Gazing down at the bustle of Manila from the upper floors of a skyscraper late one evening, it’s easy to feel like you are near the center of one of the great industrial transitions of the past few hundred years. This is the heartland of outsourcing, a practice that’s held costs down for some of the world’s biggest corporations — and helped make the Philippines one of Asia’s top performing economies over the last decade.

Like all great transformations, the shift has brought tensions and displacement alongside considerable bounty. It’s also generated a growing number of imitators eager for a slice of the expanding trade in services. While headlines frequently, and often simplistically, proclaim the demise of free exchange in merchandise and the cantonment of investment along national-security lines, transactions in services are doing better than fine. Relative newcomers, such as South Africa and Poland, hold considerable attraction. The Philippines needs to take great care that the apex of its success doesn’t presage a decline. That would be a major setback for a nation that missed the big manufacturing supply-chain boom of the 1980s and 1990s that benefited neighbors like Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore.

QOSHE - Disruptors Are Coming for an Outsourcing Superpower - Daniel Moss
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Disruptors Are Coming for an Outsourcing Superpower

10 1
05.04.2024

Gazing down at the bustle of Manila from the upper floors of a skyscraper late one evening, it’s easy to feel like you are near the center of one of the great industrial transitions of the past few hundred years. This is the heartland of outsourcing, a practice that’s held costs down for some of the world’s........

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