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ICT summit to craft Davao City’s master plan, settle issues
DAVAO CITY—The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Summit scheduled here next month will seek to settle issues that have hindered easier transfer of more business-process outsourcing (BPO) companies and that may pull down the city from the list of preferred relocation sites.
Article from Business Mirror - Online Space. Written by Manuel Cayon / Reporter. Thursday, 16 July 2009 19:02
The summit, set on August 6 and 7, hopes to gather chief executive officers or representatives of telecommunications companies (telcos), key persons in the ICT affairs of the city and the business community, various colleges and universities, as well as landowners, some of whom have ran aground with their negotiations with major ICT companies over the issue of high rent.
While the summit would like to know the commitment of the different telcos to reassure reliable electricity and broadband supply to the city, the gathering would also like to hear the position of the city government on whether it was interested in crafting a clear direction of the ICT industry.
“Davao City has been listed as a fourth preferred investment site for new and existing companies planning to relocate their operations from the congested and expensive rental rates in Metro Manila and Cebu,” Andrei Fournier, member of the board of trustees of the ICT Davao, told a local forum of business reporters at the Marco Polo Hotel here.
Being the fourth could not excite ICT business leaders here because, Fournier said, “we are far from the third [Makati] and very near from the fifth and sixth places on the list in terms of the number of companies operating.”
“If these issues about land rents, local government incentives, promotion and direction, and steady supply of human resources would not be settled and assured, it’s easy to be pulled down from the list and bypassed by other cities hungrier to host them,” he said.
The city has about 13 or 14 big- and medium-sized companies, those hiring more than 30 agents, which have aggregately employed more than 60,000 persons here, but more were coming and could have settled much earlier if negotiations did not bog down on the rates, or if the infrastructure is in place.
“Our immediate concern that must be settled before the August 6 and 7 summit is for the electric companies and the telcos to assure us of the reliability of power supply and broadband connections,” he said. Not only BPOs have raised their concern on the succession of power outages and the disconnection of broadband Internet connections in the past few months, he added.
