Plus 375 Jobs

American software company Lawson is making a huge shift. It will more than double the number of employees in the Philippines, where labor is so much cheaper compared to rates in the U.S. The company, according to Pioneer Press, employs 3,600 people worldwide, and it will soon have almost a fifth of those working in the tropics, rather than cold, cold Minnesota.

St. Paul-based Lawson Software will be transferring between 325 and 375 technical and research-and-development jobs from offices in the United States and Europe to the Philippines, where it has created a technical support center in Manila.

The jobs will be transferred over an 18-month period, ending in 2008. . . . But the shift will benefit the Philippines, where Lawson had a minimal presence just a year ago. It now has 250 employees there, and that number will grow as Lawson makes Manila a third research-and-development center, along with St. Paul and Stockholm, Blake said.

Moving software-development jobs overseas has been a longstanding trend in the industry, and Lawson chose the Philippines because better-known centers of software offshore outsourcing like India have become overpriced, Blake said.

Many of the jobs that technical staff used to have to do on-site, such as installing and fixing business software, can now be done remotely, and those are the kinds of jobs that are moving to Manila, Blake said.

Here's StarTribune.com's take on the move:

Not only are salaries in Manila a fraction of those in St. Paul, where Lawson has its headquarters, they're lower than those in India, where many U.S. companies have outsourced their technology work and where Lawson has outsourced about 100 jobs, the company said.

"India is getting to the point where it's beginning to price itself out of the market," said Terry Blake, a spokesman for Lawson, which develops corporate software for enterprises as diverse as health care, financial services and government. That makes locating employees in the Philippines "very attractive."

Manila will become one of three centers where Lawson does software research and development and provides over-the-phone technical assistance. The other two centers are in St. Paul and Stockholm, Sweden, the former headquarters of Intentia, which Lawson acquired last year for $480 million.