Biz Buzz: Expanding Misibis Bay

Negative travel advisories notwithstanding, Chinese tourists are still flocking to the Philippines’ “hot” tourist destinations.

This Chinese New Year, for instance, hundreds of tourists from Guangzhou, China, have found creative ways of skirting travel restrictions just to spend the long Chinese holidays in Misibis Bay, Albay. Although group visa issuances are not endorsed by the Chinese tourism bureau, free itinerary travelers, their families and friends have found “creative” ways of entering the Philippines via Hong Kong or Macau, then Manila, before finally reaching Albay.

These tourists, we are told, are not only after the warm sun, glorious beaches and amazing seafood but the plush amenities and hospitable service for which Bicolanos, and Filipinos in general, are known for.

Albay tourism officials say this is the third wave of Chinese tourists which began in 2014 through the combined efforts of the local governments of Albay and Legazpi City, the Bureau of Immigration and the management of Misibis Bay.

With the resumption of direct charter flights between Legazpi and Guangzhou and Xiamen, China, even more tourists from the Chinese mainland are expected to get a taste and experience the many “hot” attractions Bicolandia has to offer.

Because of bullish tourism prospects, Misibis Bay owner Elizaldy “Zaldy” Co is reportedly embarking on an aggressive expansion plan of 200 additional rooms annually for the next five years, with total investments reaching an estimated P2.5-billion.–Daxim L. Lucas

Satellite success

It could easily be one of the best administrative initiatives rolled out by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2014. Apart from making the processing of official documents more convenient for the public, the new satellite office opened by the corporate watchdog in Ali Mall Cubao last November has turned out to be a profitable proposition.

Manned by only four people in a modest office in a busy shopping mall that caters to the mass market, the SEC’s satellite unit is expected to post an annual gross income of P26.5 million this year, which means it will earn as much as a typical small town. A fourth-class municipality in this country earns an average annual income of P25 million to P35 million.

Three months since its launch, the SEC reported that the inaugural satellite office had pre-processed over 700 documentary requests. It’s now earning an average P2.2 million in gross income, mostly in filing and other fees, per month (which supports the full-year projection.) The new unit does not necessarily eat up business processed at the main headquarters in Ortigas, which SEC folks are raring to vacate at the soonest time possible, because the pie is growing and the need to decongest head office foot traffic is paramount.

SEC chair Teresita Herbosa stresses that this satellite office offers simplified company registration services such as verification of proposed corporate names and pre-processing of registration applications.  For those whose companies are already registered and existing, the office can handle pre-processing of amendment applications as well as monitoring and receiving of reportorial requirements.

Open on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., the satellite office in Ali Mall is the first in a chain of similar satellite offices to be rolled out by the SEC as part of efforts to make doing business easy in this country.

For the whole of 2014, the SEC—regulator of about 870,000 corporations and other entities—processed the incorporation of 24,000 new firms last year. In the past three years, its collections averaged P3 billion a year at an annual operating budget of P400 million and about 385 employees.  Based on the Makati Business Club’s 2014 survey, the SEC was the fifth best-performing national agency.

As earlier indicated, expect more of these mall-based satellite offices to be unveiled soon.–Doris Dumlao

Heating up

The Philippine tech startup scene is heating up as entrepreneurs here are turning to software solutions to help address common problems.

One of the more promising startups is Makati City-based Kalibrr, a cloud-based platform that uses profile matching and online assessments to streamline the recruitment and job seeking process altogether.

Kalibrr does this in a smarter and faster way than ever before—not to mention in a more elegant fashion (goodbye to those endless junk e-mails offering jobs we never really wanted).

But don’t take our word for it.

The startup’s co-founders, CEO Paul Rivera and COO Dexter Ligot-Gordon, both University of California, Berkeley-educated Filipino-Americans, have sold their dream to a slew of investors, including some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network.

Kalibrr, also the first Filipino startup accepted into Silicon Valley-based accelerator Y-Combinator, is also backed by Globe Telecom’s Kickstart Ventures.

Kalibrr has raised about $2 million so far (that’s among the biggest raised by a homegrown tech startup) and its founders told Biz Buzz they were embarking on a new “aggressive” funding round ahead of their commercial launch in the second quarter of this year.

The platform is in the Beta testing phase, although it has already signed up more than 1,500 companies and has helped over 1,000 people find jobs.

Some observers looking into this sector are wondering if Kalibrr or other tech startups can pull off another IPO hit like Xurpas Inc., led by its CEO Nico “Nix” Nolledo (himself an early Kalibrr investor), did last year.

We certainly hope so. It’s about time the Filipino entrepreneur got the same recognition many of our professionals have secured worldwide.–Miguel Camus

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