• BPO company Aegis opens a 900-seat call center in Costa Rica. The new facility is located in the Rohrmoser section of San Jose and it will be a blend of additional capacity and reduced costs, the statement said.
• CSC announced it signed a three-year business process services contract with AMERISAFE, Inc. Under the agreement, CSC will provide business process outsourcing (BPO) services to manage and automate legal expenditures for AMERISAFE using Legal Bill Analyzer, a component of CSC’s Legal Solutions Suite, strengthening transparency in legal matter planning and communication with outside counsel.CSC’s customized BPO offering for AMERISAFE includes a range of services, such as bill review, resolution, reporting, invoice management and Web hosting support. The agreement provides a low-risk approach to transforming operations and controlling costs, and encourages constructive collaboration between AMERISAFE and law firms.
• Information Services Group (ISG) (NASDAQ: III), a technology insights, market intelligence and advisory services company, today announced winners of the 2012 Australia New Zealand (ANZ) Paragon Awards, which recognise leadership and best practices in sourcing and service management. The ANZ Paragon Awards celebrate and promote organisations and relationships within the sourcing community that have demonstrated high performance leadership and best practices in the sourcing and service management fields.

  The 2012 ANZ Paragon Award winners are:
  Best Sourcing Relationship in Business Process Outsourcing Award: Russell Investments and Mahindra Satyam

  Best Sourcing Relationship in IT Outsourcing Award: Westpac and IBM
  Service Provider Innovation Excellence Award: Wipro, for the introduction and implementation of innovative services for the University of Canberra

• Global Legal Solutions Provider Earns Top 100 Call Center Contest for Second Consecutive Year. ARAG®, a global provider of legal solutions, announced today it has been named to the Top 20 in the Top 100 Call Center Contest by BenchMark Portal. This is the second consecutive year ARAG has made the list. BenchmarkPortal is internationally recognized as the premier research and education organization for customer contact best practices. Each year the organization features a Top 100 Call Centers Contest for centers located in North America.

Well Easter came and went, I am sure that Christmas was only last week , I sometimes feel like my desk calendar is on fast forward and the days and weeks are whipping past like the wind. Where does the time go?

Exciting news – The ABPOA is delighted to be hosting a market place breakfast with KPMG on May the second in Sydney. The Sauce, sponsored by IBM and Fuji Xerox will be showcasing the landmark research report “The Australian BPO Study 2912’ which the ABPOA endorsed.

This is the first time anybody has gone to the trouble to find out what’s really happening on the buy side in Australia and – let me tell you, there is a fascinating tale to tell.

There are only limited seats available so jump in quick if you would like to attend and find out what’s really going on in BPO in Australia.
Please visit http://outsourcingreporting2012.eventbrite.com to book your spot.

A couple of things that I can share with you are that Digital Marketing outsourcing is one of the growth areas and for your interest I draw your attention to the last two paragraphs from the article below about “How the marketing world went digital” and I see opportunities for enterprising BPO companies who can offer support with such services.

Also spotted this discussion on a LinkedIn blog, “The Death of the Call Center”.

Click here

It certainly is topical and has people with very firm views on both sides of the debate and in the context of the upcoming US election a fascinating discussion. (see story below about Joe Biden and Mitt Romney facing off about outsourcing of US jobs.)

Also in case you missed it last week, a story that will affect us all is the debate about the word ‘Outsourcing’ – http://thesauce.net.au/2012/04/buyers-and-providers-are-desperate-to-alter-the-perception-of-outsourcing/

We would be interested in your views about these subjects and please feel free to join the debate and post your comments at the bottom of this page or write to me mconboy@abpoa.com.au

The big SSON event is coming up next week in Melbourne and if you have not got your ticket you will be need to be very quick –
SSON

We are launching the new Australian BPO research report there so watch the mainstream Australian business media for coverage.

There is also some BPO M&A activity in the local market , see the story below by Malcolm Maiden and the further story about the NCO merging with APAC so plenty going on in the market as we now move into Q2 2012.

As always enjoy the read and thanks for all those who have sent encouraging feedback about the work we do- always appreciated and keep those stories coming in.

• Listed business process outsourcing (BPO) firm Paxys Inc. has announced plans to sell off for a significant premium all of its business in Australia, representing about two-thirds of the company’s assets. In a disclosure on Monday, Paxys said its wholly owned subsidiary Paxys NV had signed an agreement with Smart Group Investments Pty Ltd for the sale of Paxys Australia for 84.9 million Australian dollars. “The sale includes all of the subsidiaries of Paxys Australia, consisting of Smart Salary Pty Ltd, Smart Fleet Management, SeQoya Pty Ltd, PBI Benefit Solutions, and Australian Vehicle Consultants,” the listed firm said in a disclosure. As of end 2011, the consolidated net book value of Paxys Australia was at 34 million Australian dollars.
• Talent2, IBM & Fuji Xerox recognised as top global providers of training outsourcing solutions three members of the Australian BPO Association (ABPOA) have been named in Training Industry.com’s Top 20 Training Outsourcing Companies list for 2012. TrainingIndustry.com, a global training industry portal for the learning and development market, continuously reviews companies that provide training business process outsourcing (BPO) services and conducts an annual assessment to determine suppliers’ experience and capabilities. The Top 20 list recognises the leading training outsourcing companies for their high quality services and comprehensive capabilities. All have demonstrated expertise and experience in managing major BPO engagements as well as creating a significant impact on the industry.

  Click here to view the Top 20 Training Outsourcing Companies

• Datacom managed Small Business support line that provides expert advice to Australia’s small business sector is about to reach a milestone of 50,000 calls. The support line is a free service that provides one stop shop assistance on a range of issues to small business. The small business support line can be contacted on 1800 777 275

By Martin Conboy, President – ABPOA

As we all know we are moving away from needing to actually talk to a human being when we are doing our day-to-day transactions. There is no doubt that as consumers we are using our smart phones, web chat, email, SMS and social media channels to get what we need to get done. Now it turns out we are falling out of love with cash.

I read the other day that Australians withdrew cash from ATMs 64.7 million times in January, well down on 65.6 million withdrawals made the previous January.

December was even worse. Australians took out cash 71.9 million times compared to 73.6 million the year before.

Mobile phones, EFTPOS, internet transfers and cards that merely need to be waved in front of Point of Sale machines are taking the place of cash, but credit cards aren’t.

Cash is losing its position as the primary method for making purchases.

Reserve Bank figures released last week show the average credit card limit climbed just 0.7 per cent over the year to January, the smallest annual growth on record. The outrageous interest rates charged on credit cards would no doubt feed into that.

Internet transfers jumped 7.5 per cent, making 60 million transactions in January, up from 55 million. Debt card transactions jumped 12 per cent.

So it will follow that as we move too ever more convenient ways to transact our transactional business the less and less we need to actually talk to humans either in person or on the phone. It’s no secret that internet shopping is growing and growing although that may come off the boil a bit as the Australian dollar slips back to parity

Rising uncertainty about China’s growth rate coupled with healthier readings on the US economy are likely to weigh on the Australian dollar, analysts say.

There is no point wringing our hands and be in denial of the evidence that we can see with our own eyes we need to start to make plans to stay ahead of the curve.

By Goutam Das and Sunny
India’s BPO industry losing voice, finds life elsewhere

Two years ago, Barclaycard decided to outsource the customer service of its credit card and consumer lending businesses. The deal was worth a mouthwatering 100 million pounds over five years. Naturally, Indian business process outsourcing (BPO) companies queued up. But Marge Connelly, Barclaycard’s Chief Operating Officer, said the function – all of it voice – had to be done out of the Philippines.

The Philippines was a colony of the United States from just after the Spanish-American war of 1898 to the Second World War – enough time for the US to imbue the South-East Asian country with its culture and language.

Barclaycard, part of the Barclays Group with headquarters in the United Kingdom, and Connelly, an American, were more comfortable with Filipinos, rather than Indians, speaking to their clients.

Eventually, Firstsource, an Indian BPO outfit, took over Barclaycard’s customer service centre in Teesside in Northeast England, and moved a majority of the work to the Philippines. Connelly, who left Barclaycard last December, is not the only one of her kind. Nor was the Barclaycard voice contract the first to go to the Philippines. But, given its size and profile, it provided a curious twist to the BPO story in India.

The story began with a whisper more than two decades ago when Raman Roy took on some work for American Express. It soon grew into a rumble and then into a thunder as the industry rode on Indians’ comfort with the English language to appropriate the bulk of the work being outsourced by companies in the US and Europe. Sanjay grew an alter ego as Sam, Nikhil turned into Nick and Sulekha pretended to be Sally. Hours in training turned a Tamil accent into the Boston twang and the Punjabi gruffness into the Texan drawl.

Images of young men and women, fresh out of college, sitting at a computer with headphones planted on their heads as if rooted there, became the symbol of the new India. Costing a fraction of what a similar professional in the West would have, they spoke and spoke into the microphone. And then the voices got muffled.

A RIVAL RISES

In the last six years, voice contracts coming to India are estimated to have fallen by half. This has pegged back the industry overall. In 2008, a report by industry lobby NASSCOM and research firm Everest said the Indian BPO industry would earn $30 billion from exports by 2012.

Given the “significant future market opportunity”, said the report, the industry could also set itself a “stretch target” of $50 billion. We are in the third month of the year and that market opportunity looks less than significant.

The BPO industry’s growth has lagged that of IT even from a smaller base

The industry may clock less than $16 billion this year – a meagre growth rate of 12 per cent, according to NASSCOM’s latest estimates. In fact, the compound annual growth rate since 2006 has been an underwhelming 13.41 per cent.

“I will take a bet,” says an industry veteran who does not want to be identified. “No BPO company in India can show double digit organic growth in 2012/13. They will show growth only by making small acquisitions or by passing off information technology work as BPO.”

As voice in Indian BPO gets muted, the buzz around the Philippines gets louder. Last year, it became the biggest provider of voice-supported services as its BPO industry jumped 21 per cent to $10.9 billion.

The Business Processing Association of the Philippines expects growth to touch 19 per cent in 2012, very similar to how India had been growing before 2006/07. If you look at pure voice operations, the Philippines, with $5.2 billion in revenues, has already become No. 1 in the world, pushing India, at $4.8 billion, into the second spot.

What’s more, a chunk of the voice contracts going to the Philippines has moved out of India. According to estimates, in the last two years, about 75,000 seats that could have been added to call centres in India went to the Philippines.

In this period, US Retailer Target, Australian telecom firm Telstra, Manila-based food and beverages company San Miguel, US-based Aetna Insurance and Canadian carrier Air Canada – none of whom gave details – are understood to have preferred the Philippines to India. “We make decisions about engaging vendors based on the global needs of our business,” said a spokesperson for Target.

SLEEPING WITH THE RIVAL

“In the next decade, India as a destination can lose $25-30 billion in foreign exchange earnings to the Philippines. Indian service providers will earn a large chunk of this but India will lose out,” says Sandeep Aggarwal, who is part of a strategic transformation group at Intelenet.

The company, for its part, has made sure it is one of those gaining even if India loses. About a year ago, hospitality giant Hilton decided to give out nearly half a billion dollars worth of call centre work spread over five years.

It wanted the centre to be in the Philippines and Intelenet won half of that contract by setting up a centre there with 2,000 employees. The other half went to Aegis, part of the Essar Group, which followed suit.

Neither company was willing to discuss the contract, but when IBM’s Global Locations Report of 2011 says the Philippines has become a top destination for Indian investors, you can be sure the bulk of that money is going out of BPO coffers.

BPO rivals to India

“Calls requiring empathy towards the customer are best handled from countries like the Philippines, as they understand the American culture better than Indians,” says Rohit Kapoor, who heads EXL, India’s ninth largest BPO company. EXL has not added many new voice processes in India since 2008, choosing to add most of them in the Philippines.

Jerry Durant, who sits in Manila as Chairman Emeritus of The International Institute for Outsource Management, says of the Indian approach: “We hear complaints on voice-based services, linguistics as well as the tenor. It is not uncommon to be told ‘no problem’ and this has become a sure sign that there is a big problem.”

Beyond empathy, there are other areas in which the Philippines has the edge. It gets trained manpower, thanks to a government programme, and its employees travel on their own.

In comparison, the fresh-out-of-college look in the Indian call centres may look cool, but does not make a great business case, especially when the employer has to spend on training its people, arranging transport for everyone working nights and providing escorts for the women.

And then there is the matter of skill in certain areas. Some time ago a large health care company wanted EXL to handle processes like medical summarisation and disease management. It wanted US-registered nurses. India did not have any. The Philippines, on the other hand, had 100,000 nurses who had returned from the US after the financial crisis and were unemployed. EXL hired 400 of them and put them in front of computers.

According to industry estimates, 30 per cent of the graduates in the Philippines are employable, compared to 10 per cent in India. And they last longer. The attrition in the Philippines is about half that in India.

As the Philippines has emerged as India’s biggest rival in voice, several others are vying for the same pie. So if empathy tilts the scales in the Philippines’ favour, culture swings it for Egypt, which, with costs comparable to India’s, has been getting more and more contracts from companies based in West Asia.

Dalian in China has become an important outsourcing centre because a large population of the former Japanese colony is conversant in Japanese.

It does not help that the manpower in India is becoming costlier, with a 10 to 15 per cent rise in BPO salaries and training expenses in the last five years, leaving the Philippines just about 10 per cent higher in manpower cost. Brazil, West Asia, Poland and Romania – with costs comparable to or slightly higher than India’s – have also started giving Indian BPOs a run for their contracts.

To keep pace, Indian BPO companies have spread out. “Some voice work we cannot take offshore because of regulatory reasons and customer demand. A larger geographic spread also helps in reducing transfer of operations from one centre to another, and helps us grow in other markets,” says a Genpact executive.

The company, the largest in India’s BPO industry, is present not only in Dalian but also in several other countries, including five locations in the US and one in Mexico.

“It is only if a client asks specifically that its calls be handled out of India that we do so,” says N.V. “Tiger” Tyagarajan, President and CEO of Genpact. It operates in 25 languages, of which only English can be handled in India with a high degree of proficiency.

“Few clients, if any, are served from one location. We are also increasing our onshore activity in the US, some of it due to regulatory and licensing issues,” says Tyagarajan.

There is one more issue. As Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich battle for the right to challenge US President Barack Obama in elections later this year, there is pressure on US companies to keep jobs within the country.

The pressure is more telling on BPO than on IT, mainly because there is a shortage of coders in the US but BPO jobs, particularly on the voice side, do not need much skill. With an unemployment rate of more than eight per cent, the US has enough people who would want to work in a call centre. And they may show more empathy than even the Filipinos.

“The perception that we are taking away jobs is the biggest challenge. The CEOs of client organisations are trying to weigh the benefits of offshoring against the pain they would suffer,” says Swami Swaminathan, who heads Infosys BPO.

Back home in India, the Manmohan Singh government has not done BPO any favour by withdrawing tax incentives under the Software Technology Parks of India scheme and imposing the Minimum Alternate Tax on Special Economic Zones. The inadequate infrastructure takes its own toll.

“I think part of the problem was the early success that Indian companies enjoyed. You really didn’t need to do much in order to get business as demand exceeded supply. But now Indian companies have to compete head-to-head with others in every aspect,” says Durant.

MUFFLING MURTHY

Phaneesh Murthy, dressed in his usual attire of jeans and T-shirt, reaches into a small, crystal bowl of fruit. Nibbling on something he picked, he says: “Companies like WNS are dead.” And you wonder if it is a case of sour grapes.

Murthy, whose iGATE acquired Patni Computers in 2011, tried to acquire WNS Global Services four years ago, but dropped the bid because he found that it was not a “strategic fit”. Maybe he is just bitter. WNS, after all, is a leading provider of BPO services, with 22,500 employees in 25 locations across the world.

It is then that Murthy brings you out of your conspiracy reverie. “There was a downturn in the market in 2008. All our prices were down. The tech industry got hammered. Our share price was $4. WNS’s was $11. Today our share price is $22, WNS’s is still at $10.” At the time this article was written, WNS’S share price on the New York Stock Exchange was $13 while iGATE was trading on NASDAQ at $16.62.

On second thought, WNS is not all that hot right now. Its revenues declined 23.2 per cent in the quarter ended December last year and its operating margin was a wafer-thin two per cent for the year ended March last year. Experts say staying focused on pure BPO services and not getting into IT has hurt the company.

However, where there is WNS, there is also Genpact, which reported a 27 per cent rise in revenue last year and boasts a 16.5 per cent margin. Genpact has done it not just by spreading out geographically, but also by moving up the value chain.

Several others companies, notably EXL, have done the same. They hire doctors to handle medical claims, chartered accountants to look at large loan maintenance and portfolio tracking, and lawyers to handle legal processes. Genpact also offers technology services, which acquired a big boost with the acquisition last year of Arjun Malhotra’s financial analytics services provider company Headstrong.

Gopinathan Padmanabhan, head of global delivery at MphasiS, owned by Hewlett Packard, says: “I can manage the customer’s infrastructure, the applications, and also the business processes that run on top of the application.”

Milind Godbole, who runs the Asia Pacific operations for Aditya Birla Minacs, the BPO arm of the group run by Kumar Mangalam Birla, says the industry is moving from an assembly-line model to more intellectual capital oriented work.

“Call centres were always like a line assembly. Now, the BPO industry is looking more at creating platforms and introducing automation to add value,” he says.

Platforms use cloud computing and bundle business process with technology.

The BPO firm hosts an application at its own or a third party data centre and customers pay only for using the platform. The BPO revenues through this stream are not linked to the number of people the company employs. Like a product, a platform is built once and sold to many customers.

Infosys is an aggressive platform builder. One of its BPO platforms, Source to Pay, manages a customer’s indirect spending. After a purchase request from the client, Infosys BPO executes the range of processes from managing requests, generating purchase order, following the goods shipment, invoice processing and vendor payments.

The customer pays for the usage or outcome and incurs no capital expenditure. WNS, the target of Murthy’s ire, is dismissive of his prognosis. It sees itself on the growth path again after “a period of uncertainty”. It is investing in its technology-enabled practice.

“We have aggregated dozens of platforms, automation and new tool kits,” says Keshav Murugesh, its CEO. WNS has created a platform for the travel industry, which can check irregularities in the way travel agents function. It helps fare experts tell airlines how much more they should charge from an agent in case of irregularity.

The evidence of the transition is more than visible in the industry’s revenue split. In 2005/06, voice constituted 75 per cent of the industry’s revenues, which stood at $5 billion. As the revenue has grown more than three times, non-voice is more than half of it. The larger Indian firms do not have more than 20 per cent of their revenues coming from voice. It helps that the margins in non-voice are higher – 10 to 15 per cent higher than in voice.

Some companies have started distancing themselves from the term BPO. Bangalore-based [24]7 in which Microsoft invested recently, wants to be seen as a technology company. Essar-owned Aegis calls itself an “experience” company, managing different experiences for its customers.

The CEO of a rival firm sniggers that these companies may be facing an “identity crisis”. With time, we will know if the crisis had an opportunity lurking inside.

Source: In Today

By Geetanjali Shukla

Photo on right side: Aparup Sengupta, MD & Global CEO, Aegis

A post-lunch slowing of biorhythms is sweeping through call-centre country Gurgaon and the performance on a floor full of agents working on a large Indian mobile phone company’s account is faltering. The slowdown is spotted some 1,400 km away at Aegis’s grandiosely named Global Command Centre, or GCC, in Mumbai. The analyst, who notices the falling metrics, reaches for the phone, flagging it to the Gurgaon call centre’s head with a solution: cut down on breaks later that afternoon to bring back service levels to an even keel.

Sure, there would have been some tight bladders on the post-lunch shift, but the remote sensing ability of Aegis’s so-called GCC is the next generation of outsourcing, says Aparup Sengupta, the company’s Managing Director and Global CEO. “It will improve consumer experiences and in the process help companies perform better,” he says.

Systems like the GCC (it cost $10 million to put up), a focus on consultancy, and its investment in training will propel growth for the emerging star in the steel-to-oil Essar group of companies, says Sengupta. For a company that has made 18 acquisitions in seven years, Aegis is focused on squeezing growth through consolidating its spread. “We crossed $700 million of revenue this year. By March 2012, we want to cross the magic $1 billion mark, and this growth will be organic,” says Sengupta. India’s total business process outsourcing, or BPO, services revenue was around $17 billion in 2010/11.

Source: In Today

By Karen Lema

The Philippines is the world’s call centre capital, but will need more graduates and better trained professionals if it’s to be a major force in the broader outsourcing market, where growth is in providing research and analytics for the legal, healthcare and financial industries.

In little more than a decade, the Philippines has overtaken India in running call-centres, helped by an affinity for the language, culture and work ethic of the United States, its former colonial master.

The number of Filipinos offering a cheery “Have a nice day” while working the graveyard shift to answer calls on behalf of multinational clients such as Citigroup (C.N) and JPMorgan Chase now far exceeds India’s 350,000, and the government wants to double the market to $25 billion by 2016, employing 1.3 million workers.

But to do that the Southeast Asian nation must convince investors it has more to offer than just a huge pool of talent speaking English with an American accent.

Research firm Everest Group has forecast the global business process outsourcing (BPO) industry could be worth $220-$280 billion this year, with 90 percent of that in non-voice work – providing more complex skills and services in research and analytics for lawyers, doctors and bankers.

In the Philippines, non-voice work last year accounted for just over a fifth of total BPO revenues of $10.9 billion, but employed a third of the BPO workforce, or around 220,000 people.

“The goal is aggressive but achievable as long as we know one thing: that what got us here won’t get us to where we need to be,” said Maulik Parekh, president and CEO of outsourcing services provider SPi Global, part of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co (PLDT) (TEL.PS), the country’s most valuable listed company.

“A lot of the focus of the tripartite relationship between the government, educational institutions and the private sector has been about English language skills. We need to start to focus on how we can have a thriving healthcare, publishing, finance, human resource, procurement, IT-related BPO,” Parekh said.

India is expected to continue to dominate in outsourcing, with its first-mover advantage and skills in software development, but the Philippines has its eye on the non-voice market’s potential.

“While some providers are leveraging the Philippines for non-voice functions, the scale of work is relatively low. However, tremendous market potential exists if service providers can successfully manage talent-related constraints,” Nikhil Rajpal, partner at Everest, wrote in a study.

With China, Latin America and other Asian markets such as Malaysia also making strides in outsourcing, the Philippines must ensure it has a steady supply of professionals and highly-skilled workers to offer the more complex, added-value services to meet clients’ changing and increasing demands.

In Manila, Cebu and beyond, demand for outsourcing is growing at around 20 percent a year, but the number of local university graduates is growing at only 3 percent, and only 5-8 percent of them are hire-able, based on government data, highlighting a need to re-engineer the country’s educational system.

The Philippines has a 10-year basic education system, which the government is looking to extend by two years, by adding a pre-school kindergarten programme, to match its Asian rivals.

“The challenge is to be able to supply the human resources to support the industry both from the entry level to middle managers and executives,” said Trade Secretary Gregorio Domingo.

The country turns out 470,000 accountants, lawyers, nurses and engineers each year, but that figure is dwarfed by the 4 million college graduates in India and 2 million in China.

INSOURCING

The Americas remain the biggest clients for the Philippine outsourcing industry, accounting for nearly three-quarters of the domestic BPO market, but Europe, Australia and Japan are increasingly knocking at the door for business.

Some local BPO operators worry about the possible impact of U.S. President Barack Obama’s election-year pledge to close tax breaks for companies that move U.S. jobs overseas and offer incentives to firms bringing those jobs back home.

But Jose Cuisia, Manila’s ambassador to Washington, has sought to allay those fears, saying a pending bill in the US Congress to end job exports lacks support from the Republicans that dominate the lower house of the Congress.

“I don’t think that will pass, even in an election year,” Cuisia said at a recent forum with Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Demetrios Marantis, noting that outsourcing backroom functions makes U.S. companies more competitive.

In its 2011 Global Services Location Index, consultancy firm A.T. Kearney ranked the Philippines 9th out of 50 outsourcing destinations, saying: “Politicians are using global services offshoring as an easy scapegoat for current economic woes and high unemployment levels in their home countries, stoking resentment against globalised firms and their host countries.”

“Although signs of a slowdown in the growth of global services are evident in this environment, don’t expect offshoring to end. In fact, the global services industry’s full potential is ready to be tapped.”

FORMIDABLE FORCE

The growth in the Philippine outsourcing sector has made it indispensable to the economy and to employment, with local officials citing it as one of the reasons the country escaped recession in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis.

In 2009, when much of the world was reeling from the crisis, the United States invested $1.4 billion in the Philippine BPO sector, up from $986 million a year earlier, central bank data showed.

“The BPO industry is one that takes advantage of the strength of the Philippines, which is its people,” Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said.

“It’s an industry that not only offers direct employment (but) also supports the real estate industry and the service industry, and, together with remittances from Filipinos working abroad and tourism, will form part of the three strong legs that will be the platform for growth of the Philippines in the next years.”
(Reuters)

Negros Oriental, Philippines. Image from CSMonitor.

By Stephanie Carianga

The tremors in Cebu’s neighboring island, Negros Oriental, shook not just the buildings but the people themselves across Central Philippines.

Cebu, the Philippines’ second biggest city was caught by surprise and was shaken by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake that originated 100 kilometers away from the City, it only lasted for 30 seconds. Several aftershocks were then experienced in Cebu and other islands but none were strong enough to cause damage, except for Negros Oriental – where the epicenter of the earthquake originated.

Cebu normally has little or no seismic activity but as is the nature of these things, news quickly becomes exaggerated. There was speculation of a tsunami which proved to be false, and there was some initial local panic but it soon subsided. Due to the recent heartbreaking tragedy and publicized Japanese tsunami this was understandable.

There has been no record of any serious injury in Cebu, and officials say that the majority of the casualties were at provincial Negros Oriental.

Taking You Forward, Inc. (TYF), a call centre located at the heart of Cebu, was one of the businesses that experienced the earthquake; however, no damage was done to its buildings. The rumor mill aided by social media went into over drive and by and large proved to be baseless. TYF continued operating in the middle of all the chaos.

Reports of people fleeing, running and crying on the streets were caused by Cebu’s lack of experience with earthquakes. TYF CEO, Brad Norman, remarked: “Be reassured that Cebu is a very safe place. To be fair, we were shaken but not stirred, and after the excitement died down we just wentback to work. It was all a bit of a storm in a tea cup to be honest. Our hearts go out to the families who bore the brunt of it in Negros.”