Salmat sets up Southeast Asian hub

Hot on the heels of its impressive financial year results, communications provider, Salmat, has officially launched its new facility in Manila, Philippines.

Salmat has been present in the region for almost 15 years, yet it is only within the last 12 months that the company started to focus solely on the Australia New Zealand market. “We had a business supporting the local market for some time which we sold. We’re now focusing on Australia New Zealand,” Salmat CEO, Grant Harrod said.

While some may raise the issue of jobs being taken out of Australia, Harrod (pictured) has noted that these jobs go unfilled in Australia. “Labour shortage issues in Australia are a growth impediment. The fundamental issue is that there are job in Australia that can’t be filled and it’s becoming cost prohibitive. A reason why is Australia isn’t as advanced in web applications as other countries. It’s about giving access to a broader skill pool,” he said

“Given we’ve been there since 1996 we know the market and culture well. It’s one of the most rapidly evolving BPO’s (business process outsourcing) industries in the world. 7% of the Philippines GDP is in BPO activity and it employs around half a million people,” he said.

The new operation hosts Salmat’s contact centre services, computer programming support, digital and web content management, data entry and image processing, creative services, and other high-value IT and outsourcing service for its Australia and New Zealand clients. While the company has 240 employees currently, there is room for another 100.

“A lot of the work we intend to do is IT centric – we have created a cloud-based infrastructure. We purposely made the investment very IT ready. We have plans to expand and for Manila to become our IT hub,” Harrod said.

According to Harrod, the plans for expansion “specifically refers to using infrastructure beyond Australia New Zealand. We’ve already got a facility in Malaysia that speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, English and Malay. We are now providing call centre services with Japanese language skills.”

This article originally appeared on DIRECT.