Saturday, March 29, 2008 Group of architects want Cebu furniture for inns in Japan: DTI
A GROUP of Japanese architects has expressed interest in buying Cebu furniture, according to a trade official.
“The Credo Planning Group, a group of architects in the Tokyo area, wants to get furniture and houseware (from Cebu) to supply the pension houses there,” said Department of Trade and Industry-Cebu Provincial Office Director Nelia Navarro.
“There are 15,000 pension houses all over Japan,” she told Sun.Star Cebu.
Navarro said the Credo group was able to get a glimpse of Cebu’s products after she left some furniture products she had brought to Japan last year for a fair there at the Philippine embassy because it was too expensive to ship them back to the Philippines.
Almost 200 companies from the Philippines, of which only about 15-20 were from outside Cebu, had sent products from the Philippines to that fair. The products included the furniture of Cebu’s famed furniture manufacturers like Kenneth Cobonpue and Carlo Cordaro.
“There’s a plan for the (Credo) group to come to Cebu,” she said. “I just received a proposal from the commercial attaché of Japan.”
On the DTI-Cebu’s other plans, Navarro revealed that the agency is now trying to locate a private company in the Netherlands for help in the production of plywood from bamboo.
She said she had seen beautiful attaché cases made of this material.
“I hope we can get technical assistance from the Netherlands for Plybo (plywood made from bamboo),” she said.
Plybo is also the name of the private company in the Netherlands that makes plywood from bamboo.
Alegria town in southern Cebu produces a lot of bamboo, which the town is promoting under the One Town, One Product (Otop) project of the Arroyo administration to promote entrepreneurship and create jobs.
Under the project, local chief executives of each city and municipality take the lead in identifying, developing and promoting a specific product or service in their respective areas, with the DTI providing support through training and the enabling of benchmarking visits.
The Otop is based on the One Village, One Product project of Japan.
Last August, Navarro went on a five-day exhibit of Otop Products in the Asean Japan Center in Japan.
The Philippines was not included in that fair because although the country had adopted Otop in 1994 or 1996 yet, Japan no longer heard anything about it from the Philippines, she said.
Navarro surmised that this must have been because “we did it under some other names, like the Drive (Developing Rural Industries and Village Enterprises) of (Trade Undersecretary) Ernie Ordoñez.”
The Drive project was launched by the Estrada administration in 1998. CTL
