EasyCall, US firm tie up for call center venture

Easycall Communications Phils. Inc. (ECPI) will form a 50-50 joint venture with the US-based Centralized Marketing Co. for a call center business that would focus on high-margin accounts from clients abroad.

The former paging operator said its board approved last week the partnership with CMC or its wholly-owned Philippine holding company in line with its new corporate focus on the contact center business geared toward the foreign market.

Under the terms of the deal, a new company will be formed to serve as the corporate vehicle of the joint venture, with both companies to initially contribute $500,000 each, or a total capital of $1 million, and will make equal contributions to fund the requirements of the new company.

ECPI president Socorro Niro said CMC is a multi-awarded call center outsourcing company from the US, known for providing high quality customer service and telemarketing services to its high-end and quality-conscious corporate customers.

Highly regarded in the industry for its training modules, CMC currently has a 250-seat call center operation in the US and the joint venture with ECPI is in line with its plan to expand operations overseas, particularly the Philippines, Niro added.

"The joint venture will accelerate ECPI’s entry and access to the huge foreign call center market initially focusing on the US market. The agreement also provided for technology transfer from CMC to ECPI covering best practices in call center operations, training modules and other areas for technology collaboration," Niro said.

In a related move, the ECPI board approved a P5-million investment in Iaspire.Net (Phils.) Inc. representing about 25-percent equity participation. Iaspire is affiliated with Iaspire Singapore, which has been very successful in providing ASP (application service provider) and managed services to corporate clients in Singapore.

Niro said the investment will help enhance and increase the utilization of ECPI’s data center facility and Internet infrastructure and will subsequently contribute to higher revenues for the company.

To support this new investments and the working capital requirements of the company, the ECPI board also approved the issuance of an additional 50 million shares at P1 par value which will be fully subscribed by Global E-Business Solutions Inc. (GEBSI), the new strategic investor of ECPI and is an affiliate of the Delgado group’s Transnational Diversified Group (TBG).

In the first quarter of the year, ECPI incurred a P20-million loss, a 30-percent decline from a net loss of P28.3 million in the same period a year ago. The company said this was attributed to the continuing cost rationalization program being undertaken such as the closure of its provincial paging sites and write-down of paging-related assets.

With the substantial decline in its paging revenues, ECPI now derives 42 percent of its revenues from call center operations while a significant share (17 percent) is generated by the Internet service business.