By Tracy Cabrera
Focusing on its expansion plans in the Philippines, Japan’s multinational conglomerate Toshiba Corporation is set to upgrade its production capacity in the country through a multi-billion-peso investment over the next three years.
This was announced by the Department of Finance (DoF) in a news release that cited the expansion plans is expected to generate around 3,000 jobs and will strengthen the Philippines’ position in global technology supply chains.
According to finance secretary Frederick Go, he has already discussed Toshiba’s plans during a meeting with the company’s officials led by chief-operating-officer and senior executive vice president Koji Ikeya.
During the discussions, Ikeya shared plans to increase their nearline hard disk drive (NL-HDD) production capacity in the Philippines.
NL-HDDs provide high-capacity storage for applications such as data centers, which are experiencing growing storage requirements amid the expansion of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, digital services and other data-intensive technologies.
Ikeya explained that their planned investment builds on the more than three decades of manufacturing operations in the Philippines, which serves as a major production base for their global HDD business.
Secretary Go was enthusiastic on hearing this and he enthused that for the Philippines, this will provide an opportunity to capture a larger share of the growing global demand for high-capacity data storage while strengthening the country’s capabilities in advanced electronics manufacturing.
“We see Toshiba’s planned expansion as an opportunity to strengthen our industrial base, build an electronics and tech industry ecosystem that creates quality jobs for Filipinos, and position the Philippines to capture opportunities in the growing global technology and data economy,” he pointed out.
In ending, the finance chief highlighted that Toshiba’s continued commitment to the Philippines is a testament to the success of the Marcos (Jr.) administration in attracting long-term investments through reforms that include the Corporate Recovery and Tex Incentives for Enterprises (CREATE MORE) Act.
