Philippine Weekly Economic Update

Inflation print for Jan-23 rose to 8.7% y-o-y (Dec-22: 8.1%, Jan-22: 3.0%, est. 7.6%) – ahead of both the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas’ (BSP) monthly forecast range of 7.5% to 8.3% and the government’s annual target range of 2.5% to 4.5%. Meanwhile Jan-23 core inflation rate rose to 7.4% from 6.9% in Dec-22 and 1.8% in Jan-22.

GCash, the mobile wallet business of Globe Telecom, Inc. (GLO) and Grab Philippines have tied up to allow customers to use their mobile wallet as a direct payment method when using the services of the Grab platform. By Feb 2023, GCash will be available as a direct mode of payment on the Grab platform. Once rolled out, Grab platform users can simply choose GCash as their payment method and pay cashless for Grab services, avoiding transfer fees that go as high as P50.

The Bureau of Immigration (BI) sees an increase in the number of tourist arrivals in the country during the holiday season. In October alone, the Philippines recorded more than 600,000 tourist arrivals, due to the relaxation of travel restrictions.

House Bill 6398 proposes the creation of the Maharlika Investments Fund (MIF), with seed money of P250 billion coming from the top performing government financial institutions – GSIS, SSS, LandBank and DBP.

The beer products has shown the most significant increase in terms of production
industry followed by the seafood industry , phone components , car paint and many more, even so , the industries related to Machine water, aluminum , sugar are some of the lower percentage of production.