January 12th, 2022
The Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises or CREATE Law continues to deliver on its promise of higher foreign direct investments as data released by the Bangko Sentral showed FDIs rising for the fifth straight month. This means that every month since CREATE IRR was released, our FDIs increased year-on-year.
Data showed that FDIs rose 98.9% year on year to $855 million in October from $430 million a year earlier.
I am confident that we will see an even better year for FDIs in 2022 as the country completes its three main investment liberalization reforms in the Public Service Act, Retail Trade Liberalization Act, and Foreign Investment Act amendments.
I also welcome growth in reinvested earnings, another main point of CREATE. Reinvested earnings reached $77 million, 7.1% higher than $72 million in October 2020.
The figure brings our 10-month FDI to 8.1 billion USD. I am optimistic that we may breach, or be very close to the USD 10 billion mark, which will mean we have exceeded our pre-pandemic FDI inflows in 2018 and 2019, and bring us close to our 2017 FDI levels.
Again, CREATE promised to end the uncertain in our country’s tax incentive regime. The Cabinet approved the original version, CITIRA, in January 2018. Indeed, with CREATE, even in a bad year, we are likely to match or exceed FDI levels in 2018 and 2019.
Moving ahead, I will be working with the DTI, BOI, DOF, and NEDA to release the Strategic Investment Priorities Plan (SIPP), which is the motherlode of CREATE incentives for industries. Right now, with the default IPP as the only reference for eligibility by industry, we are unable to grant the higher-tier incentives CREATE gives to high-tech or high-value investments. These are the kinds of industries that we need to invite.
I commit to making sure that 2022 is a better year for FDIs than 2021, and that we cap this administration’s FDI record on a good note. (end)