By HENRY EMPEÑO | 

SUBIC BAY FREEPORT — It might be business as usual for the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) amidst the Covid-19 outbreak, but doing transactions with customers and investors is now taking on a novel form.

Last week, officers from the SBMA Business and Investment Group’s Business and Investment Department for Maritime and Manufacturing hooked up with businessmen in Taiwan through a teleconference to discuss a prospective investment project.

Linked by a telecommunications system, the SBMA team engaged in a live discourse and exchange of information with their counterparts who were all donning facemasks.

“We have had initial face-to-face discussions previously, but because of travel restrictions due to the Covid-19 threat, our clients couldn’t travel all the way from Taiwan this time,” explained SBMA Senior Deputy Administrator for Business and Investment Renato Lee, who led the SBMA team.

“So this is the option we took — and it worked all right,” he added.

Lee said the two groups managed to take up every essential item in the proposed project during the remote meeting that lasted close to two hours.

“They were looking for a suitable location—a factory-warehouse type of building, so we discussed the available options. Then we also talked about the products they intend to manufacture here, as well as the technology transfer we can benefit from, the number of workers to be generated, the projected revenue — things which are the stuff of initial business meetings,”  Lee said.

“It was a fruitful meeting, and judging by what we have covered you would never know it was accomplished via teleconferencing,” he added.

Although rarely resorted to in the past, teleconferencing with clients is seen to become more frequent here, as the SBMA finds ways to continue making business transactions despite recent spikes of Covid-19 infection.

“With the continuing threat of Covid-19 and the recent rash of transmissions outside China in countries like South Korea, Italy, and Iran, I see that teleconferencing will not only be a trend in Subic, it will become a necessity,” SBMA Chairman and Administrator Wilma T. Eisma said on Thursday.

Eisma pointed out that that infrastructure are in place to allow teleconferencing on a regular basis in Subic, which was affected by the national health guidelines banning cruise ships, airplanes and travellers coming from China and its special administrative regions (SARs), as well as other countries affected by Covid-19.

At the same time, the SBMA enforced measures like mandatory physical inspection of all foreign nationals entering SBMA gates; self-quarantine of all Subic residents, locators and employees who travelled from China and its SARs in the past 14 days; thermal scanning by business locators of their personnel; and disinfection practices in offices and facilities.

While the Philippine government lifted the Taiwan travel ban just days after its imposition, Covid-19 outbreaks in other places seriously hamper trade just as well, said Eisma.

This is where teleconferencing comes in handy despite the disadvantage of remote interaction.

“We cannot afford any let-up in business,” Eisma stressed. “We have to find ways to keep the wheels of commerce moving, so business mobility will have to be supplemented with mobile business.”