I was just called by a financial journalist based in the City. She wanted to ask me about the news that JP Morgan plans to scale up its  operations in the Philippines from around 5,000 people to 8,000 – quite an increase.

As so often happens when someone calls asking for an off-the-cuff comment, I had not read the news myself and I was sitting on a train from London to Nottingham with no access to the internet, other than through the tiny screen on my phone. So I gave some general comments on the situation in the Philippines and why a company like JP Morgan might want to invest further in the region.

It is clear to me that something interesting has developed in the marketplace, where everyone is usually comparing the relative merits of one country compared to another – even though these comparisons are usually too simplistic to be of much use. The thing is – and whisper this – everyone seems to have finally stopped comparing India to China.

I had a meeting earlier this week with some representatives of the Suzhou industrial park in China (an industrial park that is 288 square km!) and I mentioned this to them. They seemed to be quite upset, as I was implying that China is potentially slipping off the radar of western buyers interested in knowledge-based services. Then they slipped into the same mistake that everyone seems to make when promoting their region, trotting out statistics on tax breaks, office space, the graduate population, the number of golf courses, and just about everything except the weather and attractiveness of local women - though believe me, some investment agencies have actually spun that line with me.

It should be fairly obvious why JP Morgan is expanding in the Philippines. They have a considerable operation there already and the location offers everything a foreign investor might want – all those great things the Chinese were telling me about. So, with all those benefits and an incumbent operation, it is not likely that JP Morgan would hire 3,000 people in another location unless it was for a reason such as business continuity management.

I don’t want to sound flippant, but most senior executives I meet and talk to are really much more focused on the capabilities of partner companies, regardless of where that company is registered.

Can they do the job? I don’t care if they are based in California, Cornwall, or Korea. Yes, when companies are planning an offshore captive facility they will need to examine the fundamentals of that region, but I would argue that outsourcing is a lot more common than offshoring and creating a major captive for services.

Companies offering IT or IT-enabled services from regions such as China and the Philippines might want to work harder at developing their own reputation as a company, rather than supporting government-led initiatives and trade missions that do little more than present a sea of statistics and images of golf courses. I hate golf anyway. When someone uses a golf course as a way of selling a location to me it just makes me think of Bruce Forsyth in funny trousers. Not an attractive thought, even if he does deserve to be knighted for services to tap dancing and games shows.

The India and China debate is a serious point though. Go back a couple of years and every analyst and conference debate was about the question of who is going to win the outsourcing race – India or China? Today, the environment is much more open and it is clear that Chinese technology service firms are opening up to exports, but they are still really busy with the booming domestic market. Indian firms have just got better and better, but it is new players in countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam that are really going to be making the news in Asia.