Gov’t bullish on manufacturing sector

The Board of Investments (BOI) wants to double the share of the manufacturing sector in the P500-billion investment pledges target for this year, a top official said.

The target reflects the growing confidence in the government’s manufacturing resurgence program, which aims to revive the growth in a sector that has lagged behind other industries in the previous decade or so.

“The manufacturing sector is dead but we want to revive it. We want to double its share in the total BOI pledges from last year,” BOI Managing Head Ceferino S. Rodolfo told reporters on Friday.

This means that the BOI wants manufacturing to account for more than 22 percent of the total pledges registered under the investment promotion agency for 2017, up from last year’s 11.09 percent.

The target in terms of percentage share reflects how the sector is steadily having a bigger slice of the overall pie. In 2015, it accounted for 7.36 percent of the total pledges registered by BOI.

Last year, pledges approved by the BOI increased by 20 percent to P441.8 billion from P366.74 billion in 2015. Of this figure, P49 billion is attributed to manufacturing projects, which grew 81.41 percent in value from P27.01 billion in the year earlier.

To reach the P500 billion target, an all time high befitting the agency’s 50th anniversary this year, pledges have to grow 13.7 percent from the 2016 figure.

Prospects for job generation in the sector are also high, recent BOI reports would suggest.

Pledges for manufacturing projects under BOI promised the second largest number of new jobs in 2016, expected to provide work to more than 17,000 Filipinos.

This is second to the real estate sector whose potential for employment generation would reach more than 32,000 jobs.