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Twenty call centers will start operations in Cebu within the year, with three opening before July.
Cebu Investment Promotion Center (CIPC) managing director Joel Mari Yu said business process outsourcing (BPOs), such as call center companies, still continue to look at Cebu as a viable site for their operations.
Yu noted that the biggest potential source of investments will be the BPO industry.
"We are trying to develop non-voice BPOs. We feel there are a lot of more qualified people with skills in financial services such as accounting, payroll, insurance claims and medical transcription," he said.
While most of the major BPO companies are operating in Manila, Cebu could attract integrators such as Accenture, which get accounts from different companies, he added.
Yu noted that Accenture has expressed interest in Cebu and its entry would open up Cebu to BPO investments.
Alberto Gumarao, deputy center manager of CIPC, said one of the companies interested to locate in Cebu is Qualfone which is based in Mexico and operates Spanish language call centers.
Qualfone is looking at the possibility of setting up its first English language outbound call center to serve the southern part of the United States, he said.
If plans push through, the company will start with 150 seats and increase to 500 seats, he noted.
Gumarao said a British company called UK Link has also expressed interest in putting up a call center facility here to call people in London.
The company is engaged in telemarketing and will hire between 15 to 30 workers.
Cebu has been receiving several inquiries, but it still faces constraints on the availability of skilled manpower needed by BPOs, he pointed out.
Gumarao also bared that another company based in the United States also plans to visit Cebu soon to look at the possibility of setting up a facility here.
This company intends to come last February but postponed the trip to April or May, he added.
The US firm is engaged in knowledge process outsourcing, an emerging industry, and focus on research that would require a master's degree in biology and other sciences.
The Board of Investments (BOI), Business Process Association of the Philippines (BPA) and the Commission on Information, Communication and Technology (CICT) have projected that the country's outsourcing jobs will rise by 44 percent, revenues by 52 percent, and investments by 42 percent in 2006.
The total investments would be around P12 billion this year and by 2010, around 1.2 million people will be employed in outsourcing from the present 233,000.
According to industry estimates, the country's revenues from BPO in 2006 will bring us 3.8 billion US dollars, close to four times higher than in 2001 at one billion US dollars.
Five years ago, the revenues from BPO amounted to only 349 million US dollars.
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