Movie theatre out as IBEX Global chooses Portmore for new base
Mount Royal Estate development company managing director, Ransford White, has achieved his dream of securing a Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) client to occupy space that was once slated for a new movie theatre, but which failed to attract a concessionaire.
IBEX Global now occupies the 10,000 square feet of space in Portmore Pines Plaza in St Catherine — a development of Mount Royal — once slated for moviegoers.
In 2011, White, who owns the triple-phase Portmore Pines Plaza, invested $300 million in the project. The community does not have a cinema. However, no one offered to run the facility on favourable terms and the owner turned to wooing the BPO community.
Three floors comprising 10,000 square feet of space are now being used by Ibex-Global as its new operations hub, with a representative of White confirming on Wednesday that the company is already in operation.
The building has been painted in signature colours and signage.
IBEX Global which up until press time did not respond to queries from the Jamaica Observer, disclosed last year in an interview with Nearshore Americas that it had relocated part of its operations in India to Jamaica.
Headquartered in Washington DC, it said then that it had plans to expand centres in Kingston to three by April 2016. The company also expanded to Nearshore Nicaragua during the period.
CEO Bob Dechant told Nearshore that Jamaica is the third largest English-speaking population in the Western Hemisphere. “You can really scale a lot of English for your clients that are looking to balance their portfolios of nearshore, onshore and offshore. It offers high-volume English play,” Dechant added.
Ibex said in another news release that it is planning to include value-added services including data management and analytics.
On its website, the company said the majority of its clients are corporations that outsource some or all of their contact centre operations.
“Over 90 per cent of the Group’s revenues derive from contact centre market segments that involve extensive agent training, are essential to the Group’s clients’ ongoing corporate performance, and can be difficult for clients to replace. Such segments include inbound customer support, inbound technical assistance, and inbound sales order entry,” it noted.
IBEX Global says it delivers “onshore, near shore and offshore solutions” in five countries, across 18 call centres employing more than 15,000 customer service professionals.
At the end of its 2015 financial year (end of June), IBEX Global’s revenues stood at US$230 million, a jump of 30 per cent from the previous period, the company indicates in a release on its website.