UNITED Parcel Service (UPS) has deferred the establishment of a redistribution facility in Luzon due to low cargo volume to and from the area, UPS intra-Asia hub manager Arturo Areola told PortCalls.
Last year, UPS planned to put up such a 1,500-square meter facility to decongest its intra-Asia hub in Clarkfield, Pampanga. Under the plan, cargoes to and from Luzon will be diverted to the facility from its hub to accommodate more exports and imports to and from Luzon.
Based on the original schedule, the facility should have been up by now.
“Our plan has to wait a little further. But we are not totally abandoning it and will immediately push for it once there is enough traffic or if cargo volume in the hub overflowed,” Areola said.
UPS sees another 30% growth in Philippine exports this year. The same growth was posted in 2005.
Eyed for the redistribution facility are Rosales and Dagupan in Pangasinan and Tarlac City to take advantage of the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway Project (SCTEP) that is set to be in full commercial operations by 2008.
The SCTEP will link the growth centers of Region III to provide easy access to the international container port facility in Subic and the international cargo/passenger airport facility in Clark to boost industrial activities that will spur growth of Central Luzon. It will provide the shortest and direct access to four ecozones in Luzon — Subic, Bataan Technopark, Clark, and Hacienda Luisita Technopark.
Once complete, the P21 billion, 94-kilometer, four-lane road is expected to decongest traffic at the North Luzon Expressway, the McArthur Highway and the Pan-Philippine Highway as well as serve as an alternate route to the Olongapo-Gapan-San Fernando road.
In another development, some 300 Philippine-based UPS employees recently trooped to Barangay Cauayan in Angeles, Pampanga as part of the company’s fourth annual global volunteer week.
UPS said its employees spend 100,000 hours doing volunteer work in 50 countries undertaking community services such as painting houses, landscaping and cleaning grounds.
The volunteer community service program this year includes about 500 hours of coordinating baseball tourna-ments for blind and visually impaired children in Taiwan, 2,000 hours renovating schools and shelters in Germany, 6,500 hours across the United States providing logistics support to raise funds for breast cancer research, and 100 hours for sorting food for food banks in Montreal, Canada.
