Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, May 8) — Authorities hope to bring to the Philippine around 100 top American companies to look for investment opportunities in the country during the planned trade and investment mission by Washington, Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez said.
“Hopefully we’ll have at least 100 of them coming to the Philippines to look at opportunities,” he told CNN Philippines’ The Source on Monday.
In a statement on May 2, the White House said US President Joe Biden is planning to launch a Presidential Trade and Investment Mission to Manila to deepen American firms’ investment in the local economy, covering energy transition, critical minerals sector, and food security.
The US noted this would feature “the highest caliber of” its business leaders.
Romualdez said this will be a “big plus” for the Philippines, especially now that it is considered to be the fastest growing economy in Asia with a growth outlook of 6% this year based on latest projections from the International Monetary Fund.
“It’s an attractive place to invest now and I think this kind of interest is now even much stronger because of this revitalized relationship we have with the United States,” he added.
Aside from commitments from American officials, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. said his five-day official US visit also ended with over $1.3 billion, or over ₱72 billion, worth of investment pledges that have the potential to create approximately 6,700 new jobs for Filipinos.
Even prior to this announcement, US-based pharmaceutical company Moderna informed Marcos of its plan to make the Philippines its Asian hub.
Romualdez said Moderna General Manager Patrick Bergstedt is expected to come to Manila in the next two weeks to immediately start the process.
“The first part of their investment will be sort of like a commercial entity that they’ll set up in the Philippines to look at the distribution for the Asian region, bumping it up later on to doing research together with our new virology institute and at the same time manufacturing vaccines not only for potential pandemic, but mRNA technology is also going to be used a lot for cancer,” the envoy explained.
Aside from this, the Malacañang earlier said that another US-based firm Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation is “seriously considering” building its first nuclear energy facility in Southeast Asia in the Philippines.
If this pushes through, the nuclear power plant is seen to help the local energy sector, Romualdez said.
The official visit also resulted in the adoption of the two long-time allies’ new bilateral defense guidelines.
Romualdez said this helped make the Mutual Defense Treaty “crystal clear” as the guidelines set the parameters on how the parties will proceed in terms of implementing the agreement.
