The Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) announced that it is aiming to reach P250-billion investments next year given its stronger-than-expected performance throughout 2023 with total project approvals hitting P175.71 billion.
In a press briefing at the PEZA Office in Pasay City on Friday, Dec. 22, PEZA Director General Tereso Panga said that the agency was able to achieve an almost 25 percent increase in investments to P175.71 billion from January to December this year, surpassing by merely 10 percent its growth target of P154 billion for 2023.
This is a marked improvement of 24.88 percent increase from its P140.70 billion investments recorded in 2022.
To note, PEZA had experienced declining investments in recent years due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 to 2021, exacerbated by concerns regarding the CREATE Law and other attendant issues. The agency was able to recover in 2022 with a 103 percent increase in investments.
"If we will target another increase, 15 percent, over our baseline for 2023, we're looking at P202 billion in investments by 2024, but this is still conservative. We really want to target over P250 billion because this will bring us back to the peak levels of PEZA when we were hitting P250 billion to P300 billion. We're out here to prove that we can regain the status," said Panga.
Along with an increase in investments was a 21 percent rise in the agency's number of projects to 233 from 194. The 233 projects this year include 214 locator projects and 19 developer projects.
While investment numbers are optimistic, there was a slight decline logged in exports and employment as of October this year.
Direct exports dipped 1.75 percent to $53.29 billion this year from $54.24 billion last year, while direct employment also inched down by 1.78 percent to 1.82 million jobs from 1.85 million jobs in 2022.
Still, Panga said they are "hoping to surpass our 2022 targets."
"Our positive forecast which we hope to achieve in 2024 is if we're able to hit 80,000 to 100,000 new jobs because, in that way, we can already contribute 10 percent out of the total target of IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP) alone of one million jobs by 2030," he added.
On a year-on-year comparative basis, PEZA's projected exports rose 101.7 percent to $4 billion in 2023 from $1.98 billion last year.
Moreover, projected employment this year rose 20 percent to 40,527 jobs from 33,951 in 2022.
Throughout 2023, PEZA's projects include 116 in ecozone export, 42 in ecozone information technology (IT), 18 in ecozone logistics, 30 in ecozone facilities, two in ecozone utilities, 19 in ecozone development, and six in the domestic market.