SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — The crates that leave this Central American nation these days are more likely to be stuffed with microchips and telecom components than the bananas that once represented Costa Rica's plantation economy.
With little fanfare, Costa Rica has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from some of the best-known names in technology, including Intel Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp.
Medical device makers and pharmaceutical companies are sprouting in the tropical heat. And the nation is becoming a hub for call centers and back-office outsourcing.
Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc. recently announced it would cut 600 loan processing jobs in Chatsworth and move some of them to Costa Rica. Palo Alto-based HP plans to nearly triple its business service workforce here to 3,500 workers within two years. The lure: lower costs, an educated, bilingual workforce, political stability, fat tax incentives and its location.
"We're shooting to be the Irish," Roberto Leiton Garro, an executive at Art in Soft, a Costa Rican software company, said of his nation's ambitions to emulate the Celtic Tiger.
Indeed, like Ireland before it, this small nation is leveraging talent and technology to catapult an agrarian economy into the Digital Age. In the process, it is capitalizing on a trend known as "near-sourcing" that has American firms establishing facilities closer to home.
Although Mexico, Nicaragua and other Latin American nations have benefited as well, Costa Rica's focus on tech-related industries has helped it achieve Central America's highest standard of living and surprising stature in the tech world.
It ranks third behind powerhouses India and China as the most competitive offshore destination, according to a 2005 report on outsourcing by two consulting firms. Not bad for a country roughly the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, and whose population of just over 4 million is less than half the size of Los Angeles County's.
When medical device maker MedTech Group Inc. was looking for a low-cost location to put a plant, giants China and India loomed as obvious choices.
But the New Jersey-based manufacturer of surgical tools and other medical products chose Costa Rica, where health science firms such as Baxter International Inc. and Boston Scientific Corp. had already set up shop.
