DURING the last 10 years, the Philippines has progressively moved forward to now become the call-center capital of the world. We began taking the title from India in 2008 and the fact that the Philippines accomplished this is a little surprising.
At that time, you could have made a list of the pros and cons of setting a call center in either country and it would have been relatively balanced. The overall costs were about the same. The pool of available employees was large in both. Technology infrastructure might have leaned to India but was not significant. India had an established track record but the Philippines was being aggressive in attracting investment.
The person who, probably, is owed the most credit for the Philippines becoming No. 1 in call centers is Ferdinand Magellan.
While from a wealthy Portuguese family, Magellan was commissioned by King Charles I of Spain to find a sea route to the “Spice Islands,” or Indonesia. Apparently he missed Indonesia and ended up in the Philippines. That started a chain of events, coincidences if you prefer, that created our call-center business.
Companies were hesitant to outsource their customer-service operations to the Philippines, but their English-speaking customers in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe could not clearly understand Indian-accented English. The British colonized India in the mid 1800s, while Spain had been here about 300 years earlier. The first modern European-style university in the Philippines was the University of Santo Tomas established in 1611. It was 250 years later that India had a similar learning establishment. Because of Spanish and then-American colonization, Filipinos were exposed to western languages and accents, literally over centuries. While the use of Spanish was mostly limited to the upper classes, it was still familiar and the Americans pushed the use of English.
The series of events over centuries that bought the call centers to these shores actually started with Magellan landing on Homonhon Island in Eastern Samar.
German psychiatrist Carl Jung created and was fascinated by the concept he called “synchronicity” the idea of “meaningful coincidence” or when seemingly unrelated events have, in his word, “togetherness.” This has been illustrated in the phrase of unknown attribution, “All coincidences traced back became inevitable.”
Not only are events linear, as in my silly story of Magellan, but events are also interconnected seemingly without obvious connection.
The Americans would never have been in the Philippines if not for the Spanish-American War. That war might never have occurred if not for the anti-Spanish propaganda led by newspaper publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Hearst which used yellow journalism to criticize the Spanish administration of Cuba.
Hearst never created a scheme for the US to go to war against Spain to then be able to colonize the Philippines, to teach English to Filipinos that would eventually lead to the Philippines being the call-center capital of the world. But that is what happened.
The global financial system is not one huge clock where all the gears and wheels operate in synchronicity. But it is inescapable that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Shanghai does affect the winds off the western coast of Ireland if you are able to see the big picture.
The advantage, if you will, that the Philippines has is that because, in part by geography and its lagging economic development, we have been loosely connected or even disconnected for a disproportionate part of the time. The Philippines has made giant strides in cell-phone penetration and usage because for decades we were far behind our neighbors in land line phones. We have become the text messaging nation because other forms of communication were lacking and our relatives might be a two-day boat ride or a two-hour airplane ride away.
The change in the cycle that I have spoken of several times will affect the Philippines also. But as I also said, we raised interest rates when others were still stable or lowering, so once again, the Philippines is ahead of the curve.
As confidence in the government turns negative, money will move into the private sector and into the stock markets including here in the Philippines. The reason the Philippines will not suffer the negative affects is that Filipinos, individually and collectively, do not depend on the government for their health, wealth and survival. That is another reason I am so bullish on the Southeast Asian region.
Winter is coming and the Philippines is ready.
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E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Visit my web site at www.mangunonmarkets.com. Follow me on Twitter
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