BEIJING is penciled to deliver over $8.37 billion of investments in industrial park development as part of its program for cooperation with Manila signed during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit last week.
In a program for cooperation, the Philippines and China agreed to focus on promoting six types of industrial parks and developing industries engaged in high-value adding activities. The projects will be located in the regions.
“Both sides could explore to establish industrial parks in developed agglomeration areas, such as the special economic zones under the Philippine Economic Zone Authority, Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority and Clark Development Corp., or within existing special economic zones, which is referred to as the ‘zone in the park’ or ‘sub-zone’ model, with a view to utilize available transportation and infrastructure to achieve rapid industrial agglomeration,” the document read.
“Both sides will focus on developing export-oriented processing and manufacturing industrial parks, which will attract Chinese enterprises to settle and operate,” it added.
Capable Chinese firms are encouraged to undertake large-scale industrial park development projects in the form of joint ventures to fully benefit from this cooperation. Contractual arrangements in the context of public-private partnerships are also supported for industrial park developments.
The six areas for cooperation are processing- and manufacturing-oriented industrial parks; port-neighboring industrial parks; agricultural business and agro-industrial parks; resource-based processing parks; science and technology parks; and city-industry integration parks. The program will be effective until 2022. A mutual consent from both parties is necessary should there be a need to prolong the program.
Among the projects under the program is the $0.65-billion Philippines-China International Techno-Industrial Park, which will cover 990 hectares in Tarlac and Subic Bay. The park is to be operated by China National Machinery Corp.
Also listed is the Philippines-China New Clark City Industrial Park, valued at $1.5 billion, in a 500-hectare area in New Clark City, Pampanga. It is to be managed by China Gezhouba Group International Engineering Co. Ltd.
A $2.6 billion agro-technology park development is also penciled in Santa Ana, Cagayan, and this will take up 1,247 hectares of land area. In the same location, an industrial city development will soon rise with a project cost of $1.3 billion.
All in all, priority projects and those up for review amounted to $8.37 billion. However, most of these projects have yet to find an interested Chinese enterprise.