DTI eyes e-commerce industry growing to 1M merchants by 2022

The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is targeting to further expand the country’s e-commerce sector by 2022, with the number of merchants expanding to about a million.

"E-commerce come to our rescue amid the pandemic... adoption in the Philippines grew," Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez said during the virtual Digital Pilipinas launch on Thursday.

Lopez said e-commerce adoption in the Philippines grew from 70% in 2019 to 76% in 2020 and 80.2% in 2021.

“Many online businesses fill the void left by brick and mortar businesses affected by the community lockdowns,” he said.

Online retail, delivery services, online entertainment, telehealth services, work from arrangements, and digital payments helped the economy in 2020 and continue to do so this year, according to the Trade chief.

The Cabinet official bared the DTI’s e-Commerce Roadmap which aims to increase the contribution of the sector to the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) by 5.5% come 2022.

To do this, government is targeting to increase the number of e-commerce enterprises to one million by 2022 from 500,000 in 2020.

Meanwhile, by the end of they year, the DTI expects the number of e-commerce merchants to to reach 750,000.

Lopez emphasized the need for developing a digitally-skilled workforce as well as building confidence between merchants and consumers to achieve the goal of expanding the e-commerce sector.

The Trade chief also noted the need for reliable telco services and logistics system. -MDM, GMA News