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(Roberto V. Ongpin)
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His first job was at Proctor and Gamble. But soon after, he was enticed by Washington SyCip to join SGV's management services team, where, at the time, <a href="https://kahimyang.com/kauswagan/general-blogs/2004/if-the-marcos-economy-was-so-bad-why-is-his-economic-tsar-cesar-virata-so-respected" class="news_link">Cesar Virata</a>, was already working as partner. When Virata joined the government in 1966, Bobby, as he was called publicly by many friends, took over.


SGV at the time was actively involved working at the crossroads of management and business problems of rising companies in the country. Its reach was increasing in East and Southeast Asia in those years. As an SGV partner, he could meet with the business talents of the broader region where business ventures were growing in numbers.


At the age of 42 in 1979, his call to join government came at the invitation of President <a href="https://kahimyang.com/kauswagan/articles/595/today-in-philippine-history-september-11-1917-ferdinand-e-marcos-was-born-in-sarrat-ilocos-norte" class="news_link">Ferdinand E. Marcos</a> to become Minister of Industry. He succeeded Vicente Paterno in the task.


Roberto Ongpin was different from Paterno in a number of ways. Paterno was a visionary who worked in careful steps. Ongpin was a doer, an action man.


Paterno took the resources that he had as the constraints of his operations. Ongpin saw them as impediments to his success. So, he sought the means to correct these in his favor.

Ongpin did not dwell on issues that often led to delay. He often went ahead with solutions to the operational obstacles that he encountered to promote his industrial projects. He complained that Paterno painstakingly prepared a thick set of files containing policy issues on major projects at the Board of Investments.


As a man of action, Ongpin plunged more quickly into the decision issues concerning projects that he tried to promote. If he found something missing, he sought support from elsewhere in the government (the president or his colleagues in other ministries) to correct the problem.


Ongpin found the split of the ministry of Industry and Trade into two departments artificial. When he assumed office as Industry minister he sought their re-consolidation and got the president to approve.


More significant was the recommendation that the Board of Investment, an autonomous agency to promote investments under the Office of the President, be consolidated under the supervision of the ministry. In one single stroke, Ongpin put three major agencies under his immediate control.


As Industry minister, he found soon enough that he could not get foreign direct investments to fund the projects that were highly prioritized in his plans. Some of these were projects that dealt with the expansion of resource-based industrial projects, including those in mining and agriculture. On these, there were definite constitutional limits that could not be disregarded.


He thus discovered soon enough that foreign investors were not as readily attracted to investment proposals in which they had less control over their investments. He also discovered that domestic industrialists were quite comfortable with their small industrial projects and that they had neither the resources nor the technology nor the capacity to enter into larger undertakings.


One solution that he struck on was to revive the National Development Company (NDC). This was a state investment promotion and funding corporation put up by former president Manuel Quezon during the Commonwealth period. Under NDC support and corporate powers, it could undertake contracts committing resources in the name of the government, including extending financing support to those industrial ventures.

Roberto V. Ongpin, a technocrat and one of Philippines' brightest businessmen