BACOLOD City continues to attract potential foreign markets due to its flourishing information and communications technology (ICT) industry, an official said.
Jocelle Batapa-Sigue, executive director of Bacolod-Negros Occidental Federation for Information and Communications Technology (BNEFIT), on Sunday said that through current investment inquiries in the city, they are seeing potential foreign markets like United Kingdom, Korea, and Germany.
This is based on the nature of investors addressing queries to BNEFIT in second quarter of this year, Batapa-Sigue said.
Aside from business process outsourcing (BPO), other ICT services like game development, finance and accounting, and healthcare information management have also drawn interest from foreign locators.
Currently, most locators in Bacolod and other areas in the country are from the United States, she added.
“Bacolod remains attractive to foreign markets due to our status as center of excellence in information technology-business process management,” Batapa-Sigue said, adding that it was vested on Bacolod in 2014, making the city part of the Philippine’s top locations for IT-BPM.
Aside from having the center of excellence status, Bacolod, which is now number 85, has been consistently moving higher in the Tholons International Top 100 Cities in the World for IT Outsourcing, she added.
BNEFIT is set to meet next month with representatives of a small BPO firm from UK, which initially inquired for application in the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza), for possible operation in Bacolod.
Batapa-Sigue said that with the growing market-demand for the city’s ICT industry, the federation aims to continuously hit the target of 60,000 local jobs by 2022.
To constantly attract more markets that will surely result to additional local direct and indirect jobs for Negrenses, there is a need to scale-up the whole value chain of IT services, she added.