ence for foreign-made products.
“The way the government purchases PPE, it is subject to certain standards, rules for purchasing, so we were subjected to the lowest cost, and unfortunately, at the same time, the Philippine market was flooded with very low-cost PPEs from China, some of them are even substandard,” Carrillo told the senators.
Marites Agoncillo, executive director of the Confederation of Wearable Exporters of the Philippines , said that due to the intermittent orders from the government, companies are now mulling to return to the export market so their repurposed factories could continue operating, and thus hire more workers.
Sen. Imee Marcos, committee chairman, cited a report and said that “a very cursory review of all the winning bids will show that the same few companies continue to win them every bidding round.” Marcos further said that of the goverment’s latest procurement worth P4.8 billion, local PPE manufacturers only got 14 percent of total bid, while 86 percent of the amount “went overseas.”
“We’ll get to the bottom of this. I think it’s unfair to ask — although it would save jobs — [to] ask factories to repurpose, and yet, the same time, disappoint them by not buying their output, their produce,” he said.
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