Despite worsening problems on many fronts, the Philippines had reason to crow a little the other day. The trade figures for June showed electronics exports up 46 per cent over the previous June to US$1.2 billion.
Electronics accounts for more than half of the country's exports. If rank in electronics were assessed on this measure, the Philippines would be the electronics capital of Asia.
The country is clearly doing better here than the rest of Asia. Electronics can be notably hard to define in trade figures, but Asia, excluding the Philippines, shows only a barely positive growth rate in electronics exports at the moment, while the Philippines has consistently posted more than 30 per cent growth rates for the past four years.
As a result, it accounts for an estimated 5.3 per cent of all Asian electronics exports while its share of Asian exports is only 2.3 per cent.
All well and good, but this does not tell the full story.
The difficulty is that the Philippines has concentrated on the low end of the business, particularly when establishing the Subic Bay export processing zone, and it does not get much value-added from its electronics exports.
Last year, a visit to a listed company billed as the star of the Philippine electronics industry revealed an assembly operation working under contract to a single big US name in electronics.
