Subic output jumps 21% to $1.3 billion in 2002

Subic Bay Freeport — The Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) has registered a remarkable growth of 21 percent in export production.

SBMA Chairman Felicito Payumo told The STAR yesterday that based on the year-end report submitted by Phil-Export’s One Stop Export Documentation Center (OSEDC) Subic, actual production value recorded by the SBMA last year reached $1.307 billion registering an increase of 21 percent compared to the $1.08 billion value recorded in 2001.

"It has been four consecutive years that the Freeport has been continuously registering high export figures surpassing the $1-billion mark, thus increasing our export figure by 156 percent from $509 million export value since 1998," Payumo said.

Payumo explained that the Freeport has consistently increased its yearly export value brought about by a rebound in demand for information technology hardware products.

"The robust export increase continues despite the emergence of competitors in Asia because of the large pool of skilled workers in the Freeport zone producing high quality products and easier export documentation procedures coping with the just in time inventories in the global market," Payumo added.

Phil-Export’s OSEDC manager Noel Tuliao noted that in May 2002 alone, export value figure achieved its peak monthly figure $144 million while in April of the same year, exports reached $129 million doubling the figure compared to the same month last year of only $64 million.

Tuliao also cited that Wistron Infocomm Phils. Corp., a subsidiary of ACER Computer of Taiwan, remains to be the top exporter among Freeport locators.

Wistron is a Taiwanese company located at the Subic Bay Development and Management Corporation (SBDMC) Techno-Park and employs more than 3,000 highly skilled workers, manufacturing laptop computers, motherboards, peripherals fax machine dynamic random access memory, among others.

Other top exporters last year were Sanyo Denki with $40 million worth exports and followed by Automated Teller Machine (ATM) maker, Omron Mechatronic with $19.4 million worth of export products.