Musson breaks ground in Jamaica for US$ 30M Tech Park
-5,000 jobs promised
(Jamaica Observer) Stanley Motta Ltd, subsidiary of the Musson Group, is investing US$30 million in an integrated Tech Campus at 58 Half-Way-Tree Road in Kingston.
The location is being constructed to predominantly house business processing outsourcing (BPO) companies. Associated services of the facility will include a day-care centre, ATM and financial services, health care and food service companies.
Stanley Motta, which on Thursday broke ground for the development that stretches across 236,000 square feet of land, touts the facility as the largest Tech Park in the Caribbean. Dubbed 58HWT, the new construction adds to investment of more than US$100 million by the Musson Group over the last two years.
Stanley Motta has already signed off on a lease arrangement with BPO company Alorica, which provides global service in the communications, financial services, health care, hospitality, retail, and technology industries.
Currently Alorica employs 1,000 agents for its operation in Portmore, St Catherine. It plans to add another 5,000 employees for its new site in Kingston.
“My plan to go live is in the first or second week of December. We will start in the areas of technology, customer service and sales with about 1,500 to 2,000 agents by the end of the first quarter 2018,” Jamaica Country Lead Gilberto Gianareas told the Jamaica Observer.
He added that the company is already in dialogue with the HEART Trust/ NTA to host 20 graduates from its call centre training course at the Portmore location.
Alorica — which currently operates centres in Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Antigua, Panama, Brazil, and Uraguay — hopes to make Jamaica its flagship site for the region. Gianareas also reckons that Jamaica has the potential to generate big business from email and chat support services.
“I don’t think it’s seen that way yet, but this will be a world-class facility for the BPO industry,” he told the Caribbean Business
Report.
“I think after we grow and we see the business and the industry mature a little, then we can start bringing other kinds of business here. One of the things that I want to grow here is email and chat. By having English-speaking agents we can definitely grow a lot more in the email and chat business, which is becoming a big thing in the BPO industry,” Gianareas continued.