The Philippines plans to open up its telecommunications sector to more foreign investors and an invitation by Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is not just for Chinese companies, Philippine Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto Pernia said.
“The best offer would be picked from other offers as well,” Pernia on Saturday told reporters at a forum in Manila when asked if only Chinese companies would be considered by the Philippine government. “China is in the front line now, because no other country has sounded out or expressed interest to come in.”
Duterte, who has sought warmer ties with Beijing amid a territorial dispute between the two countries, last month offered China the right to operate in the Southeast Asian nation during bilateral talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang (李克強), Duterte’s spokesman Harry Roque said on Nov. 20.
Duterte’s commitment to open up the sector has prompted local companies, such as Philippine Telegraph and Telephone Corp, to start talks with China’s two biggest telecommunications providers to help challenge PLDT Inc and Globe Telecom Inc’s dominance.
The two became the Philippines’ only wireless carriers when the San Miguel Corp conglomerate sold its nascent wireless phone carrier to the companies for 70 billion pesos (US$1.4 billion).
The Philippine president’s order for government agencies to act swiftly to ease foreign investment limits is a first step toward opening up the telecommunications sector, Pernia said.
“There’s a lot of urgency to this,” he said, adding that better connectivity was a promise Duterte made during his election campaign.
Capital investment in the Philippines is surging past the rest of Southeast Asia as the government and firms ramp up spending.
In the first nine months of this year, net physical assets in the Philippines grew 10.4 percent from a year earlier. That compared with a 6.9 percent increase in Malaysia and 5.8 percent gain in Indonesia, data from the governments’ statistics offices showed.
There are reasons to remain bullish on the outlook. Philippine government spending jumped 28 percent in October, the largest rise in almost a year, with another record budget planned for next year.
Firms are also joining in: Metro Pacific Investments Corp plans to invest as much as US$16 billion through 2022 on road, water and power projects, while Ayala Land Inc is boosting capital spending to a record US$2 billion next year.
Duterte wants to transform the Philippines into an upper-middle income nation by the end of his term in 2022 and the cornerstone of his vision is a plan referred to as “Build, Build, Build.”
It includes the capital’s first subway and a 653km railway to the south.
“Capital formation goes hand-in-hand with the focus on infrastructure,” BDO Unibank Inc chief market strategist Jonathan Ravelas said.
“The private sector has always been investing, but now public spending is catching up,” he said.
Nvidia Corp earned its US$2.2 trillion market cap by producing artificial intelligence (AI) chips that have become the lifeblood powering the new era of generative AI developers from start-ups to Microsoft Corp, OpenAI and Google parent Alphabet Inc. Almost as important to its hardware is the company’s nearly 20 years’ worth of computer code, which helps make competition with the company nearly impossible. More than 4 million global developers rely on Nvidia’s CUDA software platform to build AI and other apps. Now a coalition of tech companies that includes Qualcomm Inc, Google and Intel Corp plans to loosen Nvidia’s chokehold by going
DECOUPLING? In a sign of deeper US-China technology decoupling, Apple has held initial talks about using Baidu’s generative AI technology in its iPhones, the Wall Street Journal said China has introduced guidelines to phase out US microprocessors from Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) from government PCs and servers, the Financial Times reported yesterday. The procurement guidance also seeks to sideline Microsoft Corp’s Windows operating system and foreign-made database software in favor of domestic options, the report said. Chinese officials have begun following the guidelines, which were unveiled in December last year, the report said. They order government agencies above the township level to include criteria requiring “safe and reliable” processors and operating systems when making purchases, the newspaper said. The US has been aiming to boost domestic semiconductor
ENERGY IMPACT: The electricity rate hike is expected to add about NT$4 billion to TSMC’s electricity bill a year and cut its annual earnings per share by about NT$0.154 Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) has left its long-term gross margin target unchanged despite the government deciding on Friday to raise electricity rates. One of the heaviest power consuming manufacturers in Taiwan, TSMC said it always respects the government’s energy policy and would continue to operate its fabs by making efforts in energy conservation. The chipmaker said it has left a long-term goal of more than 53 percent in gross margin unchanged. The Ministry of Economic Affairs concluded a power rate evaluation meeting on Friday, announcing electricity tariffs would go up by 11 percent on average to about NT$3.4518 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)
OPENING ADDRESS: The CEO is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence at the trade show’s opening on June 3, TAITRA said Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) chairperson and chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) is to deliver the opening keynote speech at Computex Taipei this year, the event’s organizer said in a statement yesterday. Su is to give a speech on the future of high-performance computing (HPC) in the artificial intelligence (AI) era to open Computex, one of the world’s largest computer and technology trade events, at 9:30am on June 3, the Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) said. Su is to explore how AMD and the company’s strategic technology partners are pushing the limits of AI and HPC, from data centers to