Maxime Droit to Speak on Investing in the Philippines at the BELFIL Business Bridge, Harelbeke

REURASIA Chief Executive Officer Maxime Droit will speak at the BELFIL Business Bridge in Harelbeke, Belgium, on 29 September 2026. The evening is presented by the Belgian-Luxembourg Filipino Business Chamber and built around three ways a Belgian company can enter the Philippine market: export, invest, and import.

Maxime takes the investment session, drawing on ten years of building and operating industrial energy projects in the Philippines as a European company. Quentin Claeys, Export Manager at the Belgian Pork Group, covers export; Steven Dejager, Partner at Digital Bakery, covers import.

Who is convening it

The event is co-presented by the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry, VOKA West-Vlaanderen Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and the Belgian-Luxembourg Filipino Business Chamber, with the Embassy of Belgium in Manila and Flanders Investment and Trade among the partners.

H.E. Jaime V. Ledda, Philippine Ambassador to Belgium, and Hon. Kristian Ablan, Assistant Secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry, join from the Philippine side. Delphine Standaert, International Business Advisor at VOKA, and Evert De Bock, President of the Belgian-Luxembourg Filipino Business Chamber, represent the Belgian side. The evening falls in the eightieth year of diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Belgium.

What Maxime will cover

The investment session is aimed at Belgian and Luxembourg companies weighing a first move into the Philippines, and at those that have tried and stalled. REURASIA was founded in Makati in 2016 by European and Filipino engineers and now employs around forty-five people in the office and on plant sites. That history is the material: what a foreign investor can realistically control, what has to be done locally, and where projects tend to fail.

Three themes run through it. The first is that a Philippine project is rarely blocked by technology; it is blocked by permitting sequence, by site reality differing from desktop assumptions, and by feedstock or offtake that was never verified on the ground. The second is that execution capability has to exist locally, not be flown in for commissioning and then withdrawn. The third is that the energy transition in the Philippines is an industrial opportunity rather than a subsidy play: high electricity prices, abundant agricultural residue, and a waste problem that companies already pay to dispose of.

These are the same questions we work through with developers and technology providers entering the Philippines, and the honest answer is sometimes that a project does not fit.

Attending

The BELFIL Business Bridge takes place on Tuesday 29 September 2026 at 5:30 pm at OSTA in Harelbeke. Entry is free and seats are limited. Registration is handled by the Belgian-Luxembourg Filipino Business Chamber; if you would still like to attend, contact the Chamber directly.

If you are travelling from Belgium and want to talk about a specific project rather than the market in general, tell us about it before the event and we will make time around it.