The Philippines went from the agung, the bronze gong once used to relay messages across a valley, straight to mobile phones, skipping the landline decades almost entirely. Filipinos never experienced the copper wire the rest of the industrialized world spent generations trenching under streets and threading through walls. Millions who never held a rotary phone now carry a smartphone in a back pocket.
Late arrival is a familiar Philippine strategy. The pattern worked for telecommunications because fixed hardwired infrastructure was obsolete by the time local capital was ready to move. Applying that same logic to electric vehicles, however, confuses skipping a technology with skipping the industrial base required to build it.
In the nineteenth-century, the steam engine built rail transport. Developing nations did not need to invent the locomotive to benefit from it, but those that merely imported rolling stock still remained captive to foreign coal fields and foreign foundries. The value was in owning the coal and the steel and not in laying the railroad track.
Executive Order 121, signed in July, promises P60 billion in incentives to position the nation within the electric vehicle global supply chain. The policy rewards domestic assembly, which means importing complete kits from abroad and fastening them together locally, known as ‘screwdriver manufacturing.’ It is an arrangement that pays for the final, lowest-value link of a supply chain owned entirely by foreign capitals.
China spent two decades constructing that chain from the mine up. The International Energy Agency reports China controls 70 percent of global electric vehicle production and over 80 percent of battery cell output. Chinese battery cell prices sit more than 30 percent below those in Europe and more than 20 percent below the United States, the product of years spent refining lithium-iron-phosphate chemistries while Western competitors remained focused on costlier nickel-based alternatives.
The European Union responded with tariffs up to 35 percent on top of its standard 10 percent auto duty. Chinese electric vehicle market share in Europe rose from 9.4 percent to 14 percent anyway. A tariff raises the price of an import without lowering the cost of the domestic alternative, taxing the outcome while ignoring the cause.
Manila chooses to replicate this logic from the opposite side of the balance sheet. Executive Order 121 offers up to P15 billion per vehicle model for assembly plant construction, plus a subsidy worth 12 percent of the individual car ex-factory price. Because these funds subsidize final assembly, the majority of that taxpayer capital flows directly to foreign component manufacturers mostly in China. A local assembly line stays vulnerable to external supply shocks that can shutter a plant without ever disturbing a mine.
The Philippines already possesses the physical mineral asset. The country is the world’s second-largest nickel producer, extracting roughly 370,000 metric tons in 2024, about 9 percent of global mine supply. Producers exported the overwhelming majority of that ore raw and unprocessed, historically bound for Chinese stainless steel smelters, though a growing share now flows to Indonesian processors instead. Still a bridesmaid with the dowry going to someone else’s smelter.
Raw Philippine nickel is not battery grade. Turning that ore into battery precursors requires high-pressure acid leach processing facilities, an intermediate step Executive Order 121 completely ignores. Developing that refining capability could transform the country into an essential supplier regardless of where vehicles are bolted together.
Indonesia used its mineral reserve position to demand foreign investment in domestic precursor and cathode facilities, banning raw ore exports. The Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives for Enterprises Act (CREATE) provides Manila with the regulatory tools to pursue a similar processing partnership within ASEAN countries. Executive Order 121 chooses instead to pursue final assembly, repeating the structure of the previous Comprehensive Automotive Resurgence Strategy program, whose funding Marcos vetoed from the 2026 national budget only months earlier, leaving its incentive obligations to participants unpaid.
Manila can draft an incentive program twice in a decade and still not get the payment terms right.
Consumer adoption advances without waiting for industrial policy. BYD captured 71 percent of the domestic electric vehicle segment in the first half of 2026. Among CAMPI-TMA member brands, electrified vehicle sales rose 132 percent to 31,381 units over the same period, even as the overall industry contracted 11.4 percent.
The country was never going to miss the EV party. Filipinos will buy efficient transport at the right price point. The open question is whether the country will remain a customer paying for foreign industrial development, or become an owner of the supply chain supplying it.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.