One of the largest ICT companies in the world based in the Philippines is keen to set up one of their operational centres in Sri Lanka.
This is subsequent to the new shifts of business models emerging after the pandemic where large global companies want to stop their concentration in one country, Sri Lanka has a major opportunity to attract them, said Chairman of John Keells, Krishan Balendra at the Ceylon Chamber organised Economic Summit.
This would be a similar operation to HCL Technologies of India where they opened its new facility at Cinnamon Life complex. HCL continues to expand and now they want to further increase its white collar employees to 5,000 in less than five years.”
Commenting on other future growth areas for Sri Lanka he said that tourism would be another major thrust sector to Sri Lanka. “with the C-19 pandemic tourists prefer short haul travel and with the huge and growing Indian middle classes Sri Lanka can be a key market for them.”
Before the pandemic China outbound travel grew from 20 million to 150 million and most of this was for neighbouring countries. This could be repeated and Sri Lanka could have an avalanche of Indian tourists in the future.”
Tourism is recovering and Maldives which opened before most of the other countries for tourists are back to normal and are doing even better than the pre pandemic era.”
He also opined that with the pandemic some of the global manufacturing is moving out of China as a lot of customers in the supply chain want to de-risk. The beneficiaries from these are India and Bangladesh. Vietnam too have seen this one option but companies have found out that South Asian regions are cheaper hence the shift now towards South Asia.
“Also there is a globe shift of economic activity towards Asia and India today is rated as the fastest growing large economy in the world.
Sri Lanka too could reap opportunity for logistics services from this shift due to its superior global location as Colombo port is considered a major transshipment hub for South Asia. Colombo Port too kept on adding transshipment volume and with the new terminal in 2013 Port increased its capacity by 50%. “However in five years this capacity was absorbed, clearly reinforcing the fact that there is demand for Colombo Port.”
Today major global shipping lines ‘order books’ are for ultra large ships that need deep water ports. Here again Colombo Port’s new facilities in East, West and South Terminals having natural depth of around 18 to 20 meters’ would be at a major advantage to attract future growing logistics transshipments and also could play the ‘Hub ports’ role.”
In addition to these there are tremendous opportunities in the related service sector such as bunkering and refilling for ships. With the Colombo Port City new legal framework now in place other shipping related services like maritime financing, marine insurance and arbitration could take place.
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