Highway robberies unnerving electronics sector

A wave of highway robberies has unnerved the Philippines’ strategic electronics sector as it struggles to recover from the 2001 global information technology (IT) sector slump, industry officials said yesterday.

Unknown gunmen have been "hijacking" trucks that bring the electronics products to Manila for shipment abroad, said Ernie Santiago, executive director of the 204-member Semiconductor and Electronics Industries of the Philippines Inc. (SEIPI).

Some of the stolen products have ended up in the local grey market, while others are bought by "some local distributors or they end up directly overseas," said Arthur Tan, president of Integrated Microelectronics Inc., a leading manufacturing subcontractor here.

SEIPI companies are major foreign exchange earners, accounting for 69 percent of Philippine merchandise exports last year.

Santiago told a press briefing that industry officials signed an agreement with police last month to deal with the hijackings, which have been occurring all over the Philippines.

The armed robberies were a "serious problem" for local semiconductor companies which produce a wide range of products ranging from chips to radar communication equipment, said Danilo Lachica, president of First Sumiden Circuits Inc., a Japanese-Filipino flexible printed circuits manufacturer.

Since the industry signed an agreement with the police "there have been some improvements but we’re not quite there yet," Lachica said.

The US and Japanese chambers of commerce, which together represent 80 IT companies in the country, "are working with SEIPI in talking to the government," he added.

The industry leaders refused to give figures for losses owing to the robberies. "We don’t want to talk about these things for our own security reasons," Lachica said.

Tan said the effect of the attacks on cost of production as well as meeting delivery requirements were in themselves "significant," but that the negative perception the problem could be even more damaging.

He cited an unnamed foreign company that has "decided not to produce new generation of products here in the Philippines because they’ve been victimized two or three times."

Both Tan and Santiago said the SEIPI is working with the freight forwarding companies that carry the bulk of the IT sector products to prevent more attacks.

Some of the measures involved equipping the vehicles with global positioning system tracking equipment, as well as imposing qualification requirements on logistics companies that transport the sector’s products.

The Philippine industry is dominated by semiconductor manufacturing companies that together account for at least 11 percent of the 150 billion-dollar global market, Santiago said. – AFP