Not
No reason in particular, it's just a wild place in my opinion. If someone is after you for whatever reason, they can easily bribe people working at the airport. It's just that kind of place. It's more of a peace of mind thing, I can withstand corruption, but it reaches eye-watering levels in PH.
Also, the problem with Filipino workers is that a lot of them just run off after some time. It is relatively hard finding high-quality workers, and if you do find them, they are also always at risk of leaving out of nowhere. If you are looking for customer service employees, keep in mind that they can just be MIA for weeks or months. It's a common issue there. Since it is still a very conservative society, the girls all want to get married ASAP which means they will quit their job. I've even seen girls join the church to become a nun.
A lot of Filipino don't even have a bank account, so you have to get cash and pay them, and you have to sort out the bills. The entire place is a headache in my opinion, plus the Western “entrepreneurs” in some cities are mostly scammers (the French there are infamous) and the food is not the best, especially not for Asian standards. If you are into spices forget about them, you will live in a country that tries its best to be like America and being able to afford McDonald's is a token of prestige.
If you are purely offshore, I don't know and would not be able to comment on that, but I think there are better options out there. I believe PH is also on a sizeable amount of blacklists, but since you are Taiwanese, I am out of scope here.
Not sure where you operated a business or have lived, but I wouldn't portray Philippines that negative. Sure there is a lot of corruption (which can also be sometimes beneficial) and I wouldn't trust doing business with a Filipino, but as employees with the right setup and culture, you can run a good business with competent people.
Filipinos easily quit their job and going AWOL is common practice in the BPO industry, but with the right corporate culture, setup and the right people in key positions those situations almost never happen.
We have been through all of them, locals trying to hijack the business, awol, people trying to destroy your business, Dole (labor department) complaints.
Setting up a business in any country comes with different challenges and key is to understand the culture and their priorities. Filipinos are family oriented and trust sometimes more their emotions than facts, whether you like that or not. If you cant put these values in your local corporate culture you will keep facing challenges. You don't have to do this yourself, you let some people you can trust do that.
You can as anywhere decide to setup a business and not to pay taxes or employ legally, it depends how you want to conduct business and the risks you would like to take. If you are not in the Philippines there is little risk with the exception some employees run away. But if you decide to reside in the Philippines and want to avoid getting black listed, as well set up business accounts you better just follow the rules, pay the contributions and some limited taxes and keep your profits offshore in Hong Kong, Singapore, US. If people are not on the payroll and don't have social security contributions paid or other benefits, they will only work for you for the money and will feel little affiliation with the company. Even they have limited resources and money is important, as soon as they feel mistreated in a company without established, culture they will just disappear with the company laptop or extort money by threatening to report you to Dole.
Philippines is a good country to setup and offcide your back office operations, but you will need to be on the ground and need time to understand their values, and probably go first through a few bad experiences.
For offshore operations I doubt this is the right country, that's UAE, HK, Singapore,..
So by "skilled people" we are talking about cheap wage labor slaves?
Not really. You can find highy educated accounting people, engineers, IT (though challenging to find good ones), marketing, managers, HR.. and ofcourse customer service
You will have to pay them a decent salary (manager level can be 1600+ usd a month) and it takes some time to recruit the right people. Although all is relative, our current staff in Philippines are more skilled than those we employed in Europe, China,..
Definitely you can find high educated, skilled people in Metro Manila and sometimes Cebu.
