City of ILOILO - Our New Operations Base.

Most people are comfortable with the idea of outsourcing to a familiar major city like Manila with its substantial infrastructure and several universities, yet possibly a little uncertain of what the city of ILOILO (which will be IAM's newest expansion site) has to offer .


With that in mind I did a little research into ILOILO which is to become the base for our third offshore centre.

A metropolitan area population of 950,000 makes it roughly the size of Gold Coast and Newcastle combined. This is no village. Iloilo's International airport is the 4th busiest in The Philippines and has direct flights to Singapore and Hong Kong.

English is the language used in both business and education meaning that the pool of candidates for employment is maximised locally.The area has a high literacy rate and high university graduate rate. Somewhat surprisingly, Iloilo province has no less than 10 major universities and numerous private colleges. Several of these universities were established during American colonial days by such people as industrialist John D Rockefeller.

Iloilo city has a distinctly modern progressive outlook towards foreign investment and specifically Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and is rated a "City of Excellence" ranking alongside Manila and Cebu in economic infrastructure and progress. It currently hosts many BPO companies and is expanding such facilities further.

The city has a state of the art Convention Centre, AM and FM Radio stations and a host of English style tabloid newspapers such as Daily Guardian and News Express.

The local government seems very progressive and to be doing its best to Westernise and expand the local economy plus we've already seen how pro-active they are with tax concessions towards IAM.

I for one am very happy with management's very sound decision regarding expanding into this business-suitable and economically welcoming city.