Come to the Philippines

Here is a bit of good news coming out of the gloom and doom of Trump's disastrous tariff increases.

- BOO CHANCO

The New York Times reports that some Chinese entrepreneurs are seeing the Trump tariffs as a chance to increase the production of their factories in guess where? The Philippines...in Batangas province.

Liu Gang, a Chinese businessman from Dongguan, told the NYT that he is telling companies to "Come to the Philippines" as he showed the NYT's Shanghai-based business reporter around his Batangas factory stamping out metal parts for Fujitsu A.T.M.s on the factory floor.

Liu told the NYT that "It was hard at first. There weren't a lot of options for labor. Raw materials like aluminum were three times more expensive than in China. The workers were not as productive as in China."

Mr. Liu began to move most of his factory production from Dongguan, in southern China, to Batangas in 2018 when Mr. Trump raised tariffs on China during his first term.

So, he and a few others went to the Philippines.

"The Philippines is like China was 15 years ago," said Kevin Lee, a sales director at HYS Enterprise, which owns a factory in Batangas. "Cheaper labor helped. It costs about $820 a month to employ someone in China; in the Philippines that same worker costs $274."

The NYT reports that "HYS started shipping two containers' worth of raw materials from China each week stuffed with plastic pellets, aluminum sheet rolls and bolts and nuts. Mr. Liu brought in Chinese engineers to work with local staff and to start automating some of the manufacturing processes. Business picked up and four years later, in 2022, they bought 20,000 square meters for a third factory that will soon start die casting as well as painting for products like the door panels of Toyota cars...