President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has secured the commitment of Australia’s Macquarie Group Ltd. to invest in the renewable energy, value-added mining and digitalization in the Philippines during the sidelines of his participation to the ASEAN-Australia Special Summit in Melbourne on Tuesday.
“I am excited to talk about what more we can be doing in the Philippines because at the moment we do advisory work in investment bank, we bring our balance sheet to invest in,” Macquarie Group Managing Director and CEO Shemara Wikramanayake told President Marcos.
“The whole digitization process, we’re excited about. Also, the energy transition we’re excited about … we certainly invest in digitization and we invest in energy transition and in mining and building bigger advisory business,” she added.
Wikramanayake said they are interested in investing in the Philippines due to its demographic profile for having “a young and growing population,” which is “a bigger opportunity in terms of growth and organization” of their company in the Philippines.
Wikramanayake met with President Marcos as she discussed their interests in energy transition, mining and digitalization process. She said Macquarie Group provides sufficient funds not only in the US and Europe, but also in Southeast Asia.
Wikramanayake added they are keen about working with the Philippines. “What we’re keen to do is to partner with Southeast Asia particularly with places like the Philippines, which are proving to be very good to create that environment for the pension savers money here. To bring capital to health, investing in infrastructure, etcetera,” she said.
President Marcos lauded Wikramanayake for their interest in investing in the Philippines as he emphasized that they will be a big help for the Philippine development especially in terms of digitalization process not only for the investors, but also for the locals.
“We somehow have fallen behind in that regard, and we’re trying to catch-up,” President Marcos said, referring to digitization. “Digitization is a very important part of ease of doing business not just for investors, but for locals in their dealings with the government.”
President Marcos also stressed there is great deal with the Macquarie Group that the Philippines can explore more than what they have discussed on Tuesday.
“I don’t see any part of what we’ve discussed so far that is not applicable to what our ground plan for the economy of the Philippines. So, again, we’re very open to any insights you might have to improve investment terrain in the Philippines,” he added.
The Macquarie Group Limited has been operating in the Philippines for over 15 years already with more than 1,000 direct employees through Macquarie Offshore Services, which supports the company’s global business across operations, finance, technology and risk management.
In 2012, Macquarie won a bid to manage the first and largest-ever infrastructure fund for the Philippines at PhP25 billion through the Philippines Investment Alliance for Infrastructure (PINAI) in partnership with the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS).
A Macquarie Asset Management (MAM) led consortium acquired a majority stake in Energy Development Corporation (EDC) – the Philippines’ largest renewable energy company in 2017 to 2018.
The EDC manages 1.5GW of renewable energy generation capacity across geothermal, solar, hydropower, and wind, representing approximately 20% of total installed renewable energy in the Philippines.
