The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said Thursday the Philippines’ digital competitiveness has been declining, but assured that the government is undertaking crucial reforms to upgrade the country’s technology infrastructure.
He said the Philippines is currently lagging behind its Southeast Asian neighbors Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam, which took advantage of the pandemic to digitize.
The country’s digital economy peaked in 2021, accounting for 8.4% of its GDP, largely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Aguda said, it has remained stagnant since then as Singapore soared to 25%, Malaysia at over 20%, and Vietnam at 18%.
“The Philippines is in a state of digital decline,” he said at a cybersecurity forum organized by Stratbase Institute.
“This is unacceptable. This is not merely about percentages. It is about people,” the DICT chief said.
Aguda urged collective action to reverse stagnation.
“Our target is hyper-exponential growth,” he said, adding that, “Some say it’s impossible. To them I say, watch us work.”
By end of 2025, he said “the dip would be corrected.”
“I will not give figures, but it will be better than 8.4%,” he said.
Aguda also said the government has started eliminating compromised and outdated digital infrastructure to safeguard the country from cybersecurity threats.
He said there will be a “massive upgrading of all our infrastructure,” with the country adopting the best cybersecurity practices.
At the forum, government leaders, diplomats, and cybersecurity experts from across the Indo-Pacific tackled the region’s escalating digital threats and the urgent need for coordinated action.
Stratbase Institute President Victor Andres “Dindo” Manhit underscored cybersecurity’s central role in national resilience.
“Threats increasingly emerge from the digital domain: unseen, borderless, and asymmetrical,” he stressed, noting how deepfakes and foreign information manipulation now “blur traditional security boundaries,” Manhit said.
“Cybersecurity is not only about technology; it is about trust,” he added. “Cybersecurity is national security. Protecting our digital domain is a shared responsibility among the State, the private sector, and the international community.”
Japanese Ambassador Endo Kazuya expressed concern over the rapid escalation of global cyberattacks as he called for stronger coordination among states.
Cyberspace, he said, is “an indispensable social infrastructure for all activities across the globe,” yet threats are “rapidly escalating.”
Endo cited Japan’s monitoring data showing cyberattack-related communications surging from 63 billion packets in 2015 to 686 billion in 2024.
“No single nation can address threats in cyberspace alone. International cooperation is indispensable,” said Endo, adding that Japan is committed to support the Philippines and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) through cybersecurity capacity-building training.
Other diplomats present at the event were Australian Ambassador Marc Innes-Brown, Canadian Ambassador David Hartman, European Union (EU) Ambassador Massimo Santoro and Jennifer Schmidt, ICT/Infrastructure Unit Chief at the US Embassy in Manila, who all called for deeper intelligence-sharing, stronger incident-response coordination, and more robust public-private partnerships. — VDV, GMA Integrated News
