The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) aims to generate P250 billion in new investments in 2024, after it surpassed this year’s P155-billion target with P175.7 billion worth of projects.
PEZA director-general Tereso Panga said the agency wanted to maximize the Philippine potential to attract investments with guidance from the President as the lead salesman.
“We would want to bring back the days when PEZA was attracting over P300 billion of foreign direct investments. This was the golden years of PEZA during the time of then PEZA DG Lilia Delima. And we want to replicate that,” he said in a news briefing.
PEZA reported a 24.88-percent increase in investments to P175.7 billion from P140.7 billion in 2022. The number of projects also grew 20 percent to 233 from 194 last year.
“We have to step on the brake. There were actually several more projects that were pending, but we decided against deliberating on it this year. There isn’t much time left till yearend. For sure, we will have better figures come the start of 2024 following a spill-over of good prospects into the new year,” Panga said.
The agency said it saw a significant increase in investments from South Korea, Taiwan, China, Australia and the EU.
Employment at the economic zones also improved, adding 40,527 full time employees (FTE) in 2023 from 33,951 FTEs that were added to the entire workforce in 2022.
Exports are also expected to hit $4 billion this year.
Panga said the series of successful outbound investment missions yielded a total of P761 billion of investments leads for the Philippines.