The country’s main investment promotion agency, the Board of Investments (BOI), has exceeded its target of increasing new project approvals by 7 percent in 2016, notching a 20.4-percent growth to P441.8 billion.
In a statement, the BOI reported this was the second-highest level based on value since 2000. The investment haul in 2013 remains as the record year for the BOI at P466 billion.
Trade Secretary Ramon M. Lopez credits this achievement to the new administration’s numerous investment road shows and state visits undertaken in the last four months. “With the investment missions that we are doing, investors have gained greater awareness of the Philippines’s strong and growing economy,” Lopez noted in a statement.
President Duterte’s successive international trips with trade and investment-promotion components were in Indonesia, Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia and Singapore.
The total investment approvals in 2016 were generated from 377 projects and are expected to create about 67,615 new jobs when these new projects become fully operational. The investments registered were mainly from local companies, taking an 80-percent share, or P352.5 billion. The rest of the 20 percent, meanwhile, came from committed investments of foreign firms amounting to P89.3 billion.
But the foreign-investment pledges this year are higher by 50 percent compared to the P59.5 billion in 2015. Per sector, power industries took the lion’s share of investment pledges with (P209.9 billion), followed by real-estate activities (P65.8 billion), construction (P62.3 billion) manufacturing (P49 billion), and transportation and storage (P23.4 billion).
Investments in construction and manufacturing clocked in the fastest growth year-on-year, with growth rates reaching 644.8 percent and 81.3 percent, respectively.
On the basis of employment potential, the real-estate sector is seen to generate the most number of employment with 32,055, followed by the manufacturing sector, which is expected to provide fresh jobs and income to 17,067 Filipinos.