BOI nears target for 2018, gets P575B in investment pledges as of Nov

The Board of Investments (BOI) has received around P575 billion worth of investment pledges as of the middle of November, inching closer to its target for 2018.

BOI Managing Head and Trade Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo told reporters last week that the total value of pledges was only around P100 billion short of the target.

To recall, the BOI is targeting to hit P680 billion worth of pledges, after hitting a record-breaking figure of P617 billion last year.

In a previous statement, BOI said that pledges in the first 10 months of the year have reached P515.9 billion, a 26.2- percent increase compared to the same period last year where it reached P408.8 billion.

This means BOI has so far received close to P60 billion worth of new pledges this month.

It is not clear if this came from one big project or several projects.

This develops as the government has been looking for more support for its second tax reform package, which will rationalize tax incentives and lower the corporate income tax.

The Tax Reform for Attracting Better and High-quality Opportunities (Trabaho) bill, however, raised a lot of fears for export-oriented companies in economic zones, whose costs of doing business might spike because of the bill.

These export-oriented firms are not registered under BOI.

Most of them are registered under the Philippine Economic Zone Authority, whose investment pledges are suffering from huge declines due to uncertainty over the tax perks.

BOI, for its part, caters to companies who target the domestic market, a growing demographic sweet spot made more attractive by the tax perks under the Trabaho bill. —ROY C. CANIVEL