The Philippine Economic Zone Authority expects South Korea to become the fourth biggest provider of foreign direct investments following the recent sealing of the Philippines-Korea Free Trade Agreement.
“This year, Korea is among our top FDI sources. With the signing of the Phl-Korea FTA, we anticipate the entry of more Korean investments and push it to the 4th spot in the PEZA FDI ranking,” PEZA director-general Tereso Panga said in a Viber message.
Last year, PEZA approved a total of P1.019 billion in investments from South Korean projects.
As of June 2023, PEZA has a total of 246 registered projects from South Korea which generated P92.190 billion in investments, $736.454 million in exports, and produced 40,688 direct employment.
Once in effect, the FTA will remove tariffs on most products from the two countries, opening the door to rapid growth in bilateral trade.
Second FTA
The deal is only the Philippines’ second bilateral FTA after the pact with Japan in 2008.
Trade between the Philippines and South Korea had benefited from the ASEAN-Korea FTA, which came into effect in 2010.
The Phl-Korea FTA will further augment trade and investments between the two countries and promote a deeper economic relations.
In line with this, Panga also reported “We are on track to achieving our conservative target for the year. In fact, we have already achieved 72 percent of our P154.77billion target investments for 2023.”
“We are confident that we will exceed our conservative 10 percent growth this year given the increasing number of ecozone applications filed with our office as well as big-ticket projects and long-term investments that we expect to register this last quarter of 2023,” he added.
Last week, the PEZA board approved a total of 27 new and expansion projects which is expected to bring in P14.044-billion in investments, $174.806 million in exports, and 4,614 jobs.
Among the 27 projects, 11 are for export, five are for facilities, five are for information technology, two are for logistics, two are for domestic, and two are for ecozone development.
These projects will be located in Makati City, Pasay City, Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Cebu, Davao del Norte and Occidental Mindoro.