[ Manila Bulletin Online ] January 14, 2009
By BERNIE CAHILES-MAGKILAT
Despite threats of continuing layoffs of workers and slowdown in economic activities in the country’s economic zones, the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) has remained upbeat targeting investments inflow to increase this year by 10 percent, exports by 5 percent and employment by 5 percent over last year’s.
PEZA director-general Lilia B. De Lima said at yesterday’s Bulong Pulungan forum that layoff of workers is expected to continue this year but not as much as last year where 3,000 ecozone workers lost their jobs mostly from electronics and garment exporting firms.
"We are upbeat this year because in a crunch companies will seek low cost but high productivity for their industrial redeployment," De Lima said.
"I don’t want a flat rate but don’t be surprised if we double our growth targets for the year," De Lima said.
De Lima anchored their upbeat economic projections on new prospects for new investment areas that would offset the losses from the manufacturing sector. These new investment areas are tourism ecozones, medical tourism special ecozones, retirement special economic ecozones and agro-industrial ecozones.
"We have to create new investment areas because we do not know when electronics become robust again," he said.
De Lima even said that they opened 2009 with a good sign as serious interests from these new sectors poured in. She, however, refused to give details for fear these might jeopardize ongoing relocation plans into the country.
De Lima was particularly positive on the agro-industrial ecozone, which she said, has already attracted two Korean investors.
On top of the new sectors, De Lima said that the IT services sector continued to be robust as well as investments in the shipbuilding industry.
"Opportunities under this global financial meltdown are expected to be created in Asia and we are Asia," De Lima said.
She noted that even with the global crisis that started hitting in the third quarter last year causing the retrenchment of workers, PEZA’s total number of workers still managed to increase by 2.52 percent to 608,057 from 593,108 in 2007.
PEZA also finished 2008 with total investments of P154.8 billion exceeding 2007’s P133.7 billion total investments haul by 15 percent as the number of projects went up 18.20 percent to 513 from 434 in 2007.
The only negative in their performance is the exports figure, which slightly declined by .88 percent to .527 billion from $ 40.889 billion in 2007.
De Lima also noted that industrial peace in the ecozone has been maintained over the years. Last year, no one of the 1,955 operating enterprises was hit by a labor strike. There were 15 locators though that filed notices of strikes but those did not prosper.
PEZA ecozones offer world-class friendly environment; fully secured area perimeter; adequate, clean and uninterrupted power supply; adequate water supply; state of the art telecommunication facilities; ready to occupy standard factory buildings; waste water treatment facilities; computer security and building monitoring system, presence of banks and other facilities.
On top of these, PEZA operates 24 hours a day 7 days a week to facilitate exports and imports requirements of locators.
All these measures have resulted in a high realization rate of 98 percent or the actual number of registered projects that materialized.
Since 1995 when PEZA was created replacing the old EPZA (Export Processing Zone Authority), there are already 183 operating ecozones from 16 ecozones 13 years ago.
PEZA has also remitted P11.619 billion to the national government for the past 13 years including P1.141 billion last year.
The agency is the also the third biggest among government-owned and cotrolled corporations and government financial institutions in terms of dividends and remittances to the national government for the January-May period last year.(BCM)