Pinoy businessmen urged: Explore summit opportunities

Local businessmen are encouraged to attend the Feb. 4 Arab-Philippines Business Summit (APBS) 2013 roadshow and explore opportunities for partnership with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member countries in the Middle East.

The roadshow, which will be held at the Marco Polo Plaza will introduce and show local businessmen the benefits of participating in the APBS.

It will also focus on infrastructure and geo-resources projects as well as projects in major industries like real estate, export, tourism and food and agriculture as among the identified areas of interest for partnerships between the GCC member countries and the Philippines through the Arab-Philippines Business Summit (APBS) 2013 that will be held from April 9 to 12 in Bahrain.

The summit would be the first for our mother company, Bahrain World Economic Summit (BWES), to do an event to link the Philippines and the GCC countries, BWES Philippines officials said yesterday.

“BWES has been doing a lot of summits since 2004 in other regions. This is first time they have finally looked at our country for the event which will definitely benefit our businessmen particularly the SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises),” BWES Philippines spokesman Edward Keith Garciano Capoy said.

target

BWES Philippines, Inc. was officially created in September last year as the sole authorized organization to market the summit in the Philippines.

Capoy said they were targeting at least 500 Filipino businessmen to attend the event on April especially those engaged in the identified industries.

Roadshow

The group will be doing a roadshow on February 4 in Cebu with their counterparts from Bahrain to encourage more Cebuanos to attend the April summit.

“Of course we want more Cebuanos to join in the delegation because Cebu can really benefit a lot from the event,” Capoy said.

Unlike the usual majority-talks and speech summit, Capoy said they designed the event to have more engagements between and among businessmen so there would be a lot of business matching during the four-day event.

“At a glance, Cebu will need a lot of partners for infrastructure and geo-resources projects. Yes the government has been doing more and more projects especially in the infrastructure side but we will need more investor partners to fuel more investments in areas like road networks and power,” BWES Philippines chairman Roa Jacob Sevilla said.

power projects

Capoy agreed with Sevilla saying that Cebu would need additional power sources by 2015 and the GCC member countries which included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Oman, were very interested to be partners with local businessmen for the power projects.

GCC members are also interested in food and agricultural products.

“They are willing to lease out agricultural lands in the Philippines to grow more food products because they are into food security. The Philippine Rice Research Institute have already perfected the Basmati rice which is a long and aromatic rice that they eat. We can grow the rice here in partnership with them,” Capoy said .

Capoy said exporters could also enter the Middle East market through Bahrain.

bahrain

“Bahrain is located at the middle of all these other member countries and right now they are building a bridge to Qatar making it really easy to transport products to all other countries. Aside from that they have an existing FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with the US (United States of America) which means exporting from Bahrain is tariff free,” said Capoy.

Another advantage for Filipino and foreign investors is that the GCC will allow full ownership of investments, which means that Filipino investors can own and operate a company in the area.