant college degrees. Of the estimated 30,000 graduates that Cebu churns out each year, about a quarter have business degrees while a combined 35 percent have engineering, IT and math, and medical degrees,” it added.
For her part, lawyer Jocelle Batapa-Sigue, executive director of Bacolod-Negros Occidental Federation for Information and Communications Technology (BNEFIT), said the city and province can handle high-value outsourced services involving knowledge and information especially in the field of healthcare information management and software development.
Batapa-Sigue said that after having been declared as Center of Excellence for business process outsourcing especially in contact center services in 2013, BNEFIT in collaboration with the local government has developed strategies to target these high-value areas, including creative processes such as game development and animation.
The BNEFIT council, she said, recognizes the need to have a carefully-planned marketing program especially for the international market, and to beef up the roster of fiscal and non-fiscal incentives for ICT companies.
Instead of reducing these incentives, there is a need to compete with other countries to ensure that jobs and investments steadily grow, Batapa-Sigue added.
“ICT companies now are not just foreign, there are many locals because of the advent of startups, they need these incentives,” she said, adding that the incentives for these companies inside Philippine Economic Zone Authority zones must be retained and increased.
The BNEFIT also considered the need to strengthen close industry-academe partnerships to create industry-calibrated certifications, which should be incentivized among companies in the countryside.
