Monday, October 16, 2006 Asiatown expects work force hike with new bldg.
AYALA-led Asiatown IT is anticipating an increase in its present 5,700 working population with the completion of the second building of Primary Industrial Properties Corp. (PIPC)
In a statement, Cebu Property Ventures and Development Corp. (CPVDC) said the total annual compensation of employees in Asiatown is estimated to be more than P1.4 billion.
“This is the amount of disposable income that the IT (information technology) park will contribute to Cebu’s economy by the end of 2006, not to mention the income tax component that will be generated out of the employees’ wages,” CPVDC said.
The second building of PIPC, which has a leasable space for offices of about 17,611 square meters, is near completion. The first PIPC property, the Engineering Sciences Building, is already fully occupied by eTelecare, Dash Engineering, SPI Technologies and a ground level retail strip.
Expansion
Skyrise IT Building, which houses PeopleSupport, Epson, Astro Ship, InfoWeapons, Qualfon and Microsoft, is also fully occupied.
PeopleSupport, one of the country’s pioneering contact centers, needed another 1,600 seats for its expansion from their first facility at eOffice One. Epson also expanded and required a bigger facility to accommodate a workforce, which doubled from the time they moved to Asiatown I.T. Park in 2002.
The Cebu facility of Mexico-based call center Qualfon International opened and started operations in June of this year. Its Asiatown I.T. is the firm’s first customer care center in Asia.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has now set up a base in Cebu. Microsoft-Cebu office is temporarily housed at the Ayala FGU Center, but will move to Asiatown in November.
Strength
“Asiatown’s strength as an ecozone is its ability to match investors with ready locators and competent workers,” CPVDC said.
The infrastructure, communication, electricity and manpower quality at Asiatown are at par with the major IT parks not only in Asia but also worldwide,” said Francis Monera, president of CPVDC.
“This has ignited the influx of more IT locators in Cebu and is one of the reasons we are experiencing more aggressiveness in the take-up of commercial lots in (Asiatown) compared to the previous years,” he added.
An IT Special Economic Zone operating for five years now, Asiatown has reported an increase in the number of contact center employees from 1,424 to 2,384. The number of contact center employees composes almost 60 percent of the total employees at Asiatown. (JBN)
