THE administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has been aggressively promoting the country’s priority sectors, such as green, innovative and sustainable manufacturing and services, to attract more foreign investors, a Trade official said on Saturday.

Lanie Dormiendo, the head of the International Investments Promotion Service of the Board of Investments (BOI), said these sectors include high-value manufacturing activities like the electric vehicle assembly, battery manufacturing and mineral processing.

The BOI’s mandate is to develop strategic sectors as well as to promote the country as a prime investment destination by working closely with trade attachés and commercial counselors abroad doing promotions.

“Ito po iyong mga high-value manufacturing activities like for example one sector that we are actively promoting would be on electric vehicle as well as iyong mga upstream sectors po nito like battery manufacturing and even mineral processing as a key raw material for the manufacture of batteries,” Dormiendo said in a media forum in Quezon City.

“We have a lot of minerals that can be processed to form part of batteries not only for electric vehicle but even for battery energy storage system,” she added.

The BOI official said the government wants to capitalize on the resources that are already available in the country instead of just exporting them to China and Japan as raw minerals.

“We want to attract foreign investors to do a higher value activity to do mineral processing, and then attract battery manufacturers and eventually the EV assemblers and EV manufacturers,” Dormiendo pointed out.

The BOI official added that aside from IT-BPM, these are the types of activities that the Marcos administration has been promoting.

In terms of sustainable infrastructure and services, Dormiendo said the current administration is actively promoting renewable energy (RE).

Late last year, the Department of Energy (DOE) amended the implementing rules and regulation (IRR) on RE Act to allow 100-percent foreign equity for a lot of RE sources including wind, solar and tidal, she said.

For geothermal and biomass, the government now allows 100-percent foreign equity, resulting in foreign and local investors to aggressively venture into RE.

For the BOI-approved projects last year, RE projects accounted for a huge portion of the government’s investment approvals, Dormiendo said.

She noted that the government registered this year more than P400 billion worth of investments and a large chunk of these investment approvals are also into RE.

Meanwhile, Vichael Angelo Roaring, officer-in-charge (OIC) of the Department of Trade and Industry-Foreign Trade Service Corps, said they were instructed by President Marcos to carry out an all-of-government approach in addressing investors’ complaints.

“Malinaw po ang instruction ng Presidente – he wants an all-of-government approach in addressing the ‘pain points’ – iyong ano ba iyong challenges ng mga namumuhunan sa Pilipinas,” the DTI official said in the same media forum.

Roaring said the overall goal is to make the Philippines more attractive as a source of investments and as a trading partner in the region.