Giant German-owned company Siemens has expressed its support to the Philippines’ bid for digital transformation, and is open to providing training for Filipino workers and businesses adapting to modern technologies.
In a meeting with President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. on Tuesday, Siemens AG President and CEO Dr. Roland Busch said the Philippines has an ideal young workforce for such program.
“Actually, there are couple of things coming together. It’s like a lot of stars are aligned: 110 million people—young people— and most of them are English-speaking. And secondly, I know that you’re also building data centers in your country, laying the foundation for cloud and cloud applications because we need that,” Busch said.
“We are more than happy to do more in terms of training the small and medium-size enterprises to see where they can go,” he added.
Busch further committed to be part of the country’s transformation.
For his part, President Marcos expressed confidence in the capabilities of the Filipino workforce to become competitive in navigating technologies with the right training and education.
“We are blessed with a good workforce, a young workforce that is very well-trained, and has very good experience with working in foreign entities, countries, corporations. And I think the need right now is for the upskilling to the new technologies that we are talking about. That I think is going to be key,” President Marcos said.
The chief executive said the Philippines is looking ahead and future-proofing its workforce as technology continues to evolve. It is with technology that many problems can be solved, he added.
“When we look at what happens next in the next 10, 20 years down the road, really is the digital space is the fastest growing, most important and least understand. AI is still something we have to figure—everyone is till trying to figure out,” Marcos said.
“But I still am a true believer that in technology we’ll find new solutions to many of the problems and it is up to us to take full advantage on that and be aware of the unintended consequences that might arise as we start to develop these technologies,” he pointed out.
Siemens has been operating in the country for more than 125 years. The company has made significant technology contributions in the areas of telecommunications, energy, factory automation, mobility, and smart building technologies since 1894. PND
