During a recent discussion with editors and reporters of the ALC Media Group, Tourism Secretary Ramon R. Jimenez Jr. said about 62 cruise ships will be making port calls on the Philippines this year, “whether we’re ready or not.” As such, “we need to improve

cruise ports facilities in the Philip-pines, specifically in Manila, Puerto Princesa in Palawan, Bohol, Cagayan de Oro, Palawan and three other places, because nothing we have is up to scratch.” He added that in 2013, “the Philippines received 14 large

By Ma. Stella F. ArnaldoSpecial to the BusinessMirror

MORE foreign cruise lines are making port calls in several destinations in the

Philippines, making it more urgent for the government to fast-track its port-infrastructure projects.

JIMENEZ SAYS BOOMING CRUISE TOURISM MAKES PORT-INFRA UPGRADE MORE PRESSING

www.businessmirror.com.ph n TfridayNovember 18, 2014 Vol. 10 No. 40 P25.00 nationwide | 6 sections 30 pages | 7 days a weekn Thursday, March 19, 2015 Vol. 10 No. 161

A broader look at today’s businessBusinessMirrorThREE-TIME

ROTARY ClUB OF MANIlA JOURNAlISM AwARDEE2006, 2010, 2012U.N. MEDIA AwARD 2008

By VG Cabuag

PROPeRTy developer Vista Land and Lifescapes Inc. on Wednesday said it will float

as much as $100 million worth of bonds later this year, about half of which will be used to pay for its maturing loans and the rest to fund its project. Manuel Paolo Villar, the company president and CeO, said the com-pany has not finalized the amount yet, but the $100-million range will be enough to cover both its matur-ing debt of about $46 million and

requirements for capital expendi-tures (capex). “We are comfortable with a five-year range. We’re taking advantage of a low interest rate environment. In the past, we have been able to ac-cess both local and foreign markets,” Villar said in a briefing on the com-pany’s financial results for last year. Villar did not mention this year’s capex budget, as the company has not yet finalized the cost. Last year it allocated some P21.1 billion. “It will be definitely higher than last year,” he said.

See “Foreign banks,” A2

INSIDE

FREE TRAvEl APPS ThAT SAvE YOU MONEY, TIME

ChIll IN ThE AIR

D1

Life � ursday, March 19, 2015BusinessMirrorEditor: Gerard S. Ramos • lifestylebusinessmirror@gmail.com

DEAR Lord, “money is a protection” and “a root of all evils,” are commonly said, but we can safely say that the blame is on the user of the money. “A

lover of silver will never be satisfied with silver, nor a lover of wealth with income. This, too, is futility” (Ecclesiastes 5:10;7:12). While we may need money to survive, we should avoid greed. We must learn to share what our money can buy. We should find contentment in whatever we have as we put our best to live simple and clean. Amen.

Find contentment

AWAKE! AND LOUIE M. LACSONWord&Life Publications • teacherlouie1965@yahoo.com

‘CINDERELLA’ ENCHANTS

MOVIEGOERS »D3

B K VThe Hartford Courant

AFTER a winter getaway to Florida and the Caribbean, I returned with a new appreciation for what travel apps can do to ease glitches along the way. We organized travel information in

the updated Tripit app; found free Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Finder and used Cost Split to tally up our tabs at the end of our journey.

If you’re planning vacation or business travel anytime soon, download these free travel apps to help you deal with any unexpected bumps in the road:

■ Having trouble keeping track of your trip details? Just forward all those confirmation e-mails for your flights, hotels, car rentals and cruises to plans@tripit.com and Tripit will organize it all into an easy-to-use itinerary for you. The app syncs your travel plans with your online or mobile calendar and will forward details to others. Available for iOS, Android, Windows and BlackBerry.

■ Missed a connection or stuck somewhere unexpectedly overnight? Hotel Tonight, available for iOS, Android and Windows, lists same-day deals for hotel rooms in more than 500 cities and lets you book from your phone. Hotels are rated Basic, Hip or Luxe, so you have an idea of what you’re getting. (A new feature now lets you book deals up to seven days in advance. Prices aren’t as good as the same-day deals, but there are savings to be had.) On the flip side, ever booked and paid for a hotel room in advance and then had a last-minute change of plans? Roomer, available for Android and iOS Free, helps you sell that reservation to someone who is looking for a last-minute deal.

■ Stay in touch, but don’t get stuck with huge data bills. Wi-Fi Finder provides a listing of hotels, restaurants, airlines, stores and other locations across the country, throughout Europe and around the world that offer free Wi-Fi hot spots.

■ Traveling with a group and sharing expenses? Cost Split, for iOS, lets you set up a budget and keep track of who spends what throughout the trip. Each person can add expenses (from their own device), as they go along. At the end of the trip, the app generates a report outlining who owes what and to whom.

■ Here’s one of my travel resolutions—never pay full price for a drink. With Happy Hours, an app for iOS and Android, you can find the best food and drink deals wherever you are in the US Search by day, time, location and other features, like free Wi-Fi or type of cuisine.

■ Still not sure what is and what’s not allowed in your carry-on bag? To help clear up questions, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has created a free mobile app, My TSA, available for iOS and Android. The app includes tips on how to prepare for various security lanes before getting to the airport and a “Can I Bring...” tool, which lets you know what items can and can’t go through security in checked or carry-on baggage. Users just type the name of the item in the search field for information.

■ If you’re driving to Boston, New York City, Chicago, San Francisco or one of more than 100 other cities, download the Best Parking app before you go. Once you arrive at your destination, plug in an address, cross street, neighborhood or attraction, and the app will direct you to the cheapest nearby parking lot. Rates are updated regularly, and links to any available discount coupons are provided. The app also lists airport parking deals. Available for iOS, Android or BlackBerry users.

■ When you gotta go, you gotta go. Airpnp, (no, that’s not a typo of Airbnb), lets residences and businesses rent out their bathrooms to people who need to use them. You plug in your location and the iOS app lists nearby restrooms and the charge to use them. Payment is made through the app. Charges generally range from $1 to $5 per, well, tinkle. Users rate their experience afterward so you can see how

each restroom stacks up.■ Waze, a traffic and navigation app for

iOS and Android, posts real-time traffic info from drivers in your area. The app alerts you to

any accidents, road hazards, road or bridge closures or traffic jams ahead, posts area gas prices so you can find the cheapest fuel and lets you coordinate arrival and departures times when you’re traveling with friends. ■

Free travel appsthat save you money, time

‘CINDERELLA’ ENCHANTS

MOVIEGOERS »D3»D3»

ETIHAD Airways has launched its new global brand campaign with the worldwide premiere of a new television commercial (TVC) in Abu Dhabi, attended by Hollywood actress Nicole Kidman, representatives of the global media and hundreds of specially invited guests.

Kidman is both star and narrator of the captivating feature, which will be shown on global TV stations and social media in both 60- and 30-second formats, with still versions of the campaign appearing in print, digital and on outdoor channels.

The TVC was shot onboard Etihad Airways’s new flagship Airbus A380 and in locations around the world, including various landmarks in Abu Dhabi.

The TVC also features a digitally created scene of Kidman in the interior of the soon to be opened Louvre Abu Dhabi, celebrated architect Jean Nouvel’s futuristic and awe-

inspiring showcase of modern architecture, influenced by the light and geometric patterns of the Emirate.

The Foster & Partners Vieux Port Pavilion in Marseilles was chosen to reflect the airline’s focus on design, while the Villa Méditerranée, also in

Marseilles, a center of culture and promotion of international dialogue and friendship, symbolizes Etihad Airways’s role as a global ambassador. The 17th century baroque hall of the historic Strahov Library in Prague represents knowledge, learning, and the desire to

innovate and lead.Peter Baumgartner, Etihad

Airways chief commercial officer, said: “Etihad Airways is constantly pushing boundaries, taking inspiration from the world to provide a superlative in-flight experience for our guests. We are rewriting the rule book and reimagining flying by breaking away from convention and leading the way in innovation, design, style and hospitality. This new campaign has succeeded brilliantly in bringing our unique brand and service ethos to life on film, in print and on digital channels. “Nicole Kidman, as a globally respected artist, was the perfect voice and face for our story, and embodies worldly sophistication, intelligence, originality and elegance—values which form the foundations of the Etihad brand.”

The new campaign can be viewed on http://bit.ly/Live_News.

MAKATI Shangri-La, Manila offers Easter room packages exclusive to Philippine residents for stays between March 27 and April 5.

Guests may experience the Easter holidays at the hotel with family and loved ones with special Easter room packages that start at P8,200 per night or P15,800 for two nights in a Superior Room with breakfast buffet for two adults

and two children under 12 years old. Better yet, make the stay even more memorable with lunch and/or dinner buffet at Circles Event Café added on top of the room package for a small fee.

All offers include applicable charges. To know more of Makati Shangri-La’s Easter room and dining offers, visit www.bit.ly/MakatiShangEaster.

OSCAR winner Nicole Kidman provides the face and narrative for the Etihad Airways’s evocative new “Flying Reimagined” brand campaign.

Hollywood glamour flies in style

Easter staycation packages

THE Executive Room of Makati Shangri-La

SportsBusinessMirrorC1 | Thursday, MarCh 19, 2015mirror_sports@yahoo.com.ph

sports@businessmirror.com.phEditor: Jun Lomibao

CHILL IN THE AIRWhat the near-capacity

crowd in the main stadium at the BNP Paribas Open

was seeing was perhaps not exactly what it was getting. Serena Williams and Sloane

Stephens have some history, and it isn’t about pajama

parties or girls’ nights out.

I NDIAN WELLS, California—Struggling with her serve and a rash of errors, Serena Williams overcame a slow start to beat Sloane Stephens, 6-7 (3), 6-2, 6-2, in

the fourth round at the BNP Paribas Open on Tuesday, extending her winning streak to 14 matches. Maria Sharapova struggled mightily, too, losing 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 to defending champion Flavia Pennetta, who won her ninth straight match after becoming emotional and leaving the court in the first set. Four-time Indian Wells champion Roger Federer defeated Andreas Seppi 6-3, 6-4, avenging his third-round loss to Seppi at the Australian Open. Seppi fought off three match points on his serve to trail 5-4 in the third set. He netted a forehand to give Federer a fourth match point in the next game, and the Swiss star closed it out with a forehand winner in the corner. Seppi’s win Down Under stopped a 10-match skid against Federer. The Italian broke Federer to tie it up 3-all in the second, but Federer broke back on a forehand

winner in the next game to take a lead he never gave up. “It absolutely was an opportunity right away to play him again and sort of erase it to some extent from the memory as the season moves forward,” Federer said. “It’s one of those matches you’re happy you’re through, and I was happy it was over.” Pennetta was happy to advance after working through her emotions, saying she “let everything out, screaming, do something.” “For the first two or three games I was OK,” Pennetta said. “Then it’s coming. Like I never expect. I never do something like that. Normally you go away and you don’t want to stay on the court. But for me was important to just keep calm and try to play. In the end I just play really well.” Pennetta had 34 unforced errors and just 15 winners. Sharapova topped her in both categories with 42 unforced errors and 27 winners to go with 11 double faults. Pennetta broke two-time Indian Wells champion

Sharapova twice in the final set, winning the last seven games. “She got in a really good rhythm,” said Sharapova, who didn’t notice Pennetta’s meltdown. “Everything I gave her she was able to hit back solid with pace.” Williams committed 52 unforced errors and had nine double faults to go with 13 aces and 31 winners in the up-and-down match played in 90-degree (32 Celsius) heat. “I’m just trying to find my bearings,” the world’s top-ranked player said. “Little off this week, but like I said, I’m just happy to be here.” Williams set up match point with a 128-mph ace and won when Stephens dumped a backhand into the net, one of her 36 errors. Williams broke Stephens three times in the final set of her third match at Indian Wells since ending a 14-year personal boycott of the tournament, where she has won two titles. “The crowd has been really great,” Williams said. “It’s been really relaxing here. I just feel I don’t want to leave.”

Stephens recovered after blowing a 3-1 lead in the first set to dominate the tiebreaker that included just one winner, a smash by Williams to trail 3-2. Williams has been subdued on court, with none of the screaming and exuberant fist-pumping that often marks her matches. “That’s why I was so calm after I lost [the first set], because it was like, I don’t really need to win this title,” Williams said. “Just being out here is a real win for me and I was just calm through it.” Stephens won four of the final five points and then promptly got broken to start the second set. Her double faults in the first game set up both break points, and Williams cashed in on the second one when Stephens’s backhand went long. Stephens held to get to 3-2 before Williams won five straight games to close out the second set 6-2 and take a 2-0 lead in the third. They shared a brief conversation at the net during the post-match handshake. “I have always thought Sloane can be really great,”

Williams said. “I think she’s on the right track. She played really well. It’s good to see her doing really well again.” In third round men’s play, Nadal beat Donald Young, 6-4, 6-2, in a matchup of lefties. “I feel confident that I am playing much better than one month and a half ago,” Nadal said. “I feel closer to be what I am, what I want to be, and it’s a positive victory for me.” Sixth-seeded Milos Raonic beat Alexandr Dolgopolov, 7-6 (2), 6-4; No. 11 Grigor Dimitrov lost to 17th-seeded Tommy Robredo, 6-4, 1-6, 7-5; Jack Sock upset 15th-seeded Roberto Bautista Agut, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 to earn his first meeting against Federer; and No. 9 seed Tomas Berdych beat Steve Johnson, 6-4, 6-2. No. 12 Carla Suarez Navarro beat Heather Watson 7-6 (5), 3-6, 6-1 to reach the quarterfinals, where she will play third-seeded Simona Halep, a 6-4, 6-4 winner over 14th-seeded Karolina Pliskova. Jelena Jankovic, the 2010 champion, outlasted 18-year-old Belinda Bencic, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3.

SHARAPOVA OUTAT INDIAN WELLS MARIA SHARAPOVA struggles mightily, losing

3-6, 6-3, 6-2 to defending champion Flavia Pennetta. AP

celebration of Ivanovic’s team. Since then, the subject has been pretty much glossed over. An Agence France-Presse reporter asked Stephens, 21, before the tournament started, about where her relationship stood with Williams. “We are colleagues,” Stephens said. Williams, of course, was making her much-celebrated return to Indian Wells 14 years after a booing incident in the final, which she won, prompted her boycott. So, with plenty of emotion floating around about that, losing the first set to Stephens in a tiebreaker could have pushed Williams to the brink of overload. But her steely control over the next two sets answered that, and the 6-7 (3), 6-2, 6-2 final score was not even that startling a result. Stephens is, indeed, a possible future star, and even though she has slumped from her best ranking of No. 11 in 2013, she still is No. 42

and has one of the more dangerous forehands in the women’s game.

She sought to characterize everything as normal, using the

phrase she has learned to lean on for

almost

any hint of a question about her relationship with Williams: “She is No. 1 in the world.” Williams had one set point in the first set and let that slip away. And Stephens still had a shot to win the match with Williams serving at 3-2 in the third. At 15-30, Stephens hit deep, approached and had a perfect put-away forehand volley floating her way. She netted it and Williams sailed home, ending the festivities. The match, and the standoffish body language, ended with an exclamation point perhaps meant as a message. Williams hit a 128-mph ace. Direct discussions of this have pretty well become taboo. It has been made clear there will be no answers, certainly no honest ones. The closest attempts were to queries about the post-match handshake. Williams: “I told her good job and keep up the good work.” Stephens: “Good match. Good luck. The normal handshake. That was it.” In the end, this match might have represented the coolest temperatures Indian Wells has ever seen.

» SERENA WILLIAMS (left) sets up match point with a 128-mph ace and wins when Sloane Stephens dumps a backhand into the net, one of her 36 errors. AP

By Bill DwyreLos Angeles Times

 

T HERE is an old Midwest expression that sums up Tuesday’s fourth-round tennis match at Indian Wells between Serena Williams and Sloane Stephens. It says, all the icicles weren’t on the rain gutters.

What the near-capacity crowd in the main stadium at the BNP Paribas Open was seeing was perhaps not exactly what it was getting. Williams and Stephens have some history, and it isn’t about pajama parties or girls’ nights out. In the quarterfinals of the 2013 Australian Open, up-and-coming Stephens, who had been the subject of great praise from Williams as both a future American star and future black star, beat Williams in a three-setter. A few months later, Stephens gave an interview to ESPN the Magazine, in which she said that Williams had snubbed her since that day and even had done one of those unforgivable things among the younger generation. She had unfollowed her on Twitter. Stephens also said in the article, “She’s so friendly, so this and that...that’s not reality.” After the article hit the newsstands, Stephens said she had been tricked by the reporter and thought that part was off the record. The reporter countered that she had asked if it were OK to turn on her tape recorder

and Stephens had said yes, and had even reminded her to turn it off when a phone call came in

during their lunch. It didn’t end there.

Stephens was photographed in the stands at the

2014 Australian Open, arms thrust into the air, appearing to celebrate Ana Ivanovic’s upset victory over Williams. Stephens said later that she was merely mocking the

B3-1

Tourism in Southeast Asia is growing fast

THE commander of the US Navy Seventh Fleet called on Southeast Asian nations to form

a combined maritime force to patrol areas of the South China Sea where territorial tensions flare with China.

US Navy urges Aseanpatrols of disputed sea

www.businessmirror.com.ph Editor: Max V. de Leon • Thursday, March 19, 2015

Asean BusinessMirror

Asean-EU PerspectiveHENRY J. SCHUMACHER

NUCHNART SAKVISETCHAI-KUL got married four years ago in Bangkok at the age

of 33. She has one child and doesn’t want more, an increasingly common trend among a population that is rapidly growing old.

“I want my kid to have the best I can give,” said Nuchnart, a senior executive at an insurance company in Bangkok whose mother looks after her 3-year-old daughter during the day. “My work is demanding. It’s good that I have only one kid.”

Women marrying later and hav-ing fewer children is one reason Thailand will join the ranks of its northern peers, whose labor forces are shrinking, just as the number of working-age people in other South-east Asian nations rises in coming decades. The decline will constrain Thailand’s long-term growth poten-tial, analysts at Credit Suisse Group AG said.

Almost a third of Thailand’s population will be over 60 by 2050, compared with less than a sixth in the Philippines and a fifth in Ma-laysia, according to the United Na-tions. That puts the country at a disadvantage among the Asean just as rising costs in China are pushing manufacturers to find new bases in the region.

“Thailand is emerging as the old man of Asean,” said Chua Hak Bin, a Singapore-based economist at Bank of America. “Demographics are use-ful predictors of real gross domestic product growth” and Japan’s expe-rience suggests an aging population will weigh on expansion and prop-erty, he said. Population peakTHAILAND’S working-age popula-tion is forecast to peak in 2017, a year after South Korea, according to estimates by Bank of America Mer-rill Lynch based on UN data. Indone-sia won’t get there till 2058 and the Philippines not until 2085. In China, which adopted a one-child policy in the 1980s, the decline began in 2012.

Thailand’s pool of workers is shrinking as it tries to regain its

position as a regional powerhouse for manufacturing and exports af-ter floods inundated its industrial heartland in 2011 and years of po-litical impasse ended in a military coup last year.

Overseas sales fell for a second straight year in 2014, the first back-to-back decline in almost two de-cades, while Vietnam and the Phil-ippines posted strong gains. Thai-land is forecast to have the slowest growth in the region this year after Singapore, Southeast Asia’s only de-veloped nation.

Central bank Governor Prasarn Trairatvorakul likened the country to a patient with flu and arthritis —the flu being an export slowdown caught from the global economy and the arthritis being the country’s own structural problems. Quick cureTHE country needs to find a cure fast, “before it’s too late,” Prasarn said in a speech on March 13. Thailand will be an aging society within 10 years and “this will make it even more dif-ficult to cure our economic diseases.”

It wasn’t a lways l ike this:

Thailand once led the charge in Southeast Asia’s development, going from a low-income nation to an up-per middle-income one in less than a generation. The government had encouraged large families, setting up a marriage promotion bureau in 1942 and holding contests to reward women with the most children. Par-ticipants generally had more than 15 children, a research paper showed.

Government policy flipped in the 1970s with the slogan “the more children, the poorer” as the country turned its attention to raising the standard of living. As more women were educated and began working, they had fewer children. The annual population growth rate for the 2010-2015 period is estimated at 0.3 per-cent, the lowest among the 10 Asean economies, UN data showed. The fer-tility rate in the same period is 1.4, compared with 3.1 in the Philippines and 2.4 in Indonesia. Serious impact“OUR key problem is how we will shape our future and drive the econo-my with this demographic structure,” said Arkhom Termpittayapaisith,

head of the National Economic & Social Development Board (NESDB), which is preparing a population plan for the next 20 years. “We need to make the public realize the serious-ness of the impact and how to pre-pare for it.”

The Thai government’s efforts to boost the fertility rate include en-couraging married couples to have kids and giving tax benefits and child-related perks. Proposals in-clude raising the retirement age, en-couraging mothers to join the work-force and revising rules for foreign workers, an NESDB draft showed.

Thailand’s challenge is the op-posite of Indonesia, where a birth-control program has been revived after decades to prevent a burgeoning population from overwhelming its services. In the Philippines President Aquino took on the Catholic Church to provide free contraceptives to the poor as unemployment rises.

Tax breaksAN alternative for Thailand is to in-crease immigration. Human Rights Watch estimates there already may

MORE people are traveling than ever before with just over 1 billion tourists recorded worldwide in 2013. As in 2012 the Asean region was again featured as the fastest-growing globally, with a 10.8-

percent increase in international tourist arrivals, a reflection of buoyant intra-regional demand, according to the United Nations World Travel Organization (UNWTO).

The travel sector is helped by growing connectivity in the Region which supports to stimulate tourism. In 2004 Asean Transport Ministers drafted a 10-year plan under which the region’s air travel would be progressively integrated and liberalized. More competition in the skies has helped in turn to reduce prices and provide more direct flights between countries and destinations in the countries.

As a result, the travel and tourism industry is seen as crucially impor-tant for development; tourism is vital for the socioeconomic benefits as it promotes people-to-people connectivity, one of the key strategies toward achieving the Asean community, starting 2016.

Industry trends continue to be encouraging; UNWTO believes that growth will continue, higher than the long-term forecast of 3.8 percent between 2010 and 2020 that the organization had previously predicted.

“Asean attracted 90 million visitors in 2013, an increase of 12 percent from 2012. This is a precursor to what lies ahead for the region, a robust tourism economy. It is human capital that is at the core of this sustainable success,” says Peter Semone, chief technical advisor for the Lao National Institute of Tourism and Hospitality.

Data from 2014 illustrates just how important tourism has become. UNWTO statistics reveal that Brunei Darussalam received 225,000 inter-national visitors; Cambodia 4.2 million; Indonesia 8.8 million; the Philip-pines 4.7 million; Vietnam 7.6 million; and Thailand 26.5 million.

Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore are recipients of the largest number of visitors in the region. The latter two countries have seen international arrivals numbering around 25 million and 11 million, respectively, for each of the last two years.

Income received from international tourism is at an estimated $21 bil-lion for Malaysia in 2013; $18.9 billion for Singapore; $9.3 billion for Indo-nesia; $7.5 billion for Vietnam; $4.7 billion for the Philippines; $2.7 billion for Cambodia; and a huge $42 billion for Thailand. This places Thailand among the top 10 countries in the world for international arrivals, and for earnings from its tourism industry.

The accelerating development of the tourism sector is focusing the at-tention of governments. Member-countries are keen to help tourism by developing a free flow of services and trained personnel. They also want to improve skills by implementing a Mutual Recognition Arrangement (MRA) of qualifications for those working in the hospitality sector. A re-gional secretariat is being set up in Indonesia to facilitate the introduction of MRA. The move includes setting up an Asean Tourism Qualifications Equivalent Matrix to serve as a key reference for the tourism industry and associated training institutions, as well as an Asean Tourism Professional Registration System.

Another priority is to develop a strategic plan for ecotourism. This aims at promoting sustainable economic development through conservation of nature based tourism in the region. Asean Tourism Ministers also see op-portunities to attract more of the booming international cruise business. This follows the establishment of an Asean Cruise Work Plan in 2013, de-signed to showcase the attractions and ports.

A central part of the Asean tourism development strategy is also the creation of a single entry visa to the 10 member-countries. The strongest proponents of this visa are countries, such as the Philippines and Indone-sia and these will benefit most according to Tourism Secretary Ramon R. Jimenez Jr.

Thailand grows old too soon to benefit from China’s rising costs

Countries could streamline coop-eration on maritime security while respecting sovereignty and coastal space, as in the case of counter-piracy efforts in the Gulf of Aden, Vice Ad-miral Robert Thomas said on Tues-day at the Langkawi International Maritime and Aerospace Exhibition in Malaysia.

The US has reassured allies in the region it will back them against Chi-na’s assertions to about four-fifths of the sea. China has ratcheted up pres-sure on some Asean members, and has accelerated reclamation work on reefs in the waters criss-crossed by claims from Vietnam, Taiwan, Bru-nei, the Philippines and Malaysia.

“Perhaps easier said than done, from both a policy and organization perspective, such an initiative could help crystallize the operational

objectives in the training events that Asean navies want to pursue,” Thomas said at a panel session with navy chiefs. “If  Asean  members were to take the lead in organizing something along those lines, trust me, the US Seventh Fleet would be ready to support.” India, JapanSINGAPORE Defense Minister Ng Eng Hen said in an interview on March 16 that his country would welcome India playing a greater role in the South China Sea. In January Thomas said the US would encourage an extension of Japanese air patrols into the area. Australian Prime Min-ister Tony Abbott signed an agree-ment today to host Vietnam forces for training.

Both countries “support freedom

VIETNAM and Australia agreed to closer security ties on Wednesday, including

training Vietnamese troops in Australia, as Canberra seeks to balance its relationship with its biggest trading partner China and relations with other neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region.

Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung told reporters that his Australian counterpart Tony Abbott had agreed during a meeting at Parliament House to strengthen cooperation on security and defense in a range of areas, in-cluding experience and information sharing, English-language training and special forces cooperation.

“We agreed on the importance of the assurance of peace, stability, maritime security and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, in compliance with international law,” Dung said.

China says it has historical claims to a huge swath of the South Sea China that overlaps with the claims of several neighbors, includ-

ing Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines, fueling concerns of a conflict.

Abbott said 120 Vietnamese military personnel would be trained in Australia and Vietnam would take part in joint military training exercises in Australia.

He acknowledged a growing se-curity relationship between Aus-tralia and Vietnam in recent years. Australian troops fought alongside the US against the Vietnam com-munists during the Vietnam war.

“We have both prospered in peace over the last 40 years, because of the stability that our region has enjoyed and anything which disturbs that stability is something that we would mutually deplore and mutually work to ensure didn’t happen,” Abbott said.

“We both support freedom of navigation by air and by sea in the South China Sea. We both deplore any unilateral change to the status quo. We both think that disputes should be resolved peacefully and in accordance with international law,” he said. AP

of navigation by air and by sea in the South China Sea, we both deplore any unilateral change to the status quo,” he said in Canberra.

At Langkawi, the US is exhibiting two F/A-18F Super Hornets, a P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, as well as the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh equipped with a MH-60R helicopter. The scale of the US delegation to the show held every two years underscores its in-creased focus on the region.

‘‘There’s a lot of competition I would say in the South China Sea, but for the United States our goal is just peaceful resolution of any con-flict,’’ said Captain John Enfield, a deputy Navy commander who flies one of the F/A-18F Super Hornets. ‘‘The US doesn’t get dragged’’ into a discussion about resources, he said in an interview.

Code of conductChina agreed to talks with Asean over a code of conduct for the South China Sea in July 2013, but little progress has been made. The government in Beijing signed a nonbinding declara-tion of conduct in 2002, which calls on parties to refrain from ‘‘inhabiting on the presently uninhabited islands, reefs, shoals, cays and other features.’’

The maritime force is ‘‘a nice idea, but it’ll never be anything meaning-ful,’’ said Richard Bitzinger, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

‘‘Creating interoperability will be a nightmare, you need common communications equipment, intelli-gence-sharing agreements,’’ he said. ‘‘Above all you need a common threat perception.’’

Asean  has consistently called for parties to show restraint on the South China Sea and preserve free-dom of navigation. The 10-member bloc has avoided singling out China, its largest trading partner.

In May last year, rioters damaged Chinese businesses and factories in Vietnam, after China parked an oil ex-ploration rig in contested waters near the Paracel Islands. China warned of a hit to trade and investment ties un-less the protests were halted. Several months later it withdrew the rig.

Asean  nations are consistently occupied with managing conflict-ing boundary claims in the South China Sea, Malaysia Defense Min-ister Hussein Hishammuddin said on Tuesday. This remains a major obstacle to upholding Asean’s zone of peace, freedom and neutrality, he said. Bloomberg News

See “Thailand,” B3-2

Vietnam, Australia agreeto strengthen defense ties ROADSIDE beauticians use a threading technique to remove hair from customers in Bangkok, Thailand. AP

life d1

sporTs c1

aseaN B3-1 Vista Land to tap bond market anew for capex

SOlAR PhIlIPPINES TO BUIlD lARGEST SOlAR FARM IN lUZON

Calatagan, Batangas—af-ter pioneering the nation’s first large-scale solar rooftop

projects, Solar Philippines claims a new frontier with the launch of the largest solar farm in luzon. at the ceremonial ground- breaking of the 50-megawatt (MW) project in Calatagan, Batangas, at-tended by officials from the local

and national government, Solar Phil-ippines President leandro leviste marked the event as a turning point for renewable energy in Batangas, which is home to both the nation’s largest number of fossil-fuel plants and various ecotourism destinations. the ground-mounted system will comprise over 150,000 solar

More cruise ships to visit PHL

Continued on A2See “Vista Land,” A2

Continued on A8

PESO ExChANGE RATES n US 44.4610 n JAPAN 0.3664 n UK 65.5355 n hK 5.7274 n ChINA 7.1139 n SINGAPORE 32.0278 n AUSTRAlIA 33.8931 n EU 47.0798 n SAUDI ARABIA 11.8544 Source: BSP (18 March 2015)

ayala laNd lisTs p16-B equiTy Top-up placeMeNT ayala land inc. (ali) held a bell-ringing ceremony at the philippine stock exchange (pse) for the listing of the subscription tranche of its p16-billion equity top-up placement, which is the largest capital-raising activity for ali as a listed company. “The amount of capital raised in this deal is a testimony to the trust that investors have on the company,” pse chairman Jose T. pardo said in his welcome remarks during the ceremony. “since most of those who subscribed to the placement were global institutional investors, i believe that the success of this offering is also a testament to the confidence that investors have on the philippine equity market, as well as in the country’s economy,” pardo added. shown in the photo are (from left) ali Treasurer augusto d. Bengzon, ali cfo Jaime e. ysmael, ali president and ceo Bernard Vincent o. dy, ali chairman fernando Zobel de ayala, pardo, pse president and ceo Hans B. sicat, pse coo roel a. refran and pse director alejandro T. yu.

3 foreign banks await BSP nodon Phl branch

calaTagaN Mayor sophia palacio (from left) with solar philippines president leandro legarda leviste and paraiso Barangay captain romeo H. Zara at the groundbreaking ceremony of the company’s new solar-farm project in Batangas on Tuesday.

By David Cagahastian

three foreign banks have applied to set up branches and are waiting for the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas

(BSP) to approve their petitions. BSP Deputy governor nestor espe-nilla said on Wednesday the applica-tions of the three foreign banks are under process and should form part of the Monetary Board discussions set for today, thursday. “Currently we are processing three, in addition to one that’s already approved. We’ll make an appropriate announcement

U.S. NAvY URGES ASEAN PATROlS OF DISPUTED SEA

SUNRISE SUNSET

HALF MOON6:01 AM 6:07 PM

MOONRISEMOONSET

5:02 PM 4:47 AM

TODAY’S WEATHERMETROMANILA

LAOAG

BAGUIO

SBMA/CLARK

TAGAYTAY

LEGAZPI

PUERTOPRINCESA

ILOILO/BACOLOD

TUGUEGARAO

METROCEBU

CAGAYANDE ORO

METRODAVAO

ZAMBOANGA

TACLOBAN

3-DAYEXTENDEDFORECAST

3-DAYEXTENDEDFORECAST

CELEBES SEA

LEGAZPI CITY23 – 31°C

TACLOBAN CITY23 – 33°C

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY

METRO DAVAO24 – 34°C

ZAMBOANGA CITY20 – 34°C

PHILI

PPIN

E ARE

A OF R

ESPO

NSIB

ILITY

(PAR

)

SABAH

PUERTO PRINCESA CITY 23 – 31°C METRO CEBU

24 – 31°C

ILOILO/BACOLOD

23 – 31°C

21 – 31°C

24 – 31°C 23 – 31°C 24 – 32°C

23 – 32°C 22 – 33°C 22 – 32°C

22 – 32°C 22 – 32°C 22 – 31°C

24 – 34°C 23 – 34°C 24 – 33°C

21 – 34°C 22 – 34°C 21 – 34°C

Watch PANAHON.TV everyday at 5:00 AM on PTV (Channel 4).

Weekday hourly updates: 6:00 AM on Balitaan, 7:00 AM & 8:00 AM on Good Morning Boss!, 9:00 AM, 10:00 AM, 11:00 AM, 12:00 PM, 1:00 PM

on News@1, 3:00 PM, 4:30 PM, and 6:00 PM on News@6

www.panahon.tv

@PanahonTV

MARCH 19, 2015 | THURSDAY

HIGH TIDEMANILA

SOUTH HARBOR

LOW TIDE

4:06 AM-0.06 METER

TUGUEGARAO CITY20 – 33°C

LAOAG CITY 22– 31°C

TAGAYTAY CITY 20 – 29°C

SBMA/CLARK 23 – 33°C

23 – 32°C 21 – 30°C 21 – 31°C

22 – 31°C 21 – 30°C 22 – 32°C

22 – 32°C 23 – 32°C 22 – 30°C

12 – 21°C 12 – 20°C 14 – 23°C

20 – 29°C 19 – 28°C 20 – 29°C

24 – 31°C23 – 32°C 24 – 32°C

23 – 32°C 24 – 33°C

23 – 33°C 22 – 32°C

23 – 32°C23 – 32°C 24 – 33°C

Partly cloudy to at times cloudy withrain showers and/or thunderstorms

Cloudy skies with rainshowersand/or thunderstorms

NEW MOON

5:36 PMMAR 20

1:48 AMMAR 14

BAGUIO CITY14 – 22°C

23 – 32°C

9:32 PM0.98 METER

MAR 20FRIDAY

MAR 21SATURDAY

MAR 22SUNDAY

MAR 20FRIDAY

MAR 21SATURDAY

MAR 22SUNDAY

21 – 31°C

Partly cloudy to at times cloudywith rainshowers

TROPICAL DEPRESSION “BETTY” (BAVI)ESTIMATED AT 1,045 KM EAST OF CASIGURAN, AURORA

(AS OF MARCH 18, 5:00 PM)

METRO MANILA21 – 33°C

Tropical Depression is a cyclone categorywith winds of 45 - 60 kph.

Partly cloudy skies

BusinessMirror news@businessmirror.com.ph Thursday, March 19, 2015A2

News

Global supply. . . Continued from A8

Vista Land. . . Continued from A1

Purisima. . . Continued from A8 Foreign banks. . . Continued from A1Solar Philippines to build largest solar farm in Luzon panels, covering over 75 hectares of land owned by the company. Once completed this year, it shall generate enough energy to power the major-ity of the entire province of Batangas. Over three decades of operation, it is expected to offset over 1 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to plant-ing over 5 million trees. Solar Philippines will develop, cofi-nance, design and construct the project the first time that any local company has taken an integrated approach to solar farm development—allowing Solar Philippines to complete this project in record time. “This is the first of many solar farms that we shall launch this year, and are in discussions with landowners across Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao,” Le-viste said. “Taking the same approach as for our rooftop projects, we’ve in-tegrated development, financing, and construction all-in-one, allowing us to move faster in meeting the Department of Energy’s solar targets for 2015.”

Leviste took the occasion to issue a call to action to other landowners: “This is the year to convert unproduc-tive lands into solar farms. What we have done to the rooftops of malls and factories, we shall do for solar farms, and we welcome all willing partners to join us in finally turning this vision into a reality.” The company plans to complete no less than 200 MW in 2015, and has secured over a dozen Renew-able Energy Service Contracts to develop projects near major cities across the country. Solar Philippines is the country’s No. 1 solar provider and Southeast Asia’s largest developer of rooftop power plants. The country’s first all-in-one solar financing, design, and construction company, it installs so-lar on rooftops at zero cost, supply-ing electricity at below utility rates. With a team of 125 veterans from the solar, construction, and power indus-tries, the company is growing fast to meet the need for affordable, clean and distributed generation.

Continued from A1

to $53.19 a barrel on the London-based ICE Futures Europe exchange. It de-creased 43 cents to $53.51 on Tuesday. The European benchmark crude traded at a premium of $8.68 to WTI for the same month. US crude inventories have gained for nine weeks through March 6 to 448.9 million barrels, the most in weekly En-ergy Information Administration data dating back to August 1982. Produc-tion accelerated to 9.37 million barrels

a day, the fastest pace since at least January 1983, according to the Energy Department’s statistical arm. The nation’s oil output will prob-ably start contracting by the end of the year because some companies can’t continue to operate at current price levels, Vitol Group’s Ian Taylor said in Cape Town on Tuesday. The CEO of the world’s largest independent oil trader predicted no return to $100 a barrel within three years. Bloomberg News

Vista Land said it reached a record profit last year of P5.71 billion, some 13 percent higher than the previous year’s income. Revenues from real-estate sales hit a record P22.2 billion in 2014, from P20.02 billion during the previous year. The company’s board also ap-proved its P1.5-billion buyback pro-gram that will be implemented in the next 24 months. “The board and management of the company believe that its shares are trading at price level that is lower than the fair value thereof,” the com-pany said. Vista Land said the revenue increase was due to the overall

completion rate of sold inventories of its business units, particularly of Communities Philippines, Vista Residences and Crown Asia. Revenue from Vista Residences increased by 76 percent, to P2.07 billion from P1.18 billion last year, due to the number of sold condo-minium units—completed or under construction—during the year. Vista Residences is the business unit of Vista Land that develops and sells vertical projects across the Philippines. Camella Homes revenues increased to P5.9 billion as of end 2014 from P5.57 billion in the previous year. Real-estate revenue of Com-

munities Philippines increased by 11 percent, to P10.37 billion from P9.35 billion in the previous year. Brittany, however, reported a 17-per-cent decrease in revenues to P1.2 bil-lion due to the drop in the number of sold homes—completed or under con-struction—in the Mega Manila area in the high-end housing segment. Crown Asia, the brand for the mid-dle-income segment, also reported a decrease in revenues by 5 percent to P2.32 billion, from the previous year’s P2.46 billion. Vista Land said the said declines were “a reflection of the company’s focus on meeting the increased de-mand for housing in the low-cost

and affordable [segments], as well as in the middle-income housing seg-ments serviced by its other business units.” Villar, however, said Vista Land is taking advantage of the “rising middle class” in the Philip-pines, but through its commercial and retail segment. “We are also ramping up our com-mercial developments within, or near, our existing residential devel-opments to build up our recurring revenue base while enhancing the value of our residential projects,” he said, adding that the company is on track to meet its P1-billion target for commercial revenues by 2017 from just about P100 million.

“The Philippines’s per-capita income stood at only $2,836 in 2014 compared against the ‘BBB’ median of $10,654,” Fitch said. Fitch also said continued strengthening in governance standards that could lead to a better business climate, a strong gross domestic product (GDP) accompanied by a narrowing of income and development and the broadening of the general government revenue base should help push the rating higher going forward. “Consistently robust growth and macroeco-nomic fundamentals built over the past four years affirm that the Philippine economic story is defined by sustainability, stability and resiliency. Looking ahead, we expect credit ratings to further improve as the country continues to register even better fundamentals on the back of expanded fiscal space and continued governance reforms,” Purisima said. A sustained period of overheating that leads to the instability of the financial system and a de-terioration in governance standards or reversal of reforms could push the country’s credit stature lower down the line, according to Fitch. While Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Governor Amando M. Tetangco Jr. welcomed

this development, Purisima said the Philippines remains a country whose credit stature is under-rated by the major sovereign credit watchers. “The Philippine economy has reached a level of resiliency that is more comfortable than that of its peers, as a result of accumulation of sufficient foreign-exchange buffer, sturdy financial system, and price stability. All of these are anchored on prudent monetary policy and effective supervi-sion of banks and other financial institutions,” Tetangco said. On the subject of the Philippines as an under-rated sovereign, Bank of the Philippine Islands economist Nicholas Antonio Mapa said unless specific deficiencies are addressed, Fitch could stick by its conviction that the sovereign does not deserve an upgrade. “True, our fiscal numbers con-tinue to improve but if this comes at the expense of the failure to address deficiencies such as poor physical infrastructure, further upgrades may not be forthcoming,” Mapa said. “Improvements in governance standards and tax collection are also needed, as well as an im-provement in per-capita GDP...Improvement in our per-capita GDP may take time,” he added.

if that happens,” Espenilla said at the sidelines of a forum organized by the Asian Development Bank. Espenilla said the foreign banks initially applied to set up mere branches, which are easier to organize although such would have limited banking services to offer because of their limited range. A foreign bank branch is easier to set up than a subsidiary unit because the foreign principals looking to establish a subsidiary here in the Philippines could look for a partner bank, in which they can buy into. Espenilla said this was because establishing a subsidiary from scratch takes a lot of time, which is also why the three foreign banks are looking to establish a branch first that they can later on upgrade into a subsidiary. “The problem with setting up a subsidiary is that they need something to acquire. It’s hard to set up from scratch as a subsid-iary because it takes a lot of time,” Espenilla said. “Right now, all three applications are for the establishment of branches because they can do that unilaterally; it’s just a matter of deciding that they want to enter this market, instead of having to acquire a bank,” he added. Under the law, establishing a local branch of a foreign bank in the Philippines requires a minimum capital of P2 billion, and the local branch is entitled to only one head office. A local branch could expand to up to six more offices, subject to capitalization requirements for establishing more than one office. Espenilla said many foreign banks adopt the strategy of estab-lishing a branch first and convert them into a subsidiary later on if they plan expanded operations here.

In an interview with re-porters, de Lima insisted that the temporary restraining order (TRO) issued by the CA Sixth Division on March 16, 2014, can no longer be imple-mented for being moot  and academic since   the six-month preventive suspen-sion order had been served by the Department of the Interior and Local Govern-ment (DILG) before the TRO was issued. De Lima shared the same opinion with Ombuds-man Conchita Carpio-Morales, a former Supreme

news@businessmirror.com.ph Editor: Dionisio L. Pelayo • Thursday, March 19, 2015 A3BusinessMirrorThe Nation

De Lima takes on CAjustices over Binay case

By Joel R. San Juan

JUSTICE Secretary Leila de Lima on Wednesday cautioned justices of

the Court of Appeals (CA) from issuing further orders that would negate the suspension of Makati Mayor Erwin “Junjun” Binay Jr. without first conducting a hearing. 

Court associate justice, who stressed that the TRO has become moot as there is no more act to be restrained. “So, the status quo that the TRO sought to preserve was the vice mayor took his oath of office. That is the status quo, that is the situation right now,” she said. But while  de Lima admitted that the camp of Binay may avail before the CA of other legal rem-edies, she insisted the appellate cannot issue any order that would allow the the son of Vice President Jejomar C. Binay to reassume his post without set-ting the matter for a hearing first. “I don’t want to say what legal remedies they can avail of, although in my letter I said they should go back to the Court of Appeals  and secure the proper order. But any order now that must come out of the Court of Apeals has to be first heard or set for hear-ing and should not be an ex parte,” de Lima added. “So any other order na hingin ng petitioner at puwedeng ibigay ng CA kung maniniwala silang may basehan cannot be just issued without hearing both sides particularly respondents through the Solgen [solicitor general],” she added.  In her legal opinion issued on Tuesday, de Lima explained that the TRO issued in favor of Binay “is without legal force and effect because it is already moot and academic, the acts sought to be restrained having already been performed and accomplished.” “Whether the TRO seeks to restrain the is-suance by the Ombudsman of the assailed joint order, or its  implementation by the DILG, the same is already moot and academic, simply be-cause before they were restrained, the Ombuds-man had already issued the joint order and the DILG had already implemented the suspension of Mayor Binay,” she added.

‘I T has now become necessary for ordinary citizens to be-come involved in national

political affairs.” The clear continuing failure of the past and present governments to push the economic and politi-cal development of the Philippines, particularly their inability to reduce substantially the present extensive spread of poverty, spurred a con-cerned group of ordinary citizens to form their own political party. The party, Buklod, was orga-nized and its registration was ap-proved by the Commission on Elec-tions in 2009. Buklod’s formation was spearheaded by the founder of top auditing firm, Punongbayan & Araullo, Benjamin Punongbayan. The new national political par-ty aims to provide an alternative to the current breed of ineffective and self-interest-motivated politi-cal leaders, who are trapped in a dys-functional system and practices, in leading the country to a new thrust to seek to achieve the long-sought aspira-tions of the Filipino people for a much better life. Buklod, the vernacular for Union, aims to boldly thrust the Philippines through large-scale reforms hinged on well- formulated programs which are enshrined in a party document called

Buklod Objectives and Beliefs. The primary focus of these re-forms is eradication of poverty. Finding the solution to this long-term problem has now become very urgent. Poverty still remains unac-ceptably extensive. According to the latest SWS survey, more than 50 percent of Filipino fami-lies rated themselves poor. Buklod aims to provide direct state intervention to deal with this problem in two major ways. One is to provide reasonable assurance that the children of poor parents who almost always were unable to complete basic education to finish high school and thereby break the cycle of poverty. Buklod plans to do this by providing free meals and transportation to children of poor parents under the poverty threshold and using moral suasion to parents to keep their children in school us-ing available means, including the barangay system. The other major thrust is to pro-vide those families under the pov-erty threshold a piece of land for free where they can build a home ala Ga-wad Kalinga with government finan-cial assistance. The party considers the adoption of this public policy as a modest form of restitution to the current economically poor descen-

dants of our ancestors who were dispossessed of the use of the land during the Spanish conquest and administration. Buklod’s calcula-tions indicate that this program is affordable and doable over a reason-able period of time. Punongbayan said that Buklod’s program of government also covers other major thrusts relating to the in-creasing employment and sustaining high economic growth. These include embarking on a more engaged and in-tensive development of agriculture, small businesses and tourism; iden-tifying and developing the economic activities that the Philippines and Filipinos can do best; reduction of the cost of doing business; developing a blueprint for long-term infrastruc-ture development, particularly in all forms of transportation, including those that will connect the country’s major islands. On political development, Buk-lod’s chairman indicated that the party will advocate and favor to pass laws relating to anti-dynasty, free-dom of information, wider decen-tralization of government services to the local governments and the reallocation of government funds for that purpose and elimination of the pork-barrel system in whatever form.

Need for total reform prompts formation of new political party

binay

BusinessMirror news@businessmirror.com.ph A4

Economybriefs

p15 wage hike for metro manila workers ‘insulting’Labor groups expressed dismay over the P15 wage increase for Metro Manila workers approved by the wage board on Tuesday. In separate statements, two of the country’s biggest labor groups said the P15 wage hike for Metro Manila workers is “insulting” and “disrespectful.” The Kilusang Mayo Uno said the P15 wage hike approved by the Metro Manila wage board for is nil compared to what workers need to cope with the cost of day-to-day living. The approved wage increase is “meager” and “insulting” to the country’s workers and will not stop protests against the government. “If [President] aquino thinks this wage hike will weaken workers’ protests calling for his resignation, then he is sorely mistaken. This meager wage hike is insulting to workers and does not address the government’s and big capitalists’ attacks against the minimum wage,” he said. The Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP)– Nagkaisa, on the other hand, said the wage increase is unacceptable. TUCP Spokesman alan Tanjusay said Filipino workers who continue to contribute to im-prove and sustain the country’s high economic growth under the aquino administration for so many years de-serve more than a P15 wage increase. Jonathan L. Mayuga

sss to issue certifications for taiwan-bound ofwsThe Social Security System (SSS) will issue certifications of application for the Unified Multipurpose ID (UMID) card of members seeking employment in Taiwan.

The certifications will be issued to help job seekers comply with the requirements for a Taiwanese working visa, pending the release of their UMID cards.

SSS Manager for ID Card Production Jose antonio Salazar said the Taipei economic and Cultural office in Manila has agreed to accept SSS certifications in consideration of the status of SSS UMID card production.

The SSS is currently experiencing delay in UMID card production as card printing is temporarily suspended due to the ongoing acquisition for UMID card-printing services.

“To address the urgency of their applications for an ID, we will issue the certification after two working days from receipt of request,” Salazar said. PNA

denr mangrove-beach forest plan gets p400-m seed fundThe Department of budget and Management (DbM) has released an initial P400 million to the Department of environment and Natural resources (DeNr) for their Mangrove and beach Forest Development Project (MbFDP) under the National Greening Program.

The amount, representing 40 percent of the total P1.0-billion funding requirement of the project as recommended by the National Disaster risk reduction and Management Council, will be charged against the rehabilitation and reconstruction Program under the fiscal year 2014 General appropriations act.

Under this project, the national government—with the participation of concerned stakeholders from both local government units and the private sector/non-governmental organizations—will develop mangroves and beach forests in areas affected by Supertyphoon Yolanda and other disasters that hit several regions in the country.

budget Secretary Florencio b. abad said that “all of our rehabilitation efforts will need to be grounded on ensuring the safety of communities against natural disasters in the future. That’s why comprehensive preparation and prevention are key elements in our policy of build back better, which includes the replanting of mangrove and beach forests on our coastlines.” PNA

By Henry EmpeñoCorrespondent

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT—Festi-vals, sports and special events, and scenic natural attractions

gave the Subic Bay Freeport and the province of Zambales the ticket to fame as most sought-after destina-tions in Central Luzon last year, at-tracting about 1.2 million visitors from January to December. According to a report from the Department of Tourism in Region 3, Subic Bay and Zambales generat-ed more than a third of the region’s overall arrival figure of 3.1 million based on monthly survey reports submitted by accommodation estab-lishments in the region. Meanwhile, Clark and Pampanga, along with Angeles City, came in second with about 621,000 arrivals; followed by Bataan with 199,000; Bu-lacan 109,000; and Aurora 108,000. Tourism Regional Director Ron-aldo Tiotuico said that as a whole, the unprecedented increase in visi-tor arrivals to the region in 2014 was powered by new developments in Subic and Clark, which have become two of the most favored destinations in the region. The influx of visitors last year, Tiotuico added, increased the re-gion’s arrival figures by 21 percent, compared to 2.7 million recorded in 2013. Aside from Subic and Clark, Tio-tuico said the annual surfing event in Aurora, the energized reconstitu-tion of the Association of Tourism Officers of Central Luzon, and the participation of Central Luzon in major tourism and travel exposi-tions in the country, all played a vital role in developing the region as a major destination. Here in Subic, a similar uptrend in visitor arrivals has been recorded by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Author-ity (SBMA) by monitoring the gates of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway. The SBMA said that about 6.39 million visitors went to Subic last year mostly on day tours, eclipsing by 12 percent the 5.69 million arrivals monitored through the gates in 2013. SBMA Chairman Roberto Garcia attributed the increase in the number of Subic visitors to a 43-percent in-crease in the number of meeting, in-centive, convention and exhibition (MICE) and special events hosted at the free port, as well as to a 59-percent jump in the number of local sports events held in the free port. “The substantial improvement in the number of MICE and special events resulted in a corresponding increase in the number of foreign and local participants by 93 per-cent and 94 percent, respectively,” Garcia said. “Likewise, there was a credible in-crease of 75 percent in the number of foreign participants despite a 6-per-cent drop in the number of interna-tional sports events held in the free port,” he added. Garcia also pointed out that Subic has been attracting more overnight tourists recently because of the re-cent upsurge in the construction of hotels and accommodation facilities in the free port. In Iba, Zambales, meanwhile, the Provincial Tourism and Invest-ment Promotion Office (PTIPO) said that festivals and sports events have proven to be the major tourism draws in the province, aside from beaches and mountains that are popular to surfers and hikers. “Our main attract ions, of course, are the beaches and islands in the towns of San Antonio, San Narciso, Iba, Masinloc and Can-delaria, as well as Mount Tapulao in the town of Palauig,” PTIPO Manager Tel Mora said. “But more and more people are coming over because of our festivals, notably the Zambales Mango Festi-val, which is held every summer, and the various sports events being held almost every quarter,” she added.

By Lenie Lectura

The energy Regulatory Commission (eRC) has approved changes to the rules gov-erning the Interruptible Load Program

(ILP), a government initiated program meant to address the anticipated power shortage this summer season. The commission, according to its executive Director Francis Juan, has approved to include “contestable customers and also directly con-nected customers, ecozones, and other distribu-tion utilities [DUs].” Contestable customers are those with a monthly average peak demand of at least 1 megawatt (MW). To draw in additional power-generation capacity needed by the country, the eRC has moved to amend the ILP rules that used to cover only the DUs. “To make the ILP more responsive in miti-gating system emergencies, the eRC expanded its coverage and introduced other changes to its ILP rules to include and attract more participants to join. More participants mean additional reduc-tions in overall demand to be realized. With this, the anticipated critical supply condition during certain peak periods in the next few months is addressed more effectively and in a cost-efficient manner,” Juan said in a text message when sought to elaborate. Under the ILP scheme, big power users will be asked to run their own generators when supply is short in the summer months, instead of getting their power from the Luzon grid. In exchange, they will be compensated for their fuel expense. The electricity that would not be taken from the grid would be available to house-holds and other users, sparing them from rotating blackouts.

Thursday, March 19, 2015 • Editors: Vittorio V. Vitug and Max V. de Leon

The twin projects, the PPP Cen-ter said, are the P50.18-billion Regional Prison Facilities and the P55.51-billion Cavite Laguna (Cala) Expressway Project. The prebidding conference for the prison faci l ity project wil l be conducted at the Philip-

pine International Convention Center in Pasay City. The project, a first in the Phil-ippines, will entail the construc-tion and maintenance of a modern prison facility at Fort Magsaysay in Nueva Ecija. The PPP Center added that the

2 PPP projects worth P105.69B slated for prebidding on Friday

By Cai U. Ordinario

Two big-ticket public-private partnership (PPP) projects are scheduled to undergo

prebidding procedures on Friday according to the PPP Center.

prebid conference for the Cala Ex-pressway will be at the Department of Public Works and Highways Cen-tral Office. The expressway PPP project will provide a critical link for the prov-inces of Cavite and Laguna con-necting two major toll roads—the Cavite Expressway (Cavitex) and the South Luzon Expressway. The prebidding conference aims to clarify and address bidder’s ques-tions on the technical and financial components of each project. Both projects were rolled out on February 27 this year. As of March 10 there are 60 PPP proj-ects in the pipeline with a total indicative cost of P1.23 trillion, or $27.26 billion. Since 2010 the national gov-

ernment has awarded nine PPP projects worth $2.89 bi l l ion; two PPPs worth $2.13 billion for implementation; and 11 proj-ects under procurement worth $6.31 bil l ion. Earlier, the PPP Center said five projects worth $6.69 billion were already approved for roll-out or just awaiting the issuance of the invitation to prequalify to bid, and two projects worth $8.65 billion that has been submitted for approval of relevant govern-ment agencies. There are also 13 projects with ongoing studies; six projects that are currently procuring consultants; and 13 projects under conceptu-alization. Cost estimates of these projects are yet to be divulged.

The ILP, however, is voluntary. As of latest count, the Manila electric Co. (Meralco) has signed up more participants for the ILP, bringing to 667.29 MW of committed interruptible load (CIL) for the summer. It has registered 80 customers from the private sector that will contribute 393.36 MW of capac-ity. It, likewise, signed up 1.7 MW of CIL from the government sector. Contestable customer participants, or those with a monthly average peak demand of at least 1 MW, has signed up a total of 264.73 MW of in-terruptible load. Of which, 110.44 MW will come from different Retail electricity Suppliers (ReS) and 154.29 MW from Power, the retail electricity supplier unit of Meralco. “If the ILP coverage was not expanded, Mer-alco could only call on its captive customers to

join the ILP,” Juan added. The amended ILP rules included those that are directly connected with the National Grid Corp. of the Philippines (NGCP). “These rules shall apply to all DUs and their respective participating captive customer within their franchise area, to all DUs that entered into a tripartite ILP agreement with a retail electric-ity supplier and its participating contestable customers, and the NGCP that entered into an ILP agreement with a participating directly con-nected customer,” the eRC said. The eRC wants the ILP to be implemented for the contestable customers under a tripar-tite agreement to be executed among the DU, ReS and the participating contestable customer. For directly connected customers,

the ILP shall be administered by the NGCP through an ILP agreement. The NGCP shall pay the participating customer an amount representing the incremental cost in-curred due to the full or partial deloading. The eRC also wants the NGCP to submit a monthly report on its ILP implementation, containing details of its calculations of the de-loading compensation. The amended rules were approved amid Congress’s failure to pass legislation that would determine who should foot the bill for the com-pensation to ILP participants. The house version wants to provide for a full-government subsidy of ILP costs via the Malam-paya Funds but the Senate version wants this to be a pass-through charge.

eRC expands ILP coverage; CIL count stands at 667.29 MW

Subic Freeport, Zambales emerge as top Central Luzon tourism attractions

By Lorenz S. Marasigan

The health-care subsidiary of holding company Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) is planning to acquire about three hospitals this year to expand its capacity, the conglomerate’s chief honcho said on Thursday.

In a chance interview, businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan said his company is negotiating with private hospital owners around the Philippines for possible buyout deals. “We look at acquiring two or three hospitals within the year,” he said. “These are from areas outside Metro Manila.” The conglomerate is targeting to increase the hospital group’s capacity to 5,000 beds in the coming years. It aims to close 2016 with a total of 3,000 hospital beds around the country. Pangilinan earlier said his company will be acquiring a “dozen” hospitals outside Manila in the next few years. The funding for the acquisition of more hospitals will partly come from the P2-billion capital spending that the health-care group has programmed for this year. Last year Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, Government of Singapore Investment Corp., invested P3.7 billion for a 14.4-percent stake in Metro Pacific hospital holdings Inc. It also made an advance of P6.5 billion in exchangeable bond with MPIC, which can be exchanged into a 25.5-percent stake in the hospitals group. The hospital Group has significant investments in De Los Santos Medical Center, Asian hospital in Alabang, Muntinlupa City; Our Lady of Lourdes hospital in Santa Mesa, Manila; Riverside Medical Center in Bacolod City, Negros Occidental; Cardinal Santos Medical Center in San Juan City; Davao Doctors hospital and Nursing College, and Makati Medical Center in Makati City.

tall order A group of workers use construction scaffoldings to put finishing touches on the wall of a newly completed structure along Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City. NONOY LACZA

MPIC to acquire 3 more hospitals this year–MVP

bumper harvest Shallot farmers in Barangay Salsalamagui, Vintar, Ilocos Norte, seek to find a way to be able to market their summer bumper harvest. They may excel in raising and cultivating their crops but a good majority of these farmers are yet to undergo training on good agricultural practices to be able to find suitable markets for their products. Pegged at a farm-gate price of P8 to P10 per kilo of shallot, several vegetable farmers here urged the Department of Agriculture to help them market their produce. PNA

briefsecology group donates

portable solar lamps to palawan residentsDAVAO CITY—The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) would be giving portable solar lamps to families in northern Palawan as part of its celebration of Earth Month, and when it holds another round of the Earth Hour, a simultaneous switching off of electric-powered lights globally. “This year, [the] Earth Hour shall fund the Gift of Light. Solar lamps rely on the power of the sun, eliminating the need to buy fuel. We’re teaching communities to veer away from fossil fuels, the burning of which contributes to climate change,” Climate Change Unit and Earth Hour Philippines Head lawyer Gia Ibay said. The WWF said that environ- mentalist organizations would center on the village of Beton for its solar-lighting project to replace the reliance of this coastal community to kerosene lamps. “To help families in Palawan safely and economically light up their homes, Earth Hour, a global movement led by the WWF, shall give portable solar lamps to 300 families,” the WWF said. Manuel T. Cayon

philmech: phl remains a laggard in mechanized farming

sc defers ruling on plea to shelve k-to-12 programTHE Supreme Court (SC) has deferred its ruling on whether to stop the implementation of the K to 12 program, a national 12-year basic- education program. During Tuesday’s en banc session, the SC justices decided not to rule yet on the petition against the K to 12 education program. Chief Justice Maria Lourdes P. Aranal Sereno is now in Singapore for an official mission. The justices decided to wait on the next en banc session to rule on the case. The SC en banc will deliberate on the petition against K to 12 program on March 24. The petition was filed by the Coalition for the Suspension of K to 12, Suspend K to 12 Alliance and the Council of Teachers and Staff of Universities and Colleges in the Philippines. PNA

By Lenie Lectura

Shell Philippines exploration B.V. (SPeX), the upstream company of Shell

in the Philippines in charge of operating the Malampaya Deep Water Gas-to-Power Project, may default in its obligations if it did not implement Phase 3 of the Malampaya expansion program on time. The Malamapaya natural-gas facility is currently off line for 30 days until April 14 to give way for the maintenance work and the installation of a second platform. SPeX Commercial Manager Teresa loresco could not stress enough the importance of an ongoing expansion through Phase 3, which involves the instal lation of new compressors and a platform. She said that this is meant to keep up the volume of gas production. “If we implement Phase 3 next year, there will be constraint in gas [supply] and we will not be able to fulfill the demand for the 2,700-megawatt gas-fired power plants,” loresco said. And if Malampaya can’t produce gas, then SPeX will not be able to deliver gas to fire up three natural-gas power plants: 1,000-megawatt (MW) Santa Rita, 500-MW San lorenzo and 1,200-MW Ilijan. SPeX has a contractual obligation to supply gas to First Gen Corp., which owns Santa Rita and San lorenzo power plants, and to Kepco Philippines, which owns Ilijan. “We won’t be able to meet our contractual obligations to our existing customers so we need to carry out Phase 3 now,” loresco said. The Malampaya gas field off Palawan contains 2.7 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 85 million barrels of condensate. The consortium has consumed around 1.5 cubic trillion of gas and the facility is expected to run out of gas by 2024. To sustain the level of gas production committed under existing contracts, the consortium has started a $1-billion expansion program through Phases 2 and 3. “For Phase 3 the work involved is the installation of the platform which will help source the gas. We also need to install new compressors so that the pressure is strong,” explained the SPeX official. The consortium is composed of SPeX, 45 percent; Chevron Malampaya llc., 45 percent; and Philippine National Oil Company-exploration Corp., 10 percent.

In a study titled A System-wide Study of the logistics Industry in the Greater Capital Region, PIDS researchers led by epictetus e. Pa-talinghug said the amount included lost Customs revenue, output losses, and vehicle operating costs. “This value includes employment and output losses of manufacturing firms in economic zones net of truck-ban benefits such as reduced emis-

sions and traffic congestion in the restricted areas,” the study stated. The researchers estimated that the Bureau of Customs (BOC) loss-es cornered the lion’s share of the amount. The Customs agency’s rev-enue losses reached an estimated P25.55 billion. This was followed by output losses that reached P18.20 billion during the seven-month period.

news@businessmirror.com.ph Thursday, March 19, 2015 A5BusinessMirrorEconomy

The truck ban in the city of Manila also caused other prob-lems such as the doubling of ship-ping costs for 20 footer and/or 40 footer containers. Prior to the truck ban, the study noted that shipping costs for these types of containers amounted to P18,000 but after the truck ban, the cost reached P36,000. “Port congestion as a result of the truck ban led to time delay in cargo releasing. For instance, a cargo that took from three to four days to be released before the truck ban took from seven to 10 days to be released after the truck ban,” the study added. To help ease congestion in Met-ro Manila, the study urged the national government to consider shifting road-based freight trans-port to rail transport. The study stated that under a 50- percent, 70-percent, and 100-per-cent shift of road-based freight trans-port to rail transport will remove 1 percent to 4 percent of truck traffic from the city streets.

The researchers said that while the shift will not result in a greater contribution to ease congestion in Metro Manila streets, giving ship-pers alternatives would improve the freight industry. “With traffic congestion going to get worse in Metro Manila, ship-pers/locators could opt to bypass Metro Manila by using the rail sys-tem to transport their goods, while at the same time, truckers can still provide their services when moving the goods from the inland container terminals to the end destination of the goods or the other way around,” the researchers said. The study also urged the govern-ment to consider developing new export processing zones near rail-way lines so that shippers can use rail as an incentive in transporting their products. The rail system, the study stated, should be able to connect processing zones, ports and airports to improve the transport of goods in and out of Metro Manila.

Manila City Hall’s truck ban wasted P43.85B–PIDS study

By Cai U. Ordinario

The Philippine economy lost an estimated P43.85 billion due to the seven-month truck

ban imposed by the city of Manila last year, according to a study released by state-owned think tank Philippine Institute of Development Studies (PIDS).

SPEX official says Malampaya repair imperative

simply shades An enterprising vendor takes to the sidewalk his pile of sunglass merchandise on an early Sunday morning near the Baclaran Church in Parañaque City. Demand for sunglasses, or shades, is expected to peak with the onset of the summer season. AlySA SAlEn

The chairman of the house Committee on energy ad-mitted on Wednesday that

no additional powers for Presi-dent Aquino will be granted by Congress to address the expected power shortage during the sum-mer season.

The panel chairman and Orien-tal Mindoro Rep. Reynaldo Umali said he had done his part but no one from the two houses of Congress wanted to give in.

“I have talked to my colleagues and the house leadership if we can bargain some provisions but the decision is final that we need to stand on our version,” Umali told reporters in a chance interview.

his Senate counterpart, led by Sen. Sergio Osmeña III, also stood pat on their version and had not scheduled for another bicameral conference meeting. Congress is scheduled to go on a traditional lenten break starting Thursday. Sessions will resume on May 4.

The house members are strong-ly pushing for the no-pass-on scheme in using the Interruptible load Program (IlP) as it is eye-ing to tap the Malampaya funds as subsidy.

“We may approve it but we can-not ratify it at the f loor because of the upcoming break,” Umali told reporters.

The Senate said the adoption

It’s final: Aquino won’t get emergency powers

of the IlP scheme would cost consumers P7 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to P8 per kWh under its version of the emergency powers.

On the time frame, the Senate still wants the special powers to be

extended until July 2016, while the house only wants it from March to July of this year. Both chambers want the govern-ment to mainly use the IlP in gen-erating additional power capacity

during these dry months. he added that with the non-pas-sage of the measure, any increases of power rates will be shouldered by the end consumers under the epira law. PNA

ides of march Two kids find the best spot to offer prayers for divine intervention at the height of a fire at a densely populated area in Tonsuya, Malabon City, on Tuesday night, lasting until dawn on Wednesday. The blaze affected 500 families, killed two residents and some P3 million worth of property turned to ash. KEvin dE lA Cruz

By Kris M. CrismundoPhilippines News Agency

AtotAl of 37.45 million Filipinos were employed in January 2015, or 1.04 million more than the 36.4 million employed in the same month last year, the latest labor Force Survey (lFS)

of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed.the PSA statistics also showed that the majority of jobs during the

first month of this year came from the services sector.According to PSA, 54.6 percent of the over 37.45 million employed

are working in services sector; 29.5 percent in agriculture; and 15.9 percent are in industries.

Among sectors, the agriculture sector had the highest poverty incidence, according to previous data of the PSA.

Economists, including from the World Bank, as well as Economic Planning Secretary Arsenio M. Balisacan, noted that jobs in manufac-turing sector will promote inclusive growth.

though providing large number of employment in the country, jobs in services sector require higher level of skills.

the January 2015 lFS noted that 45 percent of about 2.64 job-less population only had secondary level as their highest educa-tional attainment; 34 percent are high-school graduates, while 11 percent are undergraduates.

But secondary-level skills, mostly, are not enough to get jobs in the services sector, particularly the booming sector of business-process outsourcing (BPo).

on the other hand, manufacturing sector can absorb jobless indi-viduals with high school as their highest level of education attained.

Manufacturing is also a labor-intensive sector.Meanwhile, total approved investments for the full-year of 2014

rose to P756 billion from P754 billion in 2013, PSA’s national Statisti-cal Coordination Board (nSCB) data showed.

Manufacturing sector secured second largest investment or a quar-ter of total approved investments last year amounting to P186 billion.

these investments increased job creation in the sector by 35 percent.

PSA-nSCB noted that projected jobs in the manufacturing sector brought by investments in 2014 reached 86,941, while job creation from approved investments in 2013 were pegged at 64,416. Firms registered only in seven investment promotion agencies (iPAs) in the country attracted these jobs. But job creation in services sector remains fast. PSA-nSCB data showed that in real-estate activities alone, around 100,179 jobs are projected to be created by investments in iPAs. Administrative and support service activities are expected to create 56,354 jobs. With only 15 months left for the current administration to push its agenda, Balisacan, who is also the director general of national Economic and development Authority, pushed for reforms critical to attracting investments, employment generation, and inclusive growth. Balisacan cited that cutting down cost of doing business, pushing for competition law, and strengthening social protection will improve the business climate in the country.

PSA: Manufacturing jobs drive PHL’s inclusive growth

THE country targets to increase its mechanization level in agriculture to 4.0 horsepower per hectare (hp/ha) from its current level of 1.23 hp/ha.

Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (PHILMech) Executive Director Rex L. Bingabing, during the business meeting of Italian firms with the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday, said the country still lags behind other Asian countries when it comes to mechanization in agriculture sector.

Mechanization level of Japan is at 18.87 hp/ha, while South Korea is at 9.38 hp/ha and Thailand is at 4.20hp/ha.

“This means farming in the country is still manual or uses animals than machines,” Bingabing said.

“High investment cost appears to be a prime influence in the acquisition of equipment,” he said, adding that the low mechanization level in farming made production volume remain low because of large losses during postharvest.

He cited rice volume losses of 16.47 percent during postharvest specifically during drying and milling processes.

Bingabing said mechanization in farming would reduce post-harvest losses that raised productivity of farmers.

He said that the Philippine Agriculture Mechanization Program would help the country’s target to increase the mechanization level of the agriculture sector.

Under the mechanization program, the Department of Agriculture partners with farmers’ cooperatives to acquire equipment that will boost production volume. PNA

Thursday, March 19, 2015

OpinionBusinessMirrorA6

The wages of bad wageseditorial

IT is common knowledge that the primary reason Filipinos leave the country is to seek greener pas-tures. True enough, the country’s minimum wage disallows a working hand to enjoy a fast-food burger

meal without getting an anxiety attack prior to purchase. Ours is among the lowest in the region, compared to other countries at P481 (private, non-agricultural) while in other private sectors, at P429.

A Business Insider survey conducted in 2013 pegged the Philippines’s mini-mum wage at $0.61, higher only by a bop from Afghanistan, India and Sierra Leone. China, Mexico and Russia are also countries with less than a dollar minimum wage but run kilometers ahead of the Philippines. In this survey, Australia ranks highest at $16.88, with France and New Zealand running sec-ond and third at $12.09 and $11.18, respectively.

In the same year, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) con-ducted an inspection of numerous companies to assist the enforcement of la-bor standards. A little over 600 unionized establishments were surveyed and minimum-wage compliance stood at 95.8 percent. On the other hand, 105 of 120 workplaces in the National Capital Region (NCR) pegged labor violations.

Nationwide, the collective compliance rate reached 81 percent, with the lowest at 37.8 percent in Mindoro, Marinduque and Palawan, according to the DOLE.

The current minimum wage rates according to the DOLE are as follows: NCR, P429-P466; Cordillera Administrative Region, P247-P280; Region 12, P213-P253; Region 2, P219-P255; Region 3, P228-P349; Region 4A, P219-P362.50; Region 4B, P205-P275; Region 5, P236-P260; Region 6, P245-P287; Region 7, P275-P340; Region 8, P220.50-P262; Region 9, P235-P280; Region 10, P279-P306; Region 11, P286-P317; Region 12, P255-P275; Region 13, P248-P268; and Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, P250.

Apparently, the debate on whether a country must ensure higher mini-mum wages for the economy to get a boost remains debatable. The principle, of course, is to pay the worker what he is worth in skills. Simply presuming that a higher minimum wage would increase spending power is sort of a red herring, one that will not be enough to boost gains in productivity. Forbes Magazine said in one of its articles that the “economy is blind to emotion,” and increases in minimum wage could drastically affect compensation structure and company productivity.

But for a country like ours whose economy hinges on domestic spending, it is not wages per se, but opportunities for employment that must be secured, first and foremost. January 2015 saw the unemployment rate “at 6.6 percent, up from 6 percent reported in October 2014 but down from 7.5 percent in the same month a year ago.” Apparently, a said decrease is not enough to alleviate rising incidence of poverty and hunger in the country.

It is from the viewpoint of the worker that the debate on the proper minimum wage must be based. As it is, wages are a part of the thrust of government to safeguard its most precious resource—the people. The lack of family resources to safeguard health and everyday requirements for living threatens govern-ment spending on health, for example, and thereby also threatens productivity.

THE US economy is starting off its worse year since 2000 in terms of released economic data coming in way below estimates. In the last month the expert consensus on

everything from “Personal Spending” to “Housing Starts” through “Wholesale Sales” are below expectations.

By Michael S. Lubell | CQ-Roll Call/TNS

SCIENTIFIC research is dramatically more global in its practice and impact than it was just a decade ago. Whether the US is able to capitalize effectively on new discoveries stemming

from international collaborations will determine future economic growth and job creation in America.

It’s how you play the game

Innovation in an age of global science

Even as I write this, the American apologists are running for their com-puters to tell me how little I know about the US economy and how great things are over there in the land of milk and honey. And of course, it is the weather that we must blame. Home construc-tion fell like a rock, down over 50 percent in those areas affected by the last winter storm. Yet amazingly, ac-cording to US government data, the storm did not seem to affect anything when it came to the increase in non-farm payrolls.

But last year when the payroll numbers were released for the same period and were down, the weather was to blame.

We know that government moves the data to serve its own political pur-poses. However, some data cannot be massaged.

Nearly 50 percent—47 percent to be as exact as possible—of American adults are receiving more money from

the government than they are paying in taxes. This is not in the benefits from a newly built bridge or medical insurance. This is cash and goods like food and cell-phone subsidies.

An argument might be made that it is a much-needed and justified redistri-bution of wealth from the “rich” to the “poor.” But that “progressive” concept is all nonsense. On January 21, 2009, the total US national government debt was $10.625 trillion. Today that debt is $18.005 trillion. Over $7 trillion or $20,000 for every person in the US has been borrowed to “help” the disadvantaged.

As I said before, the total US eco-nomic output is up 18 percent against the national debt being raised by 70 percent in 6 years. In 2008 the US debt ratio to the economy was 76 percent; it is now 102 percent. But, as we are told, the US economy is doing just fine.

The Philippines is projected to show the second strongest economic grow

on the planet in 2015. Whether that estimate proves to be accurate or not is really unimportant. What is important is that the nation’s economy, currency exchange rate, inflation, government budget deficit and government debt are the envy of virtually every other country in the world. But it is almost impossible to find much commentary particularly from local pundits who have anything good say. Any positive comments are always qualified with terms like “inclusive growth” or criti-cism of how all those positive economic qualities are being achieved.

A few years ago, the mantra was that the call center and outsourcing business would soon be dead. Now it is remittances again. Yes, remittance growth in January was low and this may be the start of a trend. But by the same token, we are also showing some unexpectedly better numbers in foreign direct investment. Maybe that will be a new trend also.

Yet when you ask the naysayers about the problems with the Philippine economy and its structure, and more important, the solutions for those problems, the answers are all the same.

The Philippine economy is con-trolled by the oligarchs. Assume for a moment that is true and is a nega-tive, what is the solution? Industries were privatized and sold to these wealthy groups. The reason for that was that the government did not have to funds to properly capitalize and run these industries. Should we now buy them back and make them

government corporations?We are constantly reminded about

unequal wealth distribution. No doubt about that fact. Perhaps Henry Sy was thinking about establishing major control of the mall business when he opened his shoe store in Quiapo, Ma-nila, in 1958. Should the government buy the SM malls and perhaps do a similar distribution as with the Com-prehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

“The Philippines must indus-trialize to give employment to the less-educated.” That is a sound idea. Twenty-five years ago the areas south of Manila had many sport-shoe manu-facturers that all closed down when the companies realized they could increase profits by moving to China. And what products should we manu-facturer in this industrialization? I am sure that there are many like you and me who would gladly invest in a profitable industrial company.

The No. 1 rule of poker is that the winning player is not the one with the best cards. The winner is the one who best plays the cards that have been dealt. So far we are doing pret-ty well and there is always room for improvement.

The US had all the high cards and blew the game.

E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Visit my web site at www.mangunon-markets.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis tools provided by the COL Financial Group Inc.

High-energy physics, or particle physics as it is often called, is the epitome of the growing globalization of science and its recent history holds lessons for the innovation possibilities of tomorrow.

Not long ago, the US was home to three world-class accelerators, mega ma-chines that are the mainstays of particle physics. Now all three—Brookhaven’s AGS, Stanford’s Linear Collider and Fermilab’s Tevatron—are mere memo-ries. What remains is the heritage of the pioneering technologies they developed that are vital to accelerator facilities throughout the world.

Today, many American particle physicists are members of international teams working at such facilities, princi-pally the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a mammoth circular device stretching 17 miles in length and buried as far as 574 feet below ground near Geneva, Switzerland. Dan Brown fictionalized the machine half a dozen years ago in Angels and Demons, a best-selling tale he spun around the creation of a single

gram of antimatter.The LHC, as physicists around the

world call it, never did what Brown imagined it could, but it did produce the Higgs boson with the help of 1,500 US scientists. In physics circles, the Higgs discovery represented a dazzling conclu-sion to decades of work by thousands of scientists from more than 30 countries. But along the way, the European Orga-nization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which hosts the LHC, spawned some-thing even more revolutionary, at least in a public sense.

Spread across the globe, CERN’s sci-entific cast desperately needed a com-munication tool that could transmit im-ages and massive sets of data. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, working in Geneva, delivered the tool: the World Wide Web. And in less than 20 years, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, http, transformed commerce, entertainment, finance and the way we connect with each other.

Clever people in any nation could have seized on Berners-Lee’s creation

and made their fortunes. But the dot-com revolution happened here. And it was no accident.

We had a well-honed entrepreneurial engine: brainy students at top-flight uni-versities, science agencies with a history of supporting the best peer-reviewed research, a legacy of federally funded science discoveries ripe for exploitation, risk taking venture capitalists with deep pockets and well-established laws that protected intellectual property. What ensued is nothing short of one of the most spectacular episodes in the Ameri-can dream.

The High-Performance Comput-ing and Communications Initia-tive—credit Al Gore—enabled Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, then-students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to develop Mosaic. That graphical browser, introduced in 1993, morphed into Netscape Navigator and eventually into today’s three most popular tools, Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Safari.

In 1994, two Stanford electrical en-gineering graduate students, Jerry Yang and David Filo, developed the portal “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” Today, we know it as Yahoo! A few years later, Larry Page, who was pursuing his PhD at Stanford, teamed up with fellow student Sergey Brin, who was drawing support from the National

Science Foundation, and began work on a Web crawler. Their venture is better known as Google.

In 1998, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin launched PayPal, the electronic money- transmission service. Reid Hoffman, who was one of its board members, co-founded LinkedIn in 2002. That same year, Mark Zuckerberg and four of his Harvard classmates launched Facebook. Social media was here to stay.

All that was missing was hardware to make the connectivity portable. In 2007 Steve Jobs turned hope into reality when he unveiled the iPhone. Jobs was a vision-ary and an extraordinary salesman. But neither he nor his company, Apple, was a technology originator. The iPhone and the iPad, which followed in 2010, were enabled by decades of research funded by the US government.

The World Wide Web was the prod-uct of international science. Any nation could have capitalized on it, but the US had the capability to run with it best and fastest. Today science is even more global. Whether we will be able to repli-cate our past success when the next big thing happens somewhere else in the world depends on the preparations we make now: ramping up support of pub-lic universities, reinvigorating federal research budgets and getting venture capitalists to return to the days when risk was not a dirty word.

OUTSIDE THE BOXJohn Mangun

Thursday, March 19, 2015

OpinionA7BusinessMirroropinion@businessmirror.com.ph

The hour of Divine Glory

IN God’s goodness and compassion, the sinner prays to be cleansed of his sin and a clean heart be created for him (Psalm 51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15). The hour when the Son of Man

is glorified, lifted up from the earth, the Father’s name is also glorified (John 12:20-33).

Create a clean heart in MeIN the penitential Psalm 51, the psalmist pleads for forgiveness. He is confident of God’s kindness (hesed), and in the light of this divine kind-ness he hopes that God will be gra-cious (hanan) to him. He appeals to God’s tender compassion (rahamin). Only in the light of divine kindness and compassion can anyone look at his own sins and feel secure that God will blot out his transgressions (pesha, violations against the cov-enant with God) and wash away his guilt (awon, filth and rottenness) and cleanse him of his sin (hattah, being lost and “missing the target”). We have here the three most frequently used biblical Hebrew words for sin checked by three attributes of God echoing throughout the Old Testa-ment: “The Lord is tenderly compas-sionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in kindness and faith-fulness” (Exodus 34:6).

For true transformation, the psalmist asks God to create a puri-fied heart for him and to put a new and steadfast spirit within him. He begs that God will not cast him out of the divine presence and will not deprive him of the divine Spirit who alone effects reconciliation. He prays for the restoration of the covenant shattered by sin. His plea is for the return to him of the joy of salva-tion and for the gift of a generous and willing spirit. The prayer ends with the request that he himself be empowered to teach God’s ways to transgressors, so that sinners may return to God.

The hour has comeTHE Greeks in the gospel want “to see Jesus.” To see Jesus is to enter into His revelation and be involved with Him. In John’s gospel, in order to be seen Jesus must be “lifted up”; He is visible and revealed as crucified.

With the arrival of foreigners seek-ing the full revelation of the cross, Jesus understands that “the hour” has come, the time of universal rev-elation, which means the glorifica-tion of the Son of Man. But the path of this manifestation is paradoxical. Like the gain of wheat that needs to “fall to the ground and die” before it can “bear much fruit,” so also will the Son of Man fall to the ground and die in order to produce the salvation of all.

If for Jesus to die is not to be less but to be more, the crucial in-struction for his followers is clear: they must be ready to die in order to live and have eternal life. They either “love” or “hate” their life in this world, strong words indicating preference and choice in the search for the life that lasts. To love and prefer life in this world is to lose it; to choose to hate it and so offer it up is to keep it. Disciples are those who have decided to follow and serve Je-sus, to live in communion with him even in his death, so as to share in his exaltation, to be with him where he is. And that is in the love of the Father who also honors those who imitate His Son.

Father, glorify Your nameTHE hour and time of Jesus’s glo-rification is also the time of his anguish. He actually dreads the thought of his approaching death. In his troubled mind is he to ask to be spared from this hour of agony and to “love his life in this world”?

But he came precisely to die and of-fer himself for the good of all and so honor his Father. Jesus too must decide to give all for God’s greater glory. He prays that his Father’s name be glorified by his own death and exaltation. The Father’s answer is revealing: He is already glorified by the coming of His Son to give life to all, and He will be glorified still by all those who follow the Son.

Directed to Jesus but meant for the crowd, God’s answer has the paradoxical effect of being somehow heard but not really understood. A thunder, an angel? Heaven answers Jesus’s prayer, but the people still must continue listening to him to receive fully what heaven is giving them. The implications are clear: Satan is out who has ruled the world by seducing man to love life in this world and to fear death absolutely as extinction. Jesus, when he is “lifted up from the earth,” will attract all people to himself and in his death find eternal life.

Alálaong bagá, with the purified heart of the repentant sinner in a new covenant with God, the believer who seeks finds in Jesus on the cross death as exultation, not as extinc-tion. Jesus’s death means “lifted up from the earth,” to the glory of the Father.

Join me in meditating on the Word of God every Sunday, 5 to 6 a.m. on DWIZ 882, or by audio-streaming on www.dwiz882.com.

AlálAong BAgáMsgr. Sabino A. Vengco Jr.

War against nature rages in Southeast AsiaBy William deBuys

Los Angeles Times/ TNS

THE illegal traffic in wildlife, a nearly $20-billion-a-year business, adds up to a global war against nature. Unchecked,

it will give us a most un-Disneyesque future in which Dorothy’s “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!” will truly be over the rainbow. And that’s just for starters.

To grasp the breadth of the carnage, it’s essential to realize that the war against nature affects hundreds of species—not just mega-fauna like elephants, tigers and rhinos, but vast numbers of smaller mammals, amphibians, birds and reptiles—and that the toll is devastating. Among the battlefields, none may be bloodier than the forests of Southeast Asia, for they lie closest to China, the world’s most ravenous (and lucrative) market for wildlife and wildlife parts.

China’s taste for wildlife penetrates the least visited corners of the region, where pro-fessional poachers industriously gather live porcupines and turtles, all manner of venison, monkey hands, python fat, pangolin scales, ot-ter skins, gall bladders, antlers and hundreds of other items. These goods, dead or alive, are smuggled to China and other “Asian Tigers” whose expanding economies enable increas-ing numbers of people to afford animal-based “cures” that they think might stave off disease. They also feed a brisk business in fancy, wild-animal restaurant meals intended to impress in-laws and business associates.

Think of it this way: Every year, more and more money chases fewer and fewer creatures.

In a typical forest in Southeast Asia you might encounter a snare line stretching a kilometer or more along a mountain ridge or all the way across a canyon. These are waist-high walls of chopped brush—hedges of death.

The hedges have gaps every few meters, and almost any mammal moving through the landscape will eventually pass through one of the gaps. In each one, a snare awaits beneath a camouflage of leaves. Powered by a bent-over sapling, it consists of a loop of bicycle brake

cable, or truck-winch cable for larger animals like tigers. Snares that are effective against deer and wild pigs can have triggers sensitive enough to capture creatures as light of foot as a silver pheasant, the males of which shimmer in the dusky forest like bundles of fallen moonbeams.

On an expedition to central Lao PDR, my companions and I made our way into a forest distinguished mainly by its remoteness. The head of our expedition, conservation biologist William Robichaud, the only other westerner in our group of 14, told me that, unless a distressed American pilot during the Vietnam War had parachuted into the watershed before us, ours were the first blue eyes to see it.

Isolation, however, failed to protect the lush canyons and ridges we surveyed. In a matter of days, we collected wires from almost a thou-sand snares. In them, we found the decaying carcasses of badgers, mongooses, various birds, deer (which belonged to a critically endangered species) and more.

We camped by fish-rich rivers that had been stripped of their otters and saw the remains of dozens of poachers’ camps, some elaborately equipped with butchering tables and smok-ing racks. Saddest of all was the sight of a red-shanked douc, perhaps the most beautiful monkey in the world, dangling upside down from a snare pole, having succumbed to as slow and cruel a death as might be imagined. Poachers check their snare lines haphazardly and leave them armed when they depart an area. This means the killing goes on indefinitely, no mat-ter if the bodies languish and rot.

Though we were in the forest to remove snares and assess the ongoing damage, our main goal was to search for saola (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis), one of the rarest large mammals on the planet. Its existence, though known to locals, was revealed to science only in 1992, when researchers spotted a strange set of horns in a hunter’s shack high in the mountains of Vietnam.

Saola proved to be a new species, a new genus and possibly even a new taxonomic tribe, although the jury is still out on that. A ruminant with cloven hooves, a saola stands a little higher

than a carousel pony. Deerlike, but more thickly built, its muzzle is splashed with camo pat-terns of white, and its tri-colored tail—white, chocolate brown and black—blends with simi-lar bands of color on its rump. Its long, nearly straight horns taper elegantly, and in profile they seem to blend into a single horn, producing the otherworldly appearance of a unicorn.

Today no one knows whether the clock of extinction for the saola stands at two minutes before midnight or two minutes after. The great-est threat to its survival is the kind of snaring we witnessed on our expedition, which is doubly tragic, for saola are not generally targeted by poachers. In spite of its exotic horns, the animal is unknown in traditional Chinese medicine. Rather, the last survivors of the species risk being taken as by-catch, like sea turtles in a shrimper’s net.

The situation may be terrible, but there are parks and protected areas in Southeast Asia that fully protect wild creatures, right? Alas, wrong. Saola are found only in the mountains along the border between Laos and Vietnam. For five pro-tected areas there, including the area I visited, the Saola Working Group, a committee of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, reports the destruction of more than 90,000 snares since 2011. And many more lie in wait.

The stakes are high. Southeast Asia (includ-ing Indonesia and the Philippines) leads the world in the proportion of its birds and mammals that are “endemic,” that is, found nowhere else. Unfortunately, it also has the highest propor-tion in imminent danger of extinction, due in large measure to the wildlife trade. Worse, no country in Southeast Asia possesses a tradition of effective biological conservation.

If the rest of the world truly wants to save Earth’s biodiversity, helping the governments and non-governmental organizations of South-east Asia to conserve their region’s natural heritage must become a global priority. Critics of conservation may argue that extinction has always been part of evolution and that new species will arise to replace those we destroy.

Such a view may be technically correct, but

it commits an error of scale. Evolution will con-tinue; it cannot not continue. But the inexorable emergence of what Darwin called “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” proceeds at a nearly geological pace. By comparison, our human tenancy of Earth is a fleeting breath. Within the time frame of what we call civiliza-tion, the extinctions we cause are as eternal as any human accomplishment.

When it comes to wildlife trafficking, the essential task before the world is to protect key habitats and wildlife populations long enough for attitudes to change in China and its neigh-bors. At least in part, this means meeting the war on nature with a martial response. In the case of our expedition in Laos, three of our guides doubled as militia and carried AK-47s, and our near brushes with poachers confirmed that the weapons were not for show.

Meanwhile, good news glimmers amid the bad. Although the shift will take time, cultural values in Asia are beginning to change. The San Francisco-based organization WildAid reports that sales of shark fins have plummeted 82 percent in Guangzhou (formerly Canton), the hub of the shark fin trade, and that two-thirds of respondents to a recent poll cited “awareness campaigns” against indiscriminate shark fish-ing as a reason for ending their consumption of shark fin soup.

Only by rising to the challenge of species protection—not eventually, but now—can we ensure that nature’s most magnificent creations will persist in the wild. Only though generous cooperation with Asian partners, boosting both law enforcement and political resolve, can we preserve the stunning, often cacophonous and always mysterious diversity of what remains of the planet’s most biologi-cally productive ecosystems.

The dystopian alternative is terrible to consider. Uncounted species are being pressed to the brink. We’ve hardly met them, and yet, within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth’s biota are our only known com-panions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.

Implementing Republic Act 10653 increasing the tax-exempt benefits

ON February 12 Republic Act (RA) 10653 became a law. RA 10653 adjusted the 13th-month pay and other benefits excluded from the computation of gross income

for purposes of income taxation by increasing the ceiling from P30,000 to P82,000.

Under the new law, gross ben-efits received by officials and em-ployees of public and private en-tities up to a maximum amount of P82,000 are excluded from the computation of the gross income of the recipients of such benefits, and thus, such amounts are exempt from income tax. The law also gives the President the authority to ad-just the threshold amount every three years after the effectivity thereof with the Consumer Price Index to be published by the Na-tional Statistics Office.

To implement RA 10653, the Bu-reau of Internal Revenue (BIR) issued Revenue Regulations (RR) 3-2015 dated March 16, 2015. RR 3-2015 clarified that the threshold amount of P82,000 shall only apply to the 13th-month pay and other benefits which covers only the following:

Thirteenth-month pay equivalent to the mandatory one month basic salary of officials and employees of the government, (whether national or local), including government-owned or -controlled corporations, and or private offices received after the 12th-month pay; and

Other benefits, such as Christ-mas bonus, productivity-incentive bonus, loyalty award, gifts in cash or in kind and other benefits of similar nature actually received by officials and employees of both government and private offices.

RR 3-2015 clarified that oth-er than the above benefits, the P82,000 exemption shall not apply to other compensation received by an employee under an employer-employee relationship, such as basic salary and other allowances. Likewise, this exclusion from gross income is not applicable to self-employed individuals and income generated from business.

As to the period covered, RR 3-2015 clarified that it shall apply to benefits accrued or paid begin-ning January 1, which is actually a generous interpretation consid-ering that the law was passed on March 2015. For benefits received last year, the applicable thresh-old amount would still be the old amount of P30,000. It may be re-called that prior to RR 3-2015, there were questions on its covered pe-riod of application such as—since payment of the income tax is on April 15, when the law is already effective, can taxpayers avail them-selves of this increased exemption even if the income being reported pertains to 2014? Or, will there be a pro-rated application of the ex-emption in 2015 considering that the law became effective only in

March 2015? All of these questions are now clarified by the BIR with the issuance of RR 3-2015.

To ensure that the provisions of the new regulations are effectively implemented, it is required that all taxpayer-employers should ensure that the computation and applica-tion of the said increase on the 13th month and other benefits of the employees in the year-end adjust-ments are correct, and that such shall be clearly indicated in the Certificate of Compensation/Tax Withheld (BIR Form 2316). The said BIR Form shall be issued by the em-ployer to the employee on or before January 31 of the succeeding year, or if employment is terminated on or before the close of such calendar year, on the day on which last pay-ment of the compensation is made. If the employee whose employment was terminated is subsequently em-ployed by another employer before the close of the calendar year, the employee is required to furnish the new employer the accomplished BIR form issued by the previous employ-er for the appropriate withholding tax computation of the employee’s regular compensation and subse-quent year-end adjustment, if any. And, any violation of such rules may be meted with the appropriate penalties under the pertinent provi-sions of the Tax Code, as amended, and the applicable regulations is-sued by the BIR.

With these new developments in the law and BIR rules and regu-lations, it is hoped that the plight of the regular-wage earners of this nation be made slightly less burden-some, in exchange for the P25-billion to P30-billion government revenue allegedly lost due to such develop-ments. This seems to be a small price to pay for greater purchasing power for the regular Filipino, which could lead to greater consumer spending and overall economic activity, which could then lead to a more stable and stronger economy

Atty. Esther M. Weigand is a junior associate of Du-Baladad and Associates Law Offices (BDB Law), a member-firm of World Tax Services (WTS) Alliance. The article is for general information only and is not intended, nor should be construed as a substitute for tax, le-gal or financial advice on any specific matter. Applicability of this article to any actual or particular tax or legal is-sue should be supported therefore by a professional study or advice. If you have any comments or questions concerning the article, you may e-mail the author at esther.weigand@bdblaw.com.ph or call 403-2001 local 340.

TAx lAw for BuSineSSAtty. esther M. weigand

By Megan McArdleBloomberg News

IN my eight years in Washington, I have come to love its fabled streetcar project. I say “fabled”

because as of this writing, we do not actually have any streetcars.

No, wait, that’s wrong. We totally have streetcars. What we do not have are streetcars that actually ferry pas-sengers hither and yon, rather than sitting in storage or going on end-less test runs that all too frequently end in flames. The project has been hilariously mismanaged from start

to (never-never) finish, though it would be a lot more hilarious if we hadn’t spent millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars on it.

Nonetheless, I am sad to hear that my fair city may terminate its streetcar service. We’ve got the tracks, we’ve got the cars, we’ve got a whole lot of new buildings along H Street that were counting on its existence, so we might as well just run the silly thing. Particularly since failing to do so has implications for future development.

Last summer, I tried to explain why cities seem to like streetcars so

much, despite obvious drawbacks such as the inflexibility of the routes. There are some arguments in favor of the cars—they ride more smoothly, produce less exhaust, and some peo-ple argue that they’re less likely to induce motion sickness. But I pointed out that there may be a bigger benefit for cities trying to spur development: the inflexibility of the routes.

If you’re trying to spur develop-ment with transportation, then in-flexibility is a feature, rather than a bug: It allows you to make a credible commitment to serving an area over a long time period. A city can always

promise to run a bus line, of course ... but the city and the developers both know that the city can move that bus somewhere else if the development takes longer than expected to mate-rialize, leaving the developer with a giant, expensive building that’s hard to get to. Streetcars are also an eas-ily visible signal to potential busi-nesses and residents—you can see the tracks right there, rather than having to hunt for information about local bus service.

Effectively, streetcars harness the sunk cost fallacy for a little bit of good: Developers know that the

government will be reluctant to give upon on a project once it has already spent a lot of money, so they feel more comfortable betting on transit-oriented development.

Now, killing the D.C. streetcar is probably not going to mean that development on H Street stalls out. On the other hand, if the govern-ment proves willing to pull out at such a late date, future developers might think twice about building in response to government transit promises. In an area that desperately needs more housing, that’s not such a good thing.

To be sure, against that, you have to offset the annual operating cost of the streetcar line, which is esti-mated to be around $5 million. Also, to be sure, you have to offset against those costs the passengers a streetcar would carry and, um, the fact that streetcars are cute.

Regardless of the cost-benefit analysis, I’d mourn a bit if it were killed. It may be a boondoggle, but darn it, it’s our boondoggle. Lovers of our fair city, in all its incompe-tent splendor, should be sad to see this bit of D.C. history fall into the dead past.

D.C. ponders the fate of its streetcars

cruise ships, nothing below 300 persons. Do you know how many cruise ships ar-rived between [February 23] and the end of March? Fourteen.” Jimenez recognizes that in the case of the Philippines, the infrastructure has not caught up with the growth in the cruise tourism business. “This is how much rapidly the in-frastructure has to improve. But which comes first, the business or the infra-structure? In the case of the Philippines, the demand pool is so strong, the traffic will arrive ahead of the infrastructure. Hence, the congestion in our airports and our seaports. But is [the cruise business] growing? Yes.” Partial data from the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) show about P811.45 million worth of port projects under various stages of construction, with an undetermined amount of projects still being discussed at the Bids and Awards Committee level. The DOT chief explained that the Philippines is investing a lot in infra-structure for cruise tourism to attract specifically the average Chinese tourists, who don’t like to travel more than seven days. From the passenger ship termi-nal at the old Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong, the nearest destination that fits the desired cruise length of the Chinese market is the Philippines. “Their problem is, they have these giant ships [in Hong Kong] and passen-gers who only want to travel five days away. Guess where that is? Here. They looked at us and said, ’Di lang maganda ang port nito [their ports aren’t just up to par],’ so what do they do? They come here, drop anchor, and tender boats that bring them in.” In hand with the expansion of the cruise tourism business in the country, marine development needs to be pur-sued, as well. At the recent Seventh Sea-Ex 2015, Rosana Fores, president of the Tourism Congress, noted that the Philippines “has a long history and its evolution is greatly influenced by its waters and islands. Fili-pinos were known to be people of the sea, a plank boat then was called balangay—a term which we now use to describe our smallest political unit known as barangay. The Badjaos, our sea gypsies, live in com-munities on the water. Balangay—boat; barangay—communities.” And yet, she pointed out, it is Hong Kong that accounts for 19 million of the 83 million cruise passengers glob-ally, although she recognized that

cruise port calls in the Philippines have grown over 80 percent in the last three years. “Four passenger ports are in place: two in Luzon—Subic and South Harbor; Puerto Princesa; and Boracay. In 2015 there will be international cruise arrivals in Coron, Tagbilaran, Cebu, Bohol, Sibuyan Island and Siargao,” she said. She stressed that marine develop-ment can “play a strategic role in creat-ing greater connectivity to our exotic, culturally rich islands, and should increase our competitive advantage not only with our Asian neighbors, but globally.” Sea-Ex is an annual boat show and nau-tical lifestyle conference held in Manila, where various experts shared their ideas on how to promote the Philippines as the new mecca for marine tourism, as well as presentation on developing the country’s boat industry. In the same expo, Robin Wyatt, manag-ing director of Europa Yachts Philippines Inc. also batted for improvement of ma-rinas and ports to accommodate leisure yachts in the country. In his presentation, he noted there were less than 600 leisure yachts and sailboats docked in seven marinas and yacht stor-age sites in the country—Subic Yacht Club, Manila Yacht Club, Punta Fuego, Cebu, Puerto Galera, Ocean View Marina in Sa-mal, and various other resorts. He said it was important to foster a vi-brant yacht market in the Philippines be-cause this “creates employment, encour-ages more trade and industry, generates foreign income from the visit of foreign yachts, creates leisure opportunities and brings high-value tourism.” Aside from improving infrastructure, he said the government has to implement a “transparent import procedure and liberalize the registration of yachts.” He pointed out that in Hong Kong, where there are zero duties for yacht im-portation, there are approximately 6,000 yachts and most of the time, its marinas are full. Another country with zero levy on imported yachts is Malaysia, which now hosts about 1,000 yachts. Singapore, which imposes a 7-percent tax on im-ported yachts has 1,200 yachts and its marinas are also full. In Thailand, where imported yachts are levied an 8-percent duty, now has 30,000 boats today from only 500 in 2004. Europa Yachts is a 28-year veteran in importing and retailing yachts in Asia. It represents a number of the world’s lead-ing yacht/sailboat brands, such as Azimut, Benetau and Lagoon catamarans.

A8

2ndFront PageBusinessMirror

www.businessmirror.com.ph

Continued from A1

Thursday, March 19, 2015

More cruise ships to visit PHL

Purisima: PHL underrated, to see more credit upgrades

GLOBAL SUPPLY GLUT SEEN DRIVING OIL TO $40/BARRELOil’s seven-day slump to

the lowest level in six years is poised to drive prices

back into a bear market as record Us stockpiles worsen a global sup-ply glut. Futures fell as much as $1.02 to $42.44 a barrel in New York. A close at this level would be 20 percent below its peak last month, meeting a common definition of a bear market. Crude inventories probably expanded by 4.4 mil-lion barrels to 453.3 million last week, according to a Bloomberg News survey before government data on Wednesday. supplies in-creased by 10.5 million barrels, the industry-funded American Petroleum institute was said to have reported. Oil has renewed its collapse af-ter losing 50 percent in 2014 amid speculation that a slowdown in Us drilling isn’t enough to shrink a global oversupply. Options traders have become the most bearish in at least five years amid signs that rising stockpiles may strain the na-tion’s storage capacity.

“The ongoing deterioration in the supply-demand picture continues without any sign of interruption,” Michael McCarthy, a chief strategist at CMC Markets in sydney, said by phone. “With concerns about the demand side of the equation, it looks like we’re heading toward $40 in the next couple of sessions.” West Texas intermediate (WTi) for April delivery was at $42.63 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, down 83 cents, at 11:20 a.m. singa-pore time. The contract dropped 42 cents to $43.46 on Tuesday, the lowest close since March 2009. A settlement at $42.82 or lower would be 20 percent below this year’s high of $53.53, pushing crude into a bear market. The volume of all futures traded was about 23 percent below the 100-day average. US suppliesBrENT for May settlement slid as much as 32 cents, or 0.6 percent,

By Bianca Cuaresma 

The Philippines failed to muster the so-called second wave of credit upgrades this year from

all three global credit watchers as the UK-based Fitch Ratings signaled its unease on the country’s economic prospects. Fitch’s refusal to signal its vote of confidence followed earlier affirmations from two other sovereign credit watchers.

See “Global supply,” A2

“BBB-”), with a stable outlook. For Fitch, the country’s credit narra-tive requires more convincing data showing the $272-billion economy deserves a credit boost a few more notches above junk status.   This contrasted sharply against much earlier credit boosts by Moody’s Investors Service and by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Ratings Services el-evating the country’s credit stature two notches above junk status. Fitch particularly cited the coun-try’s strong macroeconomic per-formance and the condition of its external sector. Fitch also noted that Manila’s governance standards and its per- capita income were weak points of the economy even as its public finances remain a neutral factor. Fitch, likewise, said the steady inflow of worker remittances and growth of the business-process out-sourcing (BPO) industry “underpins” the country’s economic growth. Such growth was forecast to grow by 6.3

  The indecision prompted Fi-nance Secretary Cesar V. Purisima to remark that the Philippines, no matter its many fiscal and mon-etary policy victories, remain “un-derrated” by Fitch. Still, Purisima

is convinced the Philippine credit story should further improve in upcoming assessments.  Fitch Ratings announced late Tuesday that it has kept the coun-try’s rating at “BBB minus” (or

percent this year and by 6.2 percent in 2016, or below the official target of 7 percent to 8 percent for this year and next year.  Likewise, sustained current ac-count surpluses since 2003 sup-ported the buildup of the country’s foreign-exchange reserves and helped turn the Philippines into a net external creditor for several years in a row already.   But the optimism on external finances and the country’s strong macroeconomic performance was offset by allegedly weak gover-nance standards and the low per- capita income. “Governance standards have strengthened under the Aquino administration since 2010. How-ever, the Philippines continues to score especially low on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business and Political Stability metrics, at levels that are far below the ‘BBB’ median,” Fitch said.

See “Purisima,” A2