Gov’t to exporters: Innovate to hit $130-B target

Exporters are being urged to innovate and collaborate to attain the country’s exports target of $122 billion to $130 billion by 2022 amid prevailing downside risks.

“As this environment is evolving, we continue to struggle with issues that keep reversing the results of our common development objectives. It is even glaring for the export industry,” Philippine Exporters Confederation Inc. (Philexport) president Sergio Ortiz-Luis Jr. said.

“Further downside risks that are seen regionally and globally include that of a rebalancing of certain economies from export orientation to domestic consumption, protectionist rhetorics in some developed countries, geopolitical tensions and costly natural disasters,” he added.

Ortiz-Luis said innovation and collaboration are even more significant in this era when “humans have to prove themselves to be better than robots.”

As such, he said businesses need to know how to use technology to their competitive advantage.

Ortiz-Luis said technology is allowing efficient and less costly market information collection and dissemination, as well as movement of goods, production and capacity building.

“Moving forward and having tested many strategies before, we now lean on more innovation and collaboration to work our way to sustainable and inclusive progress. Note that in both cases, it is human beings, our people that are still at the heart of the process,” he said.

For his part, Philexport trustee for food sector Roberto Amores said collaboration is imperative to address the country’s trade deficit.

“This is the reason why serious collaboration work has to be done between the private agencies, private individual organization like our organization, and the DA (Department of Agriculture) and the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry),” Amores said.

“But there are a lot of things to do when we leapfrog exports. We don’t talk of benchmarking our exports with our previous performance. We have to benchmark our performance with ASEAN. So the notion of a growth target of six to seven percent does not mean good for our economy. You have to double up as an ambition. There should be an ambition and there should be effective collaboration,” he added.