Public -private tie-ups, tourism to fuel growth

Local business leaders are banking on the government’s public-private partnership projects, the manufacturers from Thailand and Cebu’s trusted economic drivers—tourism and business process outsourcing industries— to power this year’s economic growth.

“We expect 2012 to be better because we think that the public sector will now start pouring in funds and activate the PPP or the public-private partnership projects, which President Aquino has been encouraging,” said  Consul Samuel Chioson, Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry president.

Chioson said that this year would be better than last year’s growth because it was affected by the underspending of the public sector, which was doing a lot of reforms and streamlining projects under the leadership of President Benigno Aquino III.

Eric Ng Mendoza, Mandaue Chamber of Commerce and Industry president, agreed with Chioson.

Mendoza said the business sector is optimistic about this year’s growth because it is expecting big projects to start kicking in this year, which would encourage the private sector to invest more.

MANUFACTURING

Mendoza also expects the revival of the manufacturing sector in Cebu as he foresees more manufacturers, whose facilities were affected by floods in Thailand, coming Cebu to look for their production needs.

“We are also seeing to benefit from what happened in Thailand, and we can expect manufacturing to revive in Cebu this year because some of the companies that are operating in Thailand will want to come here for their manufacturing needs,” Mendoza said.

Gordon Alan Joseph,  Cebu Business Club president, for his part, sees a 4 percent to 4.5 percent growth this year with the tourism and BPO industries expected to continue its growth.

“There is a risk in the construction industry. I think we will see a dip in construction. I don’t think we can sustain all these buildings. We just hope that we will have enough people to fuel more growth in the outsourcing and sustain the growth in the construction industry,” said Joseph.

He said the export industry would continue to suffer a downturn unless the economy in the sector’s major markets would turn around.

He also sees a slowdown of overseas Filipino workers’ deployment because some countries are banning  them.

TOURISM

He is banking on the tourism industry to be the main engine that will drive more economic activities in Cebu.

He called on the Department of Tourism to implement now an improved accreditation process and create the need for a culture of tourism.

“The accreditation process that they are implementing now is still useless and they are not doing that regularly. It’s time they come up with the specific standards that are based on international standards and do the accreditation regularly. That’s one way of improving our products as a tourist destination,” said Joseph.

He also called on the government to seriously look into the infrastructure in Cebu, like  traffic reduction in roads and expansion of the airport, and strengthen the branding and marketing outside the country to encourage more tourists to come and visit.

“We can look at many aspects of tourism like education tourism, cultural, religious aside from just leisure tourism,” he said.

Joseph said that the  Dong Fang Group, which organizes trips for Chinese students, said that they can bring in 30,000 Chinese every month to Cebu for education tourism, but the problem is that Cebu is not yet ready to accommodate such a huge number of student tourists.

“Where will they stay? We lack educators and facilities to host them. This will entail a lot of investments, which I think is a huge potential that we can also tap for tourism,” he said.

MCDCB

Joseph, however, saw the creation of the  Metro Cebu Development Coordinating Board (MCDCB) as a positive step because the body could evaluate and help the business sector to move forward towards a bigger and more inclusive growth for Cebu.

“We (CBC) are part of the committee already and I should say that I’m glad that the government officials are also involved in this initiative. We have now created three major committees that are for priority, which includes infrastructure, human resource and asset management and the environment and public safety,” said Joseph.

The three business leaders earlier said that they were expecting the 2011 growth to be from 3 percent to 3.5 percent, which was a big decline from the 2010’s 7.3 percent growth.

Joseph, however, attributed the 2010 growth to the high spending because of the national elections that year.

“Still 2011 was a slower year compared to 2010 even at 4.8 percent growth. This is because of the economic situation in the biggest global markets, which are the United States of America and Europe,” said Joseph.