What happened to Latitude Web Philippines?

Going back to my “what happened to?” series.

Latitude Web Philippines was one of the leading B2B companies back in 2000 headed by CEO Jose Vicente “JV” Colayco. It was jointly owned by Latitude Web (Pte.) Ltd. of Singapore, a unit of investment firm Silkroute Holdings (Pte.) Ltd. of Hong Kong tycoon Richard Li. Latitude Web Philippines and Summit Internet Investments (JG Summit?).

Basically, they’re just making websites for companies and business, with asking prices in the range of hundreds of thousands to millions of pesos per website or project.

Along that line of business were competitors such as K2 Interactive, 2by8, AsiaWorld and Designet. But during that time, even with the internet hype, there were just too few companies willing to shell out that much money for a brochure-type website and there were a lot of shops offering the same pitch. Then, there are still the smallers players and the professional freelancers.

So, what do you get? A highly competitive, price sensitive and diluted web design/development industry. Even the very few ones that are still alive right now couldn’t cope up with all the cut-throat pricing and outsourcing.