Lopez reminds exporters of larger ASEAN market
WHILE furniture export players remain active in exploring new markets to remain relevant and continue attracting buyers in the domestic and international fronts, the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is urging them to never forget tapping the integrated ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) and its free trade agreements (FTA) with other countries.
According to Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez, tapping the ASEAN and its FTAs with other countries like Korea, Japan, Australia-New Zealand, India, and China present a huge market for local furniture players to take full advantage of especially that these markets comprise half of the world’s population.
“Our domestic market is a 109 million mar- ket. ASEAN, on the other hand, is a 600 million market excluding the markets that ASEAN has FTAs with, so clearly there is a huge market for our furniture exports,” said Lopez, in an interview last week.
“We need not limit ourselves with the traditional buyers (like US and Europe) because we’ve got a bigger market to serve,” he added.
The DTI is committed to meet with the industry to discuss with them the latest trends and innovation as well as determine today’s generation of market buyers.
“We are optimistic with the growth of the furniture industry. It’s just that in today’s market we need to inject more innovation in our products, ride with the trend, and be different to re- main attractive,” said Lopez.
He underscored the importance of “designoriented making” as a competitive edge of Filipinos, so other countries would not copy the country’s products.
He also encouraged furniture players to be more open to the public by reaching out to them using other channels such as social media for more exposure.
DTI-Cebu Director Ma. Elena Arbon noted that promoting e-commerce is one of the major directions that the DTI would embark in to connect more SMEs to this new way of doing business to access more markets.
“We urge them to get into the e-commerce space because we can’t ignore globalization. This is the way for us to go,” said Arbon.
Moreover, Lopez assured business owners that the Philippines continues to be one of the most favored destinations for trade amid controversial issues being faced by the Duterte administration.
He dismissed reports that the attractiveness of the Philippines to foreign investors may go down because of the President’s rhetorics, bloody antidrug war, among others, stressing that Duterte is the “number one protector” of investors.
“We are in a better climate. In terms of macroeconomic policy nothing has changed. In fact, we are open to welcome more investments,” said Lopez.
Board of Investments managing head and DTI Undersecretary Ceferi- no Rodolfo, in separate report, urged local industries to seize the opportunities of the sound economic fundamentals and sustained investor confidence that the country is presently in.
He cited a report from Credit Suisse indicating that the Philippines was the clear winner among member countries of the ASEAN so far this year in attracting foreign direct investments, which stood at a multi-decade high of $8 billion as of April, up from $6 billion in 2015 and $1 billion just five years ago.
Switzerland’s largest and most reputable bank also said in its report that the Philippines surpassed foreign direct investments inflows to Thailand this year for the first time in recent history.
Rodolfo also said the UNCTAD, in its World Investment Report 2016 launched this June, highlighted the Philippines as “one of the world’s most prospective investment destinations for multinational enterprises until 2018”.
The Philippines landed on the 11th spot as the preferred global investment destinations for the period 2016 to 2018, picked by decision makers of multinational enterprises in the survey.
It was the first time that the Philippines made it to the list, and now competes with established investment destinations such as the US, China, India, UK, Germany, Japan, Brazil, Mexico and – regionally – Indonesia and Malaysia, and Myanmar.