MANILA – Malacañang stated that the Marcos administration has been aggressively promoting the country’s priority sectors, such as green, innovative, and sustainable manufacturing and services, to attract more foreign investors.
Citing a Trade official, Communications Secretary Cheloy Garafil said in a statement that these sectors include high-value manufacturing activities like electric vehicle assembly, battery manufacturing, and mineral processing.
In a media forum, Lanie Dormiendo, the head of the International Investments Promotion Service of the Board of Investments (BOI), said one sector that they are actively promoting was electric vehicles and its upstream sectors like battery manufacturing and mineral processing as a key raw material for the manufacture of batteries.
“We have a lot of minerals that can be processed to form part of batteries not only for electric vehicles but even for battery energy storage systems,” she said.
The BOI’s mandate is to develop strategic sectors and promote the country as a prime investment destination by working closely with trade attachés and commercial counselors abroad doing promotions.
Dormiendo said the government wants to capitalize on the already available resources in the country instead of just exporting them to China and Japan as raw minerals.
“We want to attract foreign investors to do a higher value activity to do mineral processing, and then attract battery manufacturers and eventually the EV assemblers and EV manufacturers,” she pointed out.
Regarding sustainable infrastructure and services, Dormiendo said the current administration actively promotes renewable energy (RE).
Late last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) amended the implementing rules and regulation (IRR) on RE Act to allow 100 percent foreign equity for many RE sources, including wind, solar and tidal, she said.
For geothermal and biomass, the government now allows 100 percent foreign equity, resulting in foreign and local investors aggressively venturing into RE. For the BOI-approved projects last year, RE projects accounted for a huge portion of the government’s investment approvals.
Dormiendo noted that the government registered more than P400 billion worth of investments this year, and a large chunk of these investment approvals are also into RE.
Meanwhile, Vichael Angelo Roaring, officer-in-charge (OIC) of the Department of Trade and Industry-Foreign Trade Service Corps, said President Marcos instructed them to carry out an all-of-government approach in addressing investors’ complaints.
He added that the overall goal is to make the Philippines more attractive as a source of investments and trading partner in the region.
