TRADE Undersecretary Ceferino Rodolfo is confident that the Board of Investments (BOI) will reach its P1-trillion investment target this year despite sluggish third-quarter economic growth.
“Yes, I’m confident that we will hit [the target],” said Rodolfo, who is also managing head of the BOI.
BOI investment approvals reached P900.06 billion from January to September, 2026, representing a 53-percent increase compared to the same period in the previous year.
The nine-month total already accounts for 90 percent of the full-year P1-trillion target.
Once the target is hit, Rodolfo said they would then work on exceeding it.
He also said they were no longer focusing on registrations and investment approvals and were looking at the business environment, policy reforms and new industries instead.
He added that they would actually like investors to register and invest with other investment promotion agencies (IPAs) instead.
Asked whether this meant that the BOI would take a backseat next year, Rodolfo said this would not be the case.
“The BOI would just focus on long-term industrial policy planning and providing an enabling environment for investments to come into the BOI and other investment promotion agencies,” he said.
“For example, when the advanced manufacturing park proceeds, they would not register with us, but with another [investment promotion agency],” he said.
Rodolfo said they should maintain a steady state and noted that targets still hadn’t been set for next year.
Asked whether they expected the BOI to remain the top investment promotion agency next year, he said they had a different view of being number one.
“It’s number one in terms of servicing the needs of other IPAs, in terms of providing the [Strategic Investment Priority Plan], the direction. It’s not necessarily number one because you’re the biggest,” he said.
He highlighted existing policies to encourage more investors to invest in the country. Among these is Executive Order 122, which establishes a national policy framework for the development of the country’s critical minerals industry.
For digital infrastructure, Rodolfo noted the existence of Executive Order 19, which mandates the updating of government data classification and establishing a data residency framework.
As for whether sluggish economic growth was affecting investments, he said the investments they were seeing were transformative.
