The deal, struck last week during German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s milestone visit to Manila – the first by a German head of state since 1963 – centres on a 157,000-square-metre (39-acre) aviation facility at the former US air base.
It envisages developing the site into a state-of-the-art maintenance, repair and overhaul hub capable of servicing nine widebody aircraft at the same time.
When operations begin in 2028, the facility – to be developed by Lufthansa Technik Philippines (LTP), an existing joint venture between Germany’s Lufthansa Technik and the Philippines’ MacroAsia Corporation – is projected to employ 1,200 highly skilled Filipinos.
It is, by any measure, a serious industrial investment. But seen through the lens of intensifying global power dynamics, analysts say it is considerably more than that.
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