Cebu needs more ecozones to attract fresh investments

CEBU, Philippines - Cebu needs more economic zones if it wants a significant chunk of the investments from the recovering manufacturing sector.

Cebu Investments and Promotions Center (CIPC) managing director Joel Mari S. Yu said that the existing economic zones that host industrial companies, are almost full and that the province needs more economic zones, aside from building cyber zones.

He said the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) is now relaxing its requirements to encourage private developers to venture into this kind of project.

Thus, aside from developing residential, commercial buildings and projects, it is also good for developers now to venture into other segment in the real estate sector, and investing into ecozone development  is also lucrative.

The availability of ecozone locations could attract more investors to open up their plants in Cebu, considering the quality and the quantity of workforce here.

On the other hand, although building more PEZA-registered zones may attract more investors, what is important is for Cebu to show off its friendliness to investors both local and foreign direct investments (FDI), by fixing the problem of increasing power cost, infrastructure, in general make the province’s cost of doing business much competitive.

Bureaucracy is also very important especially for FDIs, improvement in the bureaucratic red tape, which is the Philippines is known for.

In fact, the 62-hectare Cebu Light Industrial Park(CLIP) recently reported that it has noted an increase in inquiries and intent to locate from investors all over the world.    

Rommel M. Leuterio president of CLIP said that because of this, the company that operates the Science Park of the Philippines Inc., already turned down a total of 60-hectare investment opportunity because of lack of available inventory.

The Science Park of the Philippines Inc., manages different economic zones in the Philippines, mostly in Luzon.

In Cebu, CLIP has now a total of 17 locators including the recently announced opening of Knowles Electronics (Philippines) Corporation. Now, the Park has total of 2,300 employees excluding the upcoming 4,000 more workers that will be hired by Knowles starting next year.

Now, the CLIP is down to eight-hectare available for lease to potential locators, Leuterio said.

 According to Leuterio, the recovery of the Philippine manufacturing sector is profound now, prompting the company to expand the land area of the ecozone, “we are looking at getting more land contiguous to the Park.” (FREEMAN)