To meet international markets for its Philippine operations, Salmat, an Australian Business Process outsourcing firm, has marked the company's expansion into higher-value services through putting up an 800-seat facility at McKinley Hill in Taguig City.

This is the company's first major investment outside of its home country.

Philip Hadcroft, Salmat general manager of strategy, said that the company had been in the country since 1996, but it was doing mostly transactional services that served only the Philippine market.

But this time, they are moving to next level. McKinley Hill center site would mainly serve accounts from Australia and New Zealand over the next three years, split evenly between voice and non-voice services.

The McKinley Hill center will extend existing statement processing services to call center, computer programming, Web content management, data entry and a range of IT-enabled services.

At present the new site is operating with 100 employees and panning to grow 800 over the next three years that would provide more job opportunities among Filipinos. [via business.inquirer.net]