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A. SORIANO Corp. (Anscor) announced on Monday that a
subsidiary is poised to acquire hospitals and nursing schools to
provide a steady supply of skilled labor ready for deployment in the
country and abroad.
For this year, Anscor is
allotting $20 million in acquisition and other investments, the
funds for which would mostly came from the proceeds of the
company’s divestments of its interests in port operator,
International Container Terminal Services Inc., and call-center
business, E-telecare.
During the company’s annual
stockholders meeting, Andres Soriano 3rd, Anscor president, said its
human resource company, International Quality Manpower Services Inc.
(IQMAN), will buy into a hospital and nursing school in the Visayas
region.
He, however, refused to name the
hospital and school until the transaction is completed.
In its annual report, investing
in hospital and nursing schools is one way for IQMAN to ensure that
the manpower resource company has access to United States-qualified
nurses it can deploy abroad.
“We’re bullish on the
Filipino and try to expand on his knowledge base. And one of the
areas that we feel that there’s opportunity is in the health-care
areas both foreign and domestic, on the education side and the
patient care side,” Soriano said.
He said this would be the first
of the many planned hospital and nursing school acquisitions that
the company would be doing starting this year.
The company’s resorts and
leisure arm plans to buy into Direct Hotels Ltd., an online hotel
reservation system incorporated in the United Kingdom with
operations in the Philippines.
Soriano said the Anscor’s Seven
Seas Resorts and Leisure Inc. would be buying 10 percent of the
reservation system company for $500,000 and the deal would close in
the next few days.
“It’s basically someone would
go online and [the] reservation system gets clients for the hotels
and it directs clients to that particular hotel. So it takes the
load off small hotels for marketing and running their own
reservations,” he said.
The system would do bookings and
reservations for resorts like Amanpulo and El Nido (which are both
owned and operated by Anscor), resort hotels in Boracay and other
small- and medium-sized hotels in the country and abroad.
--Likha C. Cuevas
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