The Philippines, through Department of Trade and Industry’s Board of Investments
(BOI) Governor Lucita Reyes, Semiconductor and Electronics Industries in the
Philippines (SEIPI) President Danilo Lachica and Ionics Vice-President for Operations
Mr. Jay Chavez, recently participated at the celebration of World Trade Organization’s
20th Information Technology Agreement (ITA) Symposium held on 27-28 June in
Geneva, Switzerland.
According to Magnolia Uy, DTI Philippine Trade and Investment Center in Geneva
(PTIC-Geneva), the event allowed for the member countries to highlight ITA’s role of
providing households and domestic businesses access to more affordable and higherquality
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) through tariffs elimination
on hundreds of ICT products.
The Philippines, as one of the 82 signatories of ITA, has benefited from the initial ITA
signed in 1996 and its expansion of list in 2015.
According to the Philippines’ chief ITA
negotiator and Board of Investment Governor Lucita Reyes, the country’s ITA
membership helped lower prices for key ICT hardware inputs that the BPO industry
depends upon. At present, the country’s ICT services exports account for roughly 70%
of total services exports while the ICT goods exports account for more than 35% of total
exported goods.
In terms of ICT goods exports, Lachica added that the Philippine semiconductor and
electronics industry continues to grow at a steady rate, ranking as the 17th largest
exporter of ICT products in the world valued at approximately USD 24 billion (out of
USD 29 billion total electronics exports).
However, according to Ionics Vice-President for Operations Jay Chavez, to sustain the
demand of ICT services enterprises for ICT products, it is imperative for the Philippines
to move up the value chain for ICT products by engaging in products and systems
design and by taking manufacturing to the next level through the implementation of
smart factory and Industry 4.0 technologies.
The ITA was finalized during the 1996 WTO Ministerial Conference in Hong Kong while
the Philippines became a signatory to the Agreement in 1997. In 2012, members
recognized that technological innovation had advanced to such an extent that many
new categories of IT products were not covered by the existing agreement. As
negotiations to expand the coverage of the Agreement began in 2012, the ITA
expansion agreement (ITA-2) was concluded during the 2015 WTO Ministerial
Conference in Nairobi. The Philippines availed of the flexibilities of extended staging of
PH cites benefits of WTO Information Technology Agreement 2| P a g e
tariff reductions of the Agreement. Executive Order (EO) 21 that mandates the
Philippines ITA commitment will enter into force on 1 July 2017.
WTO Director General Roberto Azevedo opened the Symposium and noted how
exports in the products covered by the original Agreement tripled from USD 549 billion
in 1996 to approximately USD 1.7 trillion in 2015 representing an annual growth rate of
6%.
At present, ITA products account for a remarkable 15% of all global manufacturing
exports. ITA membership also increased from 29 WTO members in 1996 to 82 today,
accounting for over 97% of global ICT trade.
