Services
From a strategic question to a functioning market presence
Five services, and the way we run them. Each is scoped in writing before any work begins, with the questions it will answer and the questions it will not both named.
Orientation Brief
A written brief plus a 90-minute session with your leadership team
The baseline picture: how the market actually works, which regimes and zones exist, and what the binding constraints are. Enough to decide whether to look further.
- The practical realities of doing business in the Philippines, and the binding constraints as they currently stand.
- The incentive regimes, tax credits, and grant programmes you would plausibly qualify for — on both the U.S. and Philippine sides.
- Zone options and how they actually differ: BCDA and CDC at New Clark City versus Clark Freeport, Subic under SBMA, and the PEZA estates in Laguna, Batangas, Cavite, and Cebu.
- The CREATE MORE incentive architecture, at the level a strategic decision needs.
- The honest logistics picture — including that construction on the Subic–Clark–Manila–Batangas rail is not expected to begin before 2027, with the southern segments later still.
- Power cost and reliability.
- The ten questions your board will ask, and our answers to them.
Market Entry Feasibility Study
With an optional Regional Comparison Study
The same ground worked in depth and applied to your project specifically — your product, your volumes, your headcount, your power draw. The document a board approves capital against.
- Customised research and analysis of tax, real estate, utility, and transportation costs.
- Employment and wage data, including where and how you would actually source people.
- Confidential site selection covering existing buildings and build-to-suit opportunities.
- Entity structure and incentive election, with a sample computation of the incentives you would qualify for under CREATE MORE — run on your own numbers rather than described in the abstract.
- A sequenced approval map naming every agency and the order they must be approached in.
- An 18-month critical path with named agencies and realistic durations.
- A cost and timeline model with stated confidence levels, and a risk register.
- Optional regional comparison. The Philippines set against one or two non-Philippine alternatives — Vietnam, Malaysia, India, or Indonesia — on the same criteria, so the comparison is like for like.
Site work is done for you, not for a location. We are not retained by any estate, park, or landowner, and we hold no listing, mandate, or commission on any property we show you.
Supply Chain Exposure Screen
Written analysis plus a working session with your supply chain and compliance leads
Where your footprint carries exposure, what the rules require of you, and which remedies are real.
- Map your potential tier-1 and tier-2 supplier base.
- Screen counterparties against public sanctions and entity lists.
- Flag Section 889 and forced-labour exposure.
- Identify Philippine substitution candidates, and assess how credible each one actually is.
- A tiered exposure map across your bill of materials: applicable tariffs, export and import controls, and other regulatory triggers.
- Which suppliers genuinely exist in the market, as distinct from which are advertised.
Where a remedy needs specialist capability we do not have, we refer you to supply chain solution providers and take nothing for the referral.
Landing Coordination
Monthly retainer, for after the decision is made
One point of accountability while the sequence runs, rather than five vendors you manage yourself.
- Incorporation and administrative permit facilitation.
- Coordination and transportation for local visits, including arranging the meetings you need with the parties who matter.
- Engagement with the stakeholders whose view of the project counts.
- A maintained sequencing tracker with owners and dates, and escalation handling.
- A standing weekly call.
- Referrals to tax firms, audit firms, law firms, recruitment firms, leasing agents, and other service providers.
We take no fee from any firm we refer you to, in either direction.
The AnterBridge Brief
Subscription. Two to six pages a month
For leadership teams who need to know whether an assumption they made last quarter still holds.
- Framework negotiation status.
- Locator announcements.
- Power and grid developments.
- Infrastructure progress.
- PIPIR line-of-effort awards.
- Minerals policy under Executive Order 122.
- Political risk into 2028.
Sourced throughout, with notice when something breaks between issues. We do not write about developments we cannot source, and a thin month gets a thin brief.
Choosing between them
Orientation Brief or Feasibility Study?
The two analytical services answer different questions, and the difference is depth rather than subject.
The Orientation Brief gives you basic information: how the market works, which regimes and zones exist, what they broadly offer, and where the binding constraints sit. It is current and sourced, but it is not modelled against your project. It is enough to decide whether to look further, and it is deliberately not enough to commit capital against.
The Feasibility Study works that same ground in depth and applies it to you specifically. It includes a sample computation of the incentives you would qualify for under CREATE MORE, run on your own numbers, so your board sees an actual figure rather than a description of a regime. It surfaces the nuance the brief cannot: where two zones look alike on paper and differ in practice, where an incentive election forecloses an option later, where a stated timeline and an observed timeline diverge.
Most clients take the brief first. Some skip it — and if it would tell you nothing you do not already know, we will say so rather than sell it to you.
How we work
Judgment you can check
Our product is judgment, which is difficult to buy sight unseen. These are the commitments that make ours verifiable rather than asserted.
Every claim names its source
Findings attach to a statute, an issuance, an agency, a site, or a named conversation. "The investment climate has improved" is not a finding. Which reform, administered by whom, effective when, and what it changes for you — that is a finding, and you can check it without us.
The answer comes first
Our documents open with the recommendation, then the reasoning, then the caveats. You should be able to read the first page and the last and know what we think. Nothing important is buried in the middle.
We mark what we don't know
Where a determination depends on an implementing rule that has not been published, or on an agency practice we have not been able to confirm, the document says so and states what would resolve it. Confidence levels are attached to numbers, not implied by their precision.
We work both sides honestly
We do not describe the Philippines to inbound clients as a cost to be arbitraged, and we do not describe those clients to local counterparts as a prize to be captured. Our counterparts read what we publish. That constraint improves the work.
Engagement sequence
How an engagement runs
Fixed fee, not hourly. One senior adviser stays with the engagement from the scoping call through delivery — you are not handed to a team you have not met. The steps below are ordered because the order matters: several of the expensive mistakes in this market come from doing step four before step three.
Scoping call
About an hour, no charge, no obligation, no sales process. We establish what decision you are facing, whether we can help, and whether the question is small enough that this call answers it. A meaningful share of these end without an engagement, which is the intended design.
Written scope and fixed fee
Before any work begins you receive a scope document naming the deliverable, the questions it will answer, the questions it will not, the fee, and the dates. If scope changes we re-paper it rather than absorbing it quietly into a variance.
Ground work
Desk research on the regulatory and incentive position, then the part that cannot be done from a desk: agency practice as currently applied, counterparty reputation, site conditions, and what people directly involved will say on the record and off it. We distinguish the two in the writing.
Interim read
Midway through, we tell you what we are finding, especially if it points away from the thesis you started with. You should never first learn a negative finding at the final readout.
Delivery and readout
The written deliverable, plus a working session with the people who have to act on it. We will present to your board or investment committee if that is where the decision is made.
After
Questions arising from a delivered engagement are answered without a new fee for ninety days. If the work points toward a landing coordination retainer, we say so in the deliverable, and you are free to run it with someone else.
Conduct
On dealing with officials
Work in this corridor involves regulatory approvals, which means it involves officials. We hold to a written anti-corruption policy: an absolute prohibition on facilitation payments, a gift and hospitality register, annual training for every person working on our engagements, a named escalation contact when an official asks for something improper, and standing authority for any team member to abandon an engagement rather than pay for it.
We would rather lose the work. This is stated publicly so that a client can hold us to it, and so that a counterparty knows the answer before asking.
Where the boundary sits
What we do not do
- Legal opinions, tax filings, audit work, and engineering or environmental certification. These come from licensed professionals, whom we coordinate with and do not substitute for.
- Holding a permanent establishment on a client's behalf.
- Lobbying, government relations retainers, or any representation requiring registration under FARA or its Philippine equivalents.
- Selling land, logistics, equity, or brokerage services, or taking a commission from anyone we introduce you to.