Tommy O’s investment in Cebu’s future

Halfway through my conversation with Cebu City’s Tommy Osmeña, I realized why Tommy recovered miraculously from the same aneurism in the brain that took the life of Wykes Wycoco. He still has unfinished work to do that God wants him to get done.

Tommy is one local official who has managed to combine the politician’s feel for the needs of his people and a corporate executive’s systematic approach and obsession to convert visions to reality. He is a risk taker and has no patience for myopic politicians with bird brains, for those who cannot share his grand vision for Cebu. He’s controversial, even in Cebu where the Osmeña name used to have unmatchable magic. But he sure has leadership.

Some of Tommy’s projects, like the South Reclamation Project (SRP), for which he borrowed 12 billion yen from the Japan Bank for International Cooperation had been stymied by legal challenges from local politicians. Delays from these challenges have cost the City of Cebu at least a billion pesos in financial carrying cost. It seems Cebu’s not immune from too much politics too, the bane of our existence in Imperial Manila.

But the project’s almost done, with the first phases ready for the initial investors to come in. This is why Tommy has renamed the project, South Road Properties, still retaining the initials SRP but now ready to be sold as the primest of prime properties in Cebu today. The 300-hectare area is envisioned to take a mixed development approach, with commercial, tourism, residential and industrial sectors within it.

The SRP, an island off the coast of Cebu’s central business district, was described by one potential Taiwanese locator, as Cebu’s Manhattan. That’s exactly what Tommy has in mind for it. Tommy’s looking for a private sector developer to work on the commercial, residential and tourism sides of SRP to make it one unified and well planned development. He didn’t say it outright but I thought he might have in mind, something like what had been done in converting Rockwell, a former power plant site into an integrated upscale urban redevelopment.

The SRP would be Cebu’s future central business district. A 12-kilometer, four-lane coastal road that leads to the southern portion of the island province goes around it. Aside from having its own water desalination plant, there would be fiber optic cables for reliable broadband connections.

I sat in one meeting he had with a potential investor and he made it clear that aside from the income stream he expects the city to earn from the project, he is looking at generating significant employment for Cebuanos in the city’s less developed south side.

As an aside, I asked Tommy, who in his opinion, are the best local government leaders in the country today. On top of his list is Quezon City Mayor Sonny Belmonte for among other things, his fiscal management of the City’s Treasury that was worse than empty when Sonny inherited it.

Also in Tommy’s list is Bohol Governor Erico Aumentado. Tommy thinks he is one forward looking local official who is able to muster resources from all available sources to spur Bohol’s development. Bohol is one province with so much potential, just waiting for such a local leader to get it on the fast lane.

Then there is of course, Naga City’s famous Mayor Jesse Robredo, the Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for government service in 2000. Tommy is impressed how Robredo is able to use consensus building to unite NGOs and all other parties with the best intentions for his city towards development objectives. This is why, Tommy said, even trapos who reign supreme in the provincial politics of Camarines Sur are unable to touch Robredo.

Oh well... if we had more Tommy Osmeñas, Sonny Belmontes, Erico Aumentados and Jesse Robredos at the local government level, we can ignore the National Government in Imperial Manila.

Call centers

The call center phenomenon has also gotten big in Cebu. According to Joel Mari Yu, managing director of the Cebu Investment and Promotions Center, call centers now employ about 6,000 in Cebu. The big ones, E-telecare, Convergys, Sykes and People Support employ 4,000 of the 6,000. Joel thinks the growth of the IT sector in Cebu may soon be limited by the availability of qualified manpower. He thinks they may be hitting the limits of the available pool of workers pretty soon.

Other than call centers, they also have other types of business process outsourcing or BPO, like medical transcription and computer aided design or CAD. They are doing a lot of CAD, mainly for Japanese companies, he said. One advantage of these IT-based investments in Cebu is the lower turnover rate of staff compared to Manila.

The other big sector on the rise is tourism, which Joel says, has really zoomed up in recent months. But Cebu may hit its maximum soon unless more hotel rooms are constructed. Joel says that to be taken seriously as a tourism destination, a city must have at least 10,000 hotel rooms. Cebu now has 6,000 to 7,000 rooms.

As it is, most hotels in Cebu have very high occupancy rates. During our stay at Mactan Shangri-La, we were told they had a thousand guests, mostly foreigners. And I guess they all paid through the nose, like we did. Joel says they are hoping Henry Sy would finish the hotel project he has mothballed near the SM mall. It was supposed to have been the Cebu Sheraton but was unexplainably shelved even if the structure of the building is almost done.

Joel thinks Cebu can get a lot more results in tourism and quickly too if efforts are concentrated in getting the big tourism concerns in countries like Japan to invest. For instance, he cited the All Nippon or ANA group. It shouldn’t be difficult, he says, to convince them to develop a resort destination in Cebu as good as the Mactan Shangri-La or Plantation Bay.

Once their money’s at stake here, these large tourism companies would do what it takes to bring in the Japanese tourists to their resorts in Cebu. This approach, he said, makes more sense than joining tourism exhibitions or tourism blitzes that address no one in particular in the target countries.

But Joel said his investment office is not involved in tourism development. There are too many people as it is working on it, he said. Hopefully, they get their act together.

Cebu Pacific

Here is the postscript to my experience with Cebu Pacific. My flight home from Cebu was also delayed 30 minutes, not as bad as the one hour 45 minutes delay flying over. The pilot again apologized and used the same excuse, congestion in NAIA as the reason the plane’s turnaround was delayed and affected our flight.

Then again, other members of my family who took the PAL flight scheduled at the same time as my Cebu Pacific flight, 3 p.m., took off on the dot. If the problem is really NAIA congestion, shouldn’t that affect PAL as well? Or is the Manila tower playing favorites and giving Cebu Pacific last priority?

At least the wait at the Mactan International Airport was more tolerable than at the Manila Domestic Terminal. It was a more civilized airport and has enough amenities, including really clean restrooms, for the benefit of passengers. Now I wonder what the NAIA guys are doing with the terminal fee they charge. We certainly didn’t get our money’s worth in service and facilities at Manila Domestic.

It’s not just me that had problems with Cebu Pacific over the holidays. I got an e-mail message from Vic Lorenzo about the same problem of delays. Here is his e-mail: Read your article. Am now at the Cebu airport. Cebu Pacific flight is one hour delayed 5J570 5pm now becomes 6pm hopefully.

Unless Cebu Pacific improves its operations, they should rename the airline to Imperial Manila Pacific. The quality of the present service desecrates the name of Cebu.

Idiot proof

Reader Norbert Goldie contributed this one.

A woman was overheard telling a shop assistant in a large electronics store that she was looking for an ‘idiot-proof’ camera.

The young shop assistant innocently replied: "is it for yourself?"

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]