Gov’t prepares perks to keep local shipbuilding sailing

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is planning a support package that will help beef up the shipbuilding industry in the country, with focus on promoting the local production of small- and medium-sized vessels, according to a top official.

Trade Assistant Secretary Rafaelita Aldaba said last week they were currently drafting the blueprint, which has previously been described as a Cars-like program, or the initiative that gives incentives to the local production of a huge volume of cars.

The Cars program, which stands for Comprehensive Automotive Resurgence Strategy, provides perks to participating car companies to produce 200,000 units within six years. It has often been cited as a reference for recent government initiatives to further revive the manufacturing industry.

“In the shipbuilding industry, we are also preparing a support package that would build [a] maritime industrial park along with the promotion of medium- and small-sized vessels, particularly Ro-Ro [roll-on, roll-off ships],” Aldaba said in a speech in a recent business forum.

As early as 2016, BOI Managing Head and Trade Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo has already revealed the government’s plans to come up with a Cars-like program for the shipbuilding industry, noting that Ro-Ro ships here were mostly secondhand imports.

About a year later, Aldaba said that the project was “still in the planning stage.”

“We would use the Ro-Ro ships here in the Philippines. We have capacity for that, but of course, we need to have capacity building for our workers. At the same [time], we need changes in our policies,” she said in an ambush interview. She did not expound.

The manufacturing industry has been steadily growing in the past years.

Trade and Industry Secretary Ramon Lopez said that from 1999 to 2012, manufacturing grew an average of 4 percent. However, from 2013 to 2016, the average third quarter growth of manufacturing stood at 7.8 percent.

Still, the manufacturing sector contributed the most to the third quarter gross domestic product, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). The sector hit 9.4 percent, which Lopez said might be the highest quarterly growth in the past seven years.