Wipro plans to hire more than 900 employees for its 45,000 square-foot Cebu facility, which will handle customer-focused support processes starting the 2nd of January, 2008. The company is also looking at establishing additional centers in other fast-growing cities in the Philippines.

The centre in Cebu will offer an exhaustive range of services to Wipro’s customers. The focus will be both on Voice and Non voice business in the field of Customer Service Support, Technical Support, HR Services, Financial & Accounting and Procurement Services.

The global outsourcing giant chose the Philippines among several other locations due to the availability of qualified talent in the country. According to T.K. Kurien, President, Wipro BPO, “The Philippines is one of the largest English speaking nations with a strong IT orientation and a talent pool of 29 million. This is one location that we definitely want to expand our presence in.”

Wipro’s choice of Cebu as its newest BPO destination highlights the Philippines’ emergence as a leading global outsourced service hub. Earlier this year, investment advisory firm Tholons identified Manila among the Top 5 prime outsourcing destinations, and Cebu as one of the leading emerging global destinations for outsourced processes.

Tholon’s study also revealed that the outsourcers consider process maturity, availability of relevant skills and cost as the top reasons for deciding on the locations for IT and BPO services outsourcing.

“Our business objective is to enable delivery of multi-lingual services to our global customer base. With a strong and robust game plan for the year, we are very clear in announcing Wipro’s arrival towards Global Serviceability, and Philippines is a major milestone in this journey” said Sanjeev Bhatia, Vice President, International Operations, Wipro BPO.

Wipro BPO took a quantum leap in 2002 after acquiring Spectramind which then had 3,000 employees and now employs around 20,000 plus people at all its BPO centers across the globe. In 2007, the Hewitt Survey rated Wipro among the 25 Best Employers in India.

As a part of its global expansion strategy, Wipro has already invested in several overseas centers. In the last nine months alone, Wipro successfully setup global delivery centers in Romania and Shanghai.