Intel relocating it's RP business to China and Vietnam?

I read this in Pinoyexchange. Hope this is not true. From the Wookie:

Chip manufacturer Intel Corporation is reported to be shutting down it's Microprocessor business in its plant in Cavite this 2007, transferring it to China. It's Flash Memory business (also in Cavite), appears to be moving out of the country also, if not sold altogether.

Just as Intel is increasing the size of its operations in Vietnam and China, it is downsizing its factory in the Philippines.

In terms of salary and tax incentives, the Philippines is no longer an attractive site for continued foreign investments. This P125 wage increase will only result to more jobless people.

we need to create more jobs within our country so that our kababayans don't have to leave their families to go work abroad to help cope with the increasingly high cost of living (kuryente, tubig, presyo ng bilihin).

gov't needs to reduce it's wasteful spending (eg. pork barrel spending, election related spending). They need to sacrifice. we need to give tax relief to the middle class and entrepreneurs to encourage them to start or expand their business. we need to lower to cost of doing business so that more foreign investments will come our way (or keep what we already have) instead of them relocating to china, vietnam, thailand, indonesia etc.

abolish pork barrel and wasteful political spending. reduce corruption. lower taxes.

UPDATE: Chiz Escudero: R-VAT not helping much

February 09, 2007 07:04 PM Friday
Chiz: RVAT not helping much
By: Jester P. Manalastas

THE Revised Value Added Tax should be reviewed since it has not contributed much to economic growth and has only become a burden to the people.

House Minority Leader Francis Escudero said even the elderly who depend only on their pensions have been greatly affected by the tax imposition since it has reduced their purchasing power.

“Despite VAT, the economic takeoff promised by President Arroyo did not materialize with the economy registering a GDP of only 5.4 percent in 2006 and 5.1 percent in 2005. What it did was to increase the misery of our people as even the poorest of the poor pay a 12 percent tax on every purchase, the same rate the richest of the rich do,” Escudero said in a statement.

He noted that VAT increased the cost of transportation, electricity and water services and drove up inflation rate to more than 6 percent, while most people’s income remained the same.

He said Congress should study a possible return to the progressive sales tax, where taxes are imposed on a graduated scale, from a low rate on basic necessities to high rates on luxury items.

UPDATE: Okay, here's another news that says na Vietnam got a cool $1 Billion investment from INTEL. Wow. Boo Chanco is disappointed, and offers his reasons kung bakit hindi napunta sa atin yang INTEL business na yan. He wrote the article a few days after Davos.

I had a very interesting lunch last week with pretty knowledgeable people on the subject of investment climate in ASEAN. Finally, I thought, I will have the opportunity to ask a question that had been bugging me since late last year when Intel announced it was investing $1 billion in a testing facility in Vietnam. It will be its largest such facility anywhere, one that could eventually employ as many as 4,000 people.

I thought all along we had the inside track on the Intel investment if only because they already have a similar but smaller facility in Cavite. Surely, I thought, at this stage of Vietnam’s development, we couldn’t be that worse off in terms of the usual things investors look for. Plus we had the advantage of long years of relationship with Intel, we are also more advanced in IT-related manufacturing, we are not communist and we speak English. But Vietnam still got that billion dollar investment. I want to know why we lost.

The consensus of my lunch group was simply, we didn’t fight for it. According to them, including one whose previous work involved selling the Philippines to potential investors, we were just not hungry enough.

I thought they were being very kind. My gut feel tells me the reason we lost a billion dollar potential investment is that the leadership in DTI is finding Ate Glue’s regime a tough sell to investors, beyond the cheap platitudes like that "expression of confidence in her economic reforms" that Malacañang said Intel’s Craig Barrett gave her at Davos.

Or, the DTI top honchos just don’t know how to sell the country as an investment destination, if their lives depended on it. Didn’t they just snub a group of potential German investors who were all set to listen to their pitch?

Read the whole thing. he ends the article with this:

Rudi Giuliani summed it up best: "Government has got to work in order to allow people to have confidence in it." It’s as simple as that. That’s how we lost a billion dollar investment. Ate Glue’s government doesn’t inspire confidence… lacks credibility. And that’s the sad truth whatever else they might have told her at Davos!

UPDATE: More from the tribune: Gloria's mediocrity

Who says the Gloria administration has failed to put the Philippines in the world map?

The Philippines under the Gloria administration had milestones that would be in the annals of history.

The Philippines now has the most unpopular President ever in the world’s political history. The Reporters sans Frontieres (RSF) cited the Philippines as the most dangerous country for journalists. The country is perceived to be among the most corrupt in the world by Transparency International (TI) and the fourth most-corrupt country in Asia according to Hong Kong’s Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC). It is Asia’s biggest debtor. It is also one of the mostly restrictive economies according to the Heritage Foundation, and one of the world’s most uncompetitive economy, according to the World Economic Forum.

The country is also among the biggest exporters of labor in the world and has the most number of political killings.
....
The economy has been practically dependent on income sent from abroad by Filipinos. Such proxy economy cannot be a propellant to what Gloria deceives Filipinos into believing that spin of the country leaving its Third World status in 10 years, and crossing over to First World status.

No wonder the arroyo admin wants out of Transparency International's annual corruption survey.

To solve the utterly dismal corruption perceptions rating of the country under President Arroyo’s administration, the Presidential Anti-Graft Commission (PAGC) had proposed to the global corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) to drop the Philippines from its annual listing.

PAGC chairman Constancia de Guzman wrote TI chairman Huguette Labelle to complain about the perenially low ranking that the Philippines gets from TI on its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), in which the country was ranked a lowly 121st of 163 countries in the 2006 list.