Brown and proud

Solid Group Inc., which made big waves when they launched the country’s first truly Filipino phone brand MyPhone, is once again showing all and sundry that innovation is in their DNA.

The company last week launched a new line of smartphones called Brown and Proud Movement. Both the Brown 1 and Brown 2 smartphones are brown in color, come in brown boxes, and have a pre-installed app called Brown and Proud Dream Portal, Pinoytechnoguide.com reports.

According to the same report, the portal is an all-in-one app, featuring live video, an e-magazine, mobile commerce and financial technology. But it says that what makes the Brown and Proud Movement interesting is that its members can earn up to a million pesos.

Gadgetshelf.com meanwhile reported that the B&P Movement uses a device driven hybrid business model. To join, one only needs to register online, preferably with a referral, pay for the brown device, and wait for the tool to be delivered right to your doorstep.

Joining the movement, according to Gadgetshelf, sets one up for a “Brown Tree,” which means that one gets a referral code and if that person encourages another two persons to join in, that person gets rewarded.

It has a multi-level marketing flow that is, unlike all others, limited. A single brown tree can gain only a little over P1 million,” the report stated.

Meanwhile, the Dream Portal, with a projected user base of 10 million at the end of next year, becomes a sort of crowdfunding resource. Gadgetshelf says that once registered, a member can be elevated to inspirer level and can show the community what they are passionate about – be it mounting a concert, or starting a business.

The same report gives this example. “It’s very practical math. You request for say P1,000 to fund your revolutionary new invention. When this gets posted, the entire user base of 10 million will get wind of what you’re trying to accomplish, and if even a thousand of the users find your idea intriguing, then you have P1 million in funding already. This is the true aspect of the B&P Dream Portal.”

It has been almost 10 years since the Solid Group introduced the MyPhone brand to the Philippine market at a time when the mobile phone business was dominated by foreign brands like Nokia. By 2014, MyPhone was the third biggest brand in the country in terms of unit shipments. Kudos to my friend David Lim and his team for keeping the flame alive with more state-of-the art products which ordinary Filipinos can afford.

Enough is enough

One stupid legislative proposal after the next.

According to the Department of Finance, the Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion program will redesign the tax system in order to make it simpler, fairer and more efficient for all, while also raising resources needed to invest in the country’s infrastructure and its people. The goal, DOF says, is to correct the tax system’s problems so that the overall tax burden of the poor and the middle class with be lessened.

First, the government wants to impose an excise tax on diesel. DOF says now is a good time to increase oil excise given that the economy is very strong, inflation is very low and manageable, global crude oil price is still down, and there is a popular government with strong political capital to do important reforms.

But government insists that taxing diesel is not anti-poor and that, in fact, it is mitigating this increase by implementing a Pantawid Pasada Program wherein public utility vehicles will be given cash cards to offset the increase in excise; a Jeepney Modernization Program and unconditional cash transfers by providing poor households P300 a month for one year.

The government maintains that the prices of basic goods and public transportation will not skyrocket and that food prices may increase only by one percent in the first year of implementation, and transport price by two percent.

Then there is this other proposal to increase the tax rates on automobiles, which the DOF says has not been adjusted for the past 13 years. The first bracket of the proposed tax reform bill would raise excise tax on cars costing up to P600,000 from two to three percent in 2018, and then to four percent in 2019.

The bill also seeks to expand the value-added tax base by removing exemptions and zero rates being enjoyed by some sectors.

The DOF, likewise, wants an increase in the excise tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, which could raise prices by up to 140 percent. Under Section 150-A of the bill, sugar-sweetened drinks will be levied an excise tax of P10 per liter of volume capacity.

And all these fund-raising measures just to make up for the proposal to lower personal income taxes from 32 percent to 25 percent, except for high-income individuals.

But wait, the plot thickens.

House Bill no. 3719 introduced by Masbate Rep. Scott David Lanete, seeks to impose a P1 tax on manufactured foods such as canned goods, processed food and junk food per one milligram of sodium in excess of one-third of the allowable daily intake of sodium chloride as prescribed by the Department of Health.

According to one critic of the bill, a pack of instant noodles that now costs P6.85 would be priced at P8.00 if the bill becomes a law.

Then there is HB no. 5845, also introduced by Lanete, which will impose taxes on food products containing artificial trans-unsaturated fatty acid.

Some poor families survive by cooking one pack of instant noodles in one liter of water to feed a family of five. Do you think poor families care if the pack of noodles is unhealthy because it has high sodium content?

Our tax system will become more complicated, anti-poor and more inefficient given all these changes that our government and legislators want to introduce. And we haven’t even talked about the changes in incentives being given to investors that they are proposing.

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