Pinoy-Aussie execs in Australia

By Margie Quimpo-Espino
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: October 01, 2008

THINK OFW AND THE USUAL image that comes to mind is a Filipina working as a DH or domestic helper abroad or a Filipino seaman plying the different oceans and seas.
Not known to many is the big segment of Filipinos working as professionals overseas making waves in their current countries of residence.

The Inquirer recently got to know two such Filipinos in Australia who are occupying top positions in the land down under.

Beyond the Australian dream

Millie Telan was a young accountant who applied for migration to Australia in the early 1980s.

She says some friends had applied for migration and were rejected so they urged her to try. She was accepted.

“I did not know anything about Australia when I came,” she recalls.

Some 25 years later, Millie is a partner in a mid-sized Australian law firm, Thomson Playford Cutlers. Her field of expertise is tax law, one of the most complex legal areas, not just in Australia but the world.

Millie got her break courtesy of a client she had while still employed in a law firm in Manila. She was with the finance department then and the client, who was based in Australia, told her to look him up if she ever came to Sydney.

She arrived in Sydney on a Sunday and immediately rang her client the next day to take him up on his offer. Right there and then, he asked her: “When can you start?”

A workaholic with a passion to learn, Millie pursued a Masters of Commerce in Legal Studies and Tax from the University of New South Wales. She was able to get credits for some of her MBA courses at the Ateneo, but because she was studying part time, it took her six years to finish the program.

“I had a good employer. He allowed me two afternoons a week to go to the university,” she says.

Not content with her postgraduate degree, she pursued a Bachelor of Laws in the same university, also on a part-time basis.

On top of her studies, she worked out five times a week.

“With my type of work, you sit and read. There is no physical activity. A lot of exercise kept me fit and sane,” she explains.

Millie, however, downplays her achievements even if today, she is the only Asian partner in her law firm. She is also the first female president of the Australia-Philippines Business Council Inc., an association aimed at helping firms or businessmen do business in the two countries.

She did not want to delve too much into difficulties she experienced as an Asian building a career in a foreign land. She simply says that hard work helps.

She cites, “Australians are frank. You have to understand the differences in the culture.”

While many Australians are still working on their Australian dream, Millie has already achieved it. Still single, she lives in a 660-square-meter home in one of the expensive areas of Sydney, plus rents out a smaller home.

Still, she takes the bus or the train to go to work and to meetings.

And like many Filipinos who spent their careers in foreign lands, she hopes to retire in her hometown in Isabela.

Seeking investments in the Philippines

Eduardo Alcordo is a Filipino-Australian investment banker – complete with suspenders and pin-stripe suit with his initials embroidered on his shirt – looking to invest in energy in the Philippines.

He is a director of First Pacific Capital Underwriters Pty Ltd., an Australian investment-banking firm, with holdings in China and the Philippines that he set up in 1989 with Australian investors.

He studied high school in the Philippines and elementary education at the Jose Abad Santos Memorial School. He lived with relatives while in the United States.

He spent a couple of college years at the University of the Philippines but eventually went to Australia because “you get high quality education but cheaper” than in the United States. Graduate school for his MBA, however, found him back in the United States.

He gave Wall Street a try after his MBA but Australia beckoned. It was compelling to return to Australia, he says, citing the opportunities that came more often in the continent than in New York.

He jokes that in Australia, with $500 million, you can move the market by one to two percent. In Wall Street, he says, you may have $1 billion and you will hardly make a dent.

First Pacific, which has about eight power plants under contract, was one of the bidders for National Transmission Co., which owns and operates the transmission lines in the country. The firm qualified up to the second round of bidding but decided not to pursue it.

Alcordo did not say why, but says: “You bid at your own risk but the major barrier to the cost of doing business is if the project is not awarded.”

Although, he acknowledges the difficulties of doing business in the Philippines, no different from the usual complaints of investors—bureaucracy, uncertain policies and directions—Alcordo says, “the Philippine experience is not all that bad. There are risks but there are returns. We see it as an expensive place to get into but the returns are good.”

First Pacific Capital recently set up a biomass power plant in Queensland, Australia. He says that this is the first venture into indigenous fuel use and he says there are plans to put up a similar plant in the Philippines.

“The issue is fuel sustainability. What we’re looking at in the Philippines is transmission and fuel,” he says, “If you locate the plant to the user, you have less use for transmissions. We are also mindful of the indigenous fuel the country has, such as coconut.”

Alcordo admits security remains an issue facing investors doing business in the Philippines.

“What is most likely to happen is you have private firms riding at the back of multilateral lending agencies investing in the country so that you have “governments fronting if something goes wrong,” he says.

But he remains bullish about opportunities in the Philippines. And with First Pacific taking on the symbol of the sea horse, which means “in troubled times the sea horse will float,” it is now the best time to go to the Philippines.

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The author was invited to Australia by its Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under its International Media Visitors Program last Sept. 14-20.