By Mia A. Aznar
Tuesday, July 12, 201
IN promoting an area to foreign clients, there is a difference when it comes to promotion for tourism and for investments, the marketing director of the Cebu Investment Promotions Center noted.
Joel Mari Yu, in a recent presentation on emerging industries, admitted that the Philippines has lost its competitive advantage in attracting foreign direct investments in manufacturing to China.
He said that this is only due to two reasons–the cost of labor and the cost of power.
He explained that in tourism, promoters only focus on making a short stay pleasant.
When promoting for investors, they do not concern themselves with problems like traffic congestion, hot climates or dirty surroundings.
In building for the future, Yu said Cebu has to shift its standards.
“We should move Cebu from being good enough for the Cebuanos to being good enough for the world,” he said.
He said that if Cebuanos can tolerate an hour of power interruption, foreign investors will not tolerate even a minute-long outage.
“The standard we should aspire to has to be different. We cannot remain the way we are. If not, we will go back to the way Cebu was before 1986,” he said.
He added that to improve the country’s competitiveness, problems have to be solved and that government should start with one problem at a time.
Areas he cited that need improvements are infrastructure, including ports, bridges, power and water supply; business-friendly environment; skills of the workforce; and cost effectiveness.
He said that the government is not the only institution that suffers from a bureaucracy, as private entities also need to be sure that they are also easy to deal with.
Yu added that all the efforts on improvement will be useless if the cost of doing business here is high.
Yu also pointed out that while much has been said about overpopulation, having many people in a city is not a bad thing.
He cited a United Nations study stating that the ideal population for a metropolis is between 2.5 million and 3.5 million.
Yu said people should not be worried that Cebu City is hitting the one million mark.
With most economies having a global strategy of expanding their domestic consumption, Yu said more people spending their money here would be a good thing for Cebu, whether the spenders are Cebuanos, foreigners or those coming from other provinces.
Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on July 13, 2011.
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