PEZA sets P250 billion investment target

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) aims to approve P250 billion worth of investments next year as it hopes to return to its previous peak levels of investments.

“We really want to target P250 billion because this will bring us back to the peak levels of PEZA during the time of Attorney De Lima when we were hitting P250 billion to P300 billion,” PEZA director-general Tereso Panga said in a briefing yesterday, referring to former PEZA chief Lilia de Lima who was at the helm of the agency from 1995 to 2016.

“If we will target another increase of 10 percent over our baseline for 2023, we’re looking at P202 billion in investments by 2024. And this, I would say, is still conservative,” he said.

For this year, investments approved by the PEZA went up by 25 percent to P175.71 billion from last year’s P140.7 billion.

The growth exceeded the conservative end of its investment approvals target for this year of P154.77 billion, a 10 percent increase from the previous year.

This covers a total of 233 projects, higher than the 194 approved in 2022.

Figures from the PEZA showed that these approved investments have a projected export valued at $4 billion and projected employment of 40,527.

The PEZA noted that among the top five big-ticket investments it approved this year are Raedang International Builders and Developer Corp.’s P27.178 billion investment in the North Cebu Economic Zone; Green Energy with Torrefaction Technology Inc.’s P19.701 billion investment in the Gensan Economic Zone; Philippine Manufacturing Co. of Murata Inc.’s P12.423 billion investment in the First Philippine Industrial Park SEZ; Dyson Electronics Pte. Ltd.-Philippine Branch’s P12.306 billion investment in the Camelray Industrial Park II-SEZ and First Philippine Industrial Park II SEZ, and TI (Philippines) Inc.‘s P11.740 billion investment in the Baguio City Economic Zone (BCEZ) and Clark TI-SEZ.

“I think 60 percent of our project approvals are reinvestments, which really speaks volumes of the Philippines.Because if they’re happy with their investments, surely they will keep on expanding,” Panga said.

“And when they expand, we’re talking about new product lines, new technologies and innovation,” he added.

The PEZA official said bigger projects will be registered with the PEZA by the first quarter of next year.

He added that there are two more big-ticket investments expected to be registered with the agency in January.

The PEZA reported that the Japanese continued to be the top PEZA investors, accounting for 27.3 percent of the approved investments, followed by Filipinos with a 23-percent share.

American investors had a 14.8 percent share, while Dutch investors had an 11.7 percent share.

Other top investors are the United Kingdom (6.8 percent), Singapore (4.1 percent) and South Korea (3.3 percent).