The Clark vision takes flight

The vision of the Clark Special Economic Zone is built on air. But it is a rock-solid vision of becoming an airport-driven metropolis where urban growth is centered on aviation. Welcome to the Clark Aerotropolis.

For decades, Clark was the American military’s largest air base outside the United States mainland. In 1991, Clark was made into a special economic zone, with the Clark Development Corporation (CDC), currently headed by president/CEO Antonio Ng, tasked to manage the zone.

The CDC has identified what it calls four engines of growth to propel its development as an Asian hub and gateway.

The first growth engine is its crown jewel, the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport (DMIA), a sprawling 2,500-hectare aviation complex with a Category One rating for its Precision Approach Runway, certified by the International Civil Aviation Organization.

From the pioneering Clark-Inchon flights of Asiana Airlines in 2004, five airlines now fly 39 flights a week to and from Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei, Kota Kinabalu, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur in addition to Inchon. Passenger traffic out of DMIA last year topped 230,000. Future destinations include Bangkok, Ningbo and cities in Japan. By December of this year, there will be 70 flights to ten cities in and out of the DMIA.

Aside from attracting low cost carriers, the CDC is also aggressively developing its cargo capacity. The airport currently houses the intra-Asian hub of UPS, which last year handled over 106 million kilos of cargo.

A third thrust in aviation is aircraft servicing and maintenance. Companies like Asian Aerospace and Rolls Royce Engine Services are performing top level and highly technical repair and maintenance work on planes and plane engines and components, staffed by highly trained and experienced Filipino engineers and technicians. Last April, the first complete overhaul of a C-130 plane was completed in Clark.

In addition, the Clark Aviation Academy will be set up this year by an international consortium from the UK, Singapore and India to meet the worldwide demand for trained pilots, with an initial investment of $15.6 million. It will be the first flight school to offer a one-year in-house course, including three months’ training in the state-of-the-art CAE Airbus A320 flight simulator (the Airbus A320 will operate out of Clark). In its first year, the school will train 216 pilots, increasing to 432 by the second year with an additional $12.5 million in investment.

The second growth engine is industrial development, which seeks to make Clark the investors’ first choice through cost competitiveness and ease of doing business. Last year, a total of 150 projects signed up, representing investments of P4.3 billion. Employment in the zone has reached 40,000 jobs in enterprises as diverse as manufacturing (from garments and toys to tires for sports cars and SUVs and other passenger cars), electronics, call centers, service industries and, of course, aviation-related operations. Exports last year grew by 15% to $1.029 billion, the bulk of which was electronics for the US market. Duties and taxes remitted to the National Treasury amounted to P1.145 billion last year.

The third growth area seeks to develop Clark’s tourism potential as a center for leisure and family entertainment. At present, the Fontana and the Mimosa resort complexes cater to a constant stream of tourists as well as Clark residents and off-base visitors. A 250-room hotel and an economy hotel are set to open their doors within the year.

The rehabilitation of the mothballed Clark Expo has begun, and events such as the Pinoy Big Brother final eviction show and a concert by Gary Lewis and the Playboys have been held there. It is envisioned to be an events destination for Central Luzon.

The fourth growth engine seeks to provide a coherent and integrated infrastructure plan of efficient road network, reliable and competitive power/water/telecommunication facilities as well as efficient and responsible waste management.

Work has started on the 55.8-kilometer Clark-Subic Expressway, which will cut travel time between the two zones to only 30 minutes, giving Clark locators access to the vast container port in Subic. This is scheduled for completion in December 2007, after which the expressway will be further extended to Tarlac.

Power supply in the zone will be increased with the recent approval of a P600 million, 230 kilovolts transmission line to be constructed within the zone. This will greatly enhance the CDC’s goal of zero power outage, while keeping power costs down. At present, Clark has the lowest power cost in the entire Luzon.

A state-of-the-art landfill employing German technology is being set up at the Metro Clark Waste Management facility, with an intial 3-hectare landfill area. Its target is zero smell, zero flies and zero seepage, with organized recycling and livelihood complements. The Subic Freeport has decided to use this waste facility at Clark rather than build their own landfill.

Chief drumbeater for the Clark vision is CDC president/CEO Antonio Ng, plucked from a successful management career with multi-national companies, including Intel and Motorola, in the Philippines and Asia to head a special economic zone with over 40,000 workers.

His is the proverbial rags to riches story: His father died when he was just two years old, forcing his mother to migrate from their native Cebu to Davao with three daughters and a son to raise.

"Early in life, as a young boy of ten, I learned to shine shoes, sell newspapers and roast pig–maglelechon–to earn extra money," he relates. "In the evening, it was my duty to prepare the dough, mixing flour with yeast with my bare hands, to be cooked early the following morning as donuts to be sold in the public market."

Graduating as a scholar from the Davao City Public High School, he earned an engineering degree from the University of the Philippines in 1971. "A good education became my passport out of poverty," he says. He went on to pursue graduate studies at the Asian Institute of Management and the Wharton School in Pennsylvania.

After stints in San Miguel and Concepcion Industries, Ng joined Intel Philippines as operations manager, turning the factory of 2,400 employees into one of the best among Intel assembly operations worldwide. In 1983 he took over as the first Filipino president and general manager of Motorola Philippines, a semi-conductor company with 2,000 employees. In three years he turned its operations around, making it the lowest cost factory among all Motorola operations in Asia.

His success there led him to Taiwan, where he was named chairman and country manager for Motorola’s troubled operations there. In four years he grew company revenues by nine times, to over $250 million.

This in turn led him to Kuala Lumpur as deputy managing director and head of operations of Motorola’s most complex manufacturing site with over 4,500 employees producing more than 80 product types. The factory was in the midst of a major quality issue involving significant material losses, but he was able to stabilize operations within a year.

In 1992 Ng joined Amkor Technology Philippines as its first Filipino president and managing director. Amkor is the world’s largest outsourced manufacturer of semiconductors with clients like IBM, Intel, Ford, Nokia, Sony, Siemens and others. By 2000, the company had grown from 2,000 employees to 12,000, with revenues jumping from $32 million to $852 million. Including consigned cost of wafers, Amkor Phils. accounted for 8% of total Philippine exports in 2000.

He brings this wealth of experience in managing and maximizing large operations to his post at Clark, rallying his staff at the CDC "with high energy and enthusiasm...more excited and more passionate in creating jobs and economic activity." The man is tireless, commuting daily from his home in Makati–which he shares with wife Angelina and youngest daughter Angela (their two older children, Stella and Jose, are working in the US)–to Clark ("it’s only an hour," he says, and he’s in the office before 8 a.m.). He often visits his locators in Clark, and will rattle off the merits of investing in the various areas in Clark to anyone who will listen.

And investors are listening, and signing up. The plans for Clark’s development may, at first glance, look like castles in the air, but that, Tony Ng will tell you, is the whole point: Clark’s vision is solidly built on air–now just watch it take flight.