Philippine and Scandinavian IT Services continues to expand its markets in spite of the economic downturn. The company which markets it products abroad from their website at www.makeITaffordable.com, has recently closed contracts for mainly B2B websites in both Denmark, France, USA, Malaysia, and is presently also working on regional sites for several ASEAN countries.

Where many web-development companies both locally and especially in the overseas markets are struggling with very high costs and a sluggish demand, Philscan.com started operations when the IT downturn had already started, and therefore structured its operation to be able to survive and compete in the toughest environment. This is now starting to pay off, and also local Philippine and other Asian companies in need of a website or an upgrade of their 1st generation sites to more dynamic and easily adjustable sites are starting to discover the unique combination of Scandinavian design and quality assurance coupled with Philippine IT expertise at local price levels.

President and CEO of Philscan.com, Per Stangegaard believes that there are very big possibilities for Philippine IT services overseas, provided they partner up with foreign know-how in the individual markets. “There is a natural skepticism against outsourcing to unknown IT companies in foreign countries, and the piles of offers from India, Eastern Europe and unfortunately also the Philippines, are being totally ignored, unless they are presented “live” by nationals of those countries and with their own presence and control in the country of production.”

“Our advantage is really that we have joined forces. If a foreign company is to order a website, they need to be assured of at least an initial visit by a person they feel they can trust. The subsequent communication cannot only be done by email or phone, and to this end our Online Project Administration software (OnPAS ®) has proven extremely important. – This is even more important for the customers to whom we offer our programming and outsourcing services whereby our programmers work on project or hourly basis directly under a project manager abroad.”

Per Stangegaard adds, “We believe that outsourcing will be more and more common in the future, but there is no doubt that the key factors are quality, cost-control, fluent communication as well as market presence and market understanding. We could probably expand our sales quite considerably if we put in more money and marketing, but at the present time we choose to grow only as fast as new business income allows, and instead of investing in own sales representations, we partner up with resellers in each market. If at a later stage a venture capital company should show interest in Philscan.com we believe that we would stick to these policies, but naturally it would help us market our software products faster. We are not really looking at that option in the present market conditions though.”