The Philippines would be an ideal distribution hub for Qatar in fields such as defence, manufacturing, and food processing due to its “strategic location” in Asia and the Pacific, an official of the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (Peza) has said.
According to Peza director general Charito B Plaza, the southern island of Mindanao will be home to most of the $206mn worth investments Peza signed with Qatari investors yesterday. 
Peza’s signing of letters of intent (LoI) with 13 investors was among the highlights of President Rodrigo R Duterte’s three-day state visit to Qatar, which concludes today.
The investments range from retirement village projects, hotel and tourism ecozones, IT services and digital marketing, ecozone management services, poultry and halal food processing, as well as agro-industrial farming, and hospital and medical tourism economic zones, among others.
“Both President Duterte and I come from Mindanao, and I have seen that in the past decades, Mindanao was always left behind in terms of investment and development. 
That is why the president is into the peace process with the rebels so that we could provide a safe Mindanao, and not just Mindanao but the whole country, so we could attract more investors to the Philippines,” Plaza told Gulf Times yesterday.
During a presentation at the Movenpick Hotel, Plaza encouraged Qatari investors to establish industries in Philippines, citing steel manufacturing as a viable sector for foreign investments.
“The Philippines is importing a total of $5bn a year for steel alone. We have the raw materials to manufacture steel, iron ore, chromite, and nickel. We are abundant of these minerals but we are importing because we don’t have a steel industry,” she stressed.
She added: “The Philippines is centrally located in Asia and the Pacific so we could be an ideal location as a distribution hub for all your products in order to have a market in the world.”
Plaza also said to attract foreign direct investments, Peza is promoting public-private partnerships (PPPs) in building economic zones, logistics hubs, and the development of both public and private lands.
She said Peza currently has 3,903 locator companies and a direct employment of around 1.3mn. Peza is home to five of the world’s top 20 semiconductor and electronics giants, adding that its exports currently stand at $43.6mn.
Reiterating Duterte’s anti-corruption campaign, Plaza assured Qatari investors that Peza is “corruption-free.”
“That is the directive of our president, which is why in his war on drugs, crime, and corruption, he always emphasises that. And we are taking advantage of this brand of leadership by our president because no investor will come to the Philippines if there is corruption,” she said.
Prior to his state visit to Qatar, Duterte was in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia where Peza secured $469.34mn worth of investments. To attract more FDI from the Gulf, Plaza said Peza is planning to organise another investors’ forum after Duterte’s next state visit to the UAE as well as Russia slated next month.




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