Support grows for Panga's stay

PHILEXPORT, the country’s largest and dominant export organization, has backed the reinstatement of PEZA director general Tereso Panga for successfully luring more local and foreign locators in the country’s ecozones.

Sources said Panga received a letter from Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin last week, mandating government-owned and controlled corporations and investment promotion agencies, including PEZA, to vacate their posts by tendering courtesy resignations at the order of the President.

“He is just following orders, but we find him very effective and very good at running PEZA. We hope that he will stay because he is doing a great job. The locators are happy with him, and he is getting a lot of locators. He should be retained,” said Sergio Ortiz-Luis Jr, president of PHILEXPORT, in a phone interview on Wednesday.

“I think all the business organizations would agree to that, especially the electronics sector. PEZA is successful in attracting locators in that sector,” Ortiz-Luis Jr., who also sits as Chairman Emeritus of the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and president of the Employers Confederation of the Philippines.

As of April this year, a total of 27 new and expansion projects worth P6.014 Billion were approved by PEZA under the helm of Panga, which is 110.66 percent higher than the P2.855 Billion approved in the same period last year.

These projects are seen to generate $223.497 million in exports and directly employ more than 4,500 Filipino workers.

Under the helm of Panga, and since the start of the tenure of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., 27 ecozones have already been proclaimed, 16 of which were established in 2024, for a total of 427 operating economic zones.

This year, Panga and the Marcos administration are gearing up to establish 30 new ecozones with an estimated development cost of P60 billion.

Panga, a career official who has spent 28 years within PEZA, has led the agency through three straight years of growth in investment approvals, reversing the post-pandemic slump and reinforcing PEZA’s role as a driver of national economic recovery.

Billionaires' club

Aside from significant strides within the ecozone, PEZA has officially joined the ranks of top-performing GOCCs that have remitted over a billion pesos in dividends to the national government for two consecutive years, a first in the agency’s 30-year history.

From 1995 to 2022, PEZA remitted a total of P10.82 billion in dividends to the national government, an impressive contribution over 15 years.

Moreover, for the last three years, PEZA contributed P3.688 billion, including over P1.3 billion in both 2023 and 2024.

PEZA is a non-financial investment promotion agency operating with just over 600 employees, and manages over 400 economic zones nationwide and supports more than 4,000 locator companies, all while remaining fiscally self-sustaining.

The agency’s performance aligns with the President's directive during his first Sona to make special economic zones a pillar of national growth.

PEZA has since doubled down on its mission, streamlining services, digitizing operations, and actively courting investments in manufacturing, IT-BPM, and emerging technologies.

PEZA’s transparency and efficiency have also earned it praise on the international stage. The U.S. State Department has cited PEZA as a model of good governance and regulatory clarity in the Philippines—an endorsement that reflects the agency’s professional reputation.

Now three decades strong, PEZA continues to prove that lean, transparent, and accountable governance can deliver big results, not only for investors, but for the Filipino people.