DAVAO CITY — Megaworld Corp. is in discussions with offshore gaming operators who have expressed interest in locating at the Davao Finance Center, which is targeted to open within the first half of this year.

“Davao is one of the key cities that they are looking into,” Megaworld Senior Vice-President Jericho P. Gotold media here Thursday.

The 14-storey Davao Finance Center, the first building that will be completed within the company’s Davao Park District township project, will have 26,000 square meters of office space that is positioned for licensed Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators (POGO) and business process outsources (BPO) companies.

The POGO program, with licenses issued by the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., was launched in 2016.

For BPOs, Mr. Go said three to five companies have already expressed their intent to lease space at the center.

“Now that the building is ready… we know that BPOs both in Davao and other parts of the Philippines are very interested to start operating here,” he said.

The finance center has two lobbies, one for the “low zone” and the other for the “high zone,” each with exclusive elevator access.

Mr. Go said apart from efficient foot traffic management, the separate access points are also intended to address cultural “challenges.”

“Ideally, when you entertain BPO and POGO (in one building), they would have separate and exclusive access. For a basic reason, when you talk about POGO, these are Chinese nationals and more often than not they don’t speak Tagalog so in order to anticipate possibilities that there might be some challenges facing both Filipino and Chinese, we created two separate lobbies,” he said.

The Davao Park District would be among Megaworld’s first sites for its iTownship concept, wherein “smart” technology would be a salient feature in all the facilities.

“This (Davao Finance Center) will become one, if not the most, technological advanced office tower in Mindanao,” Mr. Go said. — Maya M. Padillo

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR