THE Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza), which seeks to grow its investment pledges by 6 percent this year, approved P3.48 billion worth of projects in January.
In a statement on Thursday, the regulator of ecozones said that the recent approvals include nine new and expansion projects.
These are expected to contribute annual export sales of $56.09 million and an expected 732 direct employment.
“Despite the pandemic slowing us down for the last two years, Peza is grateful for the unceasing support of our locators and partner investors. Now that the Philippines is attaining herd immunity and reopening our economy, we in Peza continue to thrive in attracting more foreign direct investments [FDI] to the country,” Peza Director General Charito Plaza said.
Last year, Peza greenlighted P69.301 billion worth of investments, which are estimated to generate $2.128-billion annual export sales and over 35,000 direct employment.
Bulk or P25.509 billion of the approved investments in 2021 were for the manufacturing industry.
Investments coming from the information technology sector last year amounted to P7.322 billion; tourism, P2.058 billion; and export enterprises engaged in technical testing and analysis, installation of system for factory automation, technical support, and quality control, P545.019 million.
Plaza said that Japan is the country’s top investor, accounting for 21.72 percent of the total projects.
Total investments from Japanese investors grew threefold to P22.87 billion last year from P7.881 billion in 2020.
“Aside from Japan, majority of our investments are from South Korea, India, Hong Kong, and China. We also gained investments from western countries such as Germany, Austria, the United States of America, Denmark, France, and Canada,” Plaza added.
Meanwhile, the ecozone regulator saw its export income rise by 14 percent to $63.06 billion and employment boost by nearly 14 percent to 1.78 million workers.
This month, Peza revived its call for a 100-percent work-from-home (WFH) arrangement for the information technology-business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) companies without reducing their fiscal incentives.
The regulator asked the Fiscal Incentives Review Board (FIRB) anew to approve a policy allowing IT-BPO firms to operate under a WFH scheme without the requirement of 10-percent onsite capacity until September 12.
Earlier, the FIRB approved the extension until March 31, 2022 of WFH arrangements for up to 90 percent of the employees in the IT-BPO sector amid the pandemic.
The investment promotion agency (IPA) is basing its request on a provision of the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises (CREATE) Act, particularly Rule 23 entitled Temporary Measures for Exceptional Circumstances.
Such provision allows IPA to implement temporary measures, upon approval of the FIRB, that can help the recovery of registered business enterprises (RBE) from exceptional circumstances, including pandemic, epidemic, war, armed conflict, state of national health emergency, outbreak of diseases, international or regional financial crisis, major disaster such as volcanic eruption, earthquake and super typhoon, or analogous circumstances.