By Yearend: Asiatown IT Park sees P1.4B economic input

By end of 2006, the Ayala-developed Asiatown IT Park expects to release about P1.4 billion worth of compensation to over 5,700 working population employed in different company locators at the cyberpark.

The P1.4 billion is the amount of disposable income that the IT Park will contribute to Cebu's economy by the end of 2006, excluding the income tax component that will be generated out of the employees' wages, said AITP administrator Raul Mananquil.

The recent additions at AITP, the second building of Primary Industrial Properties Corporation and Sky Rise I.T. Building, highlight an anticipated increase in the present number of working population, Mananquil said.

He said after the success and full occupancy of the Engineering Sciences Building with eTelecare, Dash Engineering, SPI Technologies and a ground level retail strip, Primary Industrial Properties Corp. is now completing its second building with 17,611 square meters of leasable office space.

Skyrise Realty and Development Corp. on the other hand, houses PeopleSupport, Epson, Astro Ship, Info Weapons and Microsoft.

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 into Asiatown I.T. Park in 2002.

Astro Ship, which handles ship management for foreign vessels, occupies part of the building's 7th floor. Also, InfoWeapons develops secure network solutions for data exchanges, and is already established in Europe, Japan and the U.S. in its line of business.

The Cebu facility of Mexico-based call center Qualfon International with offices in Argentina, Costa Rica, Guyana, Mexico Monterey, and Mexico City, opened and started operations in June of this year as its first customer care center in Asia. It will exclusively service Tracfone Wireless, Inc., a US-based cellphone company with about seven million customers.

Multinational computer technology corporation Microsoft, which employs close to 72,000 employees in more than 100 countries has now set up a base right here in Cebu. Microsoft-Cebu office is temporarily at the Ayala FGU Center, but will move to AITP by November.

Mananquil cited that AITP's strength as an ecozone is its ability to match investors with ready locators and with competent workers.

Recently, AITP registered 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 the I.T. Park.

"The infrastructure, communication, electricity and manpower quality at Asiatown are at par with the major IT parks not only in Asia but also worldwide," Francis Monera, president of CPVDC said.

"This has ignited the influx of more IT locators in Cebu and is one of the reasons why we are experiencing more aggressiveness in the take-up of commercial lots in AITP compared to the previous years," Monera added.