IPA banking on survey for a better picture of investment

THE Investment Promotion Authority (IPA) hopes that the spot inspection survey to be conducted in Port Moresby will show a better picture of business investment and trends.
The last survey was held in 2016.
“If you drive around, you will appreciate that business is booming; it is going even to the peripheries of Central province,” said IPA acting director investment servicing and promotion division Daroa Peter.
“If you look around, you will see that wholesale and retail is the booming sector, also real estate, construction.”
Peter said sometimes when people register their business at IPA, they say one thing on the counter and do something else.
“What they tell us during the time of the registration is that they tell us that we want to go into these activities, we want to employ this number of people and this amount of money we want to spend, but in actually fact, they do other things,” he said.
“So that is why when we send out those survey questionnaires, we send those type of information, we will have a database that says that this sector is thriving, this province is getting most of the investment.”
He said that usually in a provincial breakdown, NCD gets the biggest number of investments.
“It gets most of the investment, second to NCD you have Morobe and other centres like New Britain, Western Highlands, and most of the investment are from Australia, obviously … (and) Malaysia, Philippines, China.
“You also need to appreciate that China is unique in the sense that they have businesses in almost all other parts of the world.
“For example, if you have a Chinese company that is incorporated in Australia and that company comes and incorporates here in PNG, they have the option of saying that are an Australian company.
“So sometimes we generalise because of their skin colour. Those are some of the things that we need to take stock off.
“We also realise that Indians are also unique in the sense that we have some Fijian Indians who are doing business and people regard them as Indians.
“There are different races doing business in PNG.”