Early in my career, I learned that the most valuable thing a company owns rarely appears on its balance sheet. It is not the office or the equipment. It is the idea, the brand, the method, the story, the things competitors cannot copy and clients cannot get anywhere else. (It is also, to the quiet disappointment of my tailor, not the suit.) That lesson has only grown truer with time.
WHERE VALUE NOW LIVES
In the world’s most advanced economies, value has migrated almost entirely from what can be touched to what can be owned as an idea. By Ocean Tomo’s reckoning, intangible assets now account for roughly 92% of the market value of the S&P 500, up from just 17% in 1975. The global stock of intangibles reached about $80 trillion in 2024, and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has found that intellectual property (IP) and other intangibles contribute, on average, twice as much value as physical capital to the goods we make and trade.
This is the lens through which every CEO should now read the creative economy. IP is not a matter for the legal department to file and forget. It is an asset class.
STRONG AT CREATING, WEAK AT OWNING
Which brings me to a paradox we must confront. The Philippines is creatively strong, yet it captures too little of the value it creates.
Our creative economy reached P2.12 trillion in 2025 — 7.6% of GDP — according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). The new National Diagnostic Report produced by WIPO with the Department of Trade and Industry, Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines (IPOPHL), and PSA puts the sector at 7.8% of GDP at constant prices and 17.8% of total employment. Creative services already make up around 12% of our service exports. By any measure, we participate.
But participation is not ownership. The same Diagnostic Report delivers the uncomfortable finding: the Philippines remains a net importer of IP. We pay more in royalties and licensing for foreign IP than we earn from our own. IPOPHL Director General Teodoro Pascua put it in a single sentence. The next chapter, he said, is not just about creating for the world; it is about owning what we create.
THE MISSING LAYER: VALUATION AND FINANCE
The gap is not talent, and it is not even protection. It is the system that turns a creation into capital. Worldwide, only about 48% of stock-market value is intangible, against 90% in the United States. Capturing the value of ideas is a learned capability, and it rests on something unglamorous: valuation and financing. In the Philippines, the use of IP as collateral remains well below our peers. A musician’s catalogue, a studio’s characters, a designer’s marks — these are revenue-generating assets, but our banks and markets have not yet learned to lend against them.
This is precisely what the Philippine IP Strategy 2025-2030 is built to change. It treats IP not as paperwork but as an economic system, organized around four ideas: building IP awareness, creating systems for valuation and commercialization, deepening cooperation, and harnessing new technology. IPOPHL is also helping develop an ASEAN-wide IP valuation framework, the connective tissue that gives a lender the confidence to treat an intangible as bankable.
We do not have to imagine this from scratch. Our neighbors are already building it, and learning as they go. Singapore piloted IP-backed lending a decade ago, letting firms borrow against their patents, trademarks, and copyrights with the government sharing default risk. Uptake was modest, and the lesson proved more valuable than the loans: the real obstacle was not the law but valuation and disclosure. Singapore’s answer was its 2023 Intangibles Disclosure Framework, which gives lenders a structured way to read a company’s intangible assets. South Korea went further and to scale, with IP-backed financing reaching roughly ₩12.4 trillion by 2025. Closest to our own situation, Malaysia approved its first loan under a WIPO-backed IP finance pilot in May 2026. Across the region, IP is moving from legal theory to live credit decisions.
FROM SERVICE TO OWNERSHIP
For Filipino enterprises, the shift is from being paid for service to owning the asset. Our screen and animation industries have spent decades as a trusted workshop for the world. The opportunity now is co-ownership. Through the Film Development Council’s International Co-Production Fund, local companies are co-producing, and co-owning, original titles with foreign partners. Fire and Ice Media’s Never the Bride, an original Filipino series project co-produced with French and Taiwanese partners, won project recognition at one of Asia’s most competitive content markets in late 2025. That is what Filipino IP, validated on a global stage, looks like.
Music tells the same story. When SB19’s company secured control of the group’s name and logo, it did more than settle a dispute. It took ownership of a brand universe that spans music, merchandise, live events, and talent development. The deeper lesson for any enterprise is that value lives in the rights stack — who controls the trademarks, the catalogue, the formats, and the royalties.
Let me be fair to our progress. The Philippines has stayed off the United States’ piracy watch list for 12 straight years, and copyright registrations hit a record 6,552 in 2025, nearly 75% higher than in 2022. Our problem is not a weak IP system. It is that we have improved protection faster than we have built the systems that turn creations into collateral, contracts, brands, and exportable equity.
This is the work ahead, and it has a regional vehicle. The proposed ASEAN Center of Excellence for Creative Industries can become the delivery mechanism for cross-border IP commercialization and a shared valuation framework, exactly the infrastructure our enterprises need as the Philippines takes up the ASEAN chairmanship in 2026.
I have spent a career arguing that creativity is an economic force, not a soft skill. The next argument is sharper still. The country that only creates will be paid less than the country that owns. The Philippines has never lacked for creators. What we must now build, deliberately and quickly, are the systems that let our creators own what they make, and earn from it, at home and across the region.
Junie S. Del Mundo is chair of the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) Trade, Investments and Tourism Committee, vice-chair of the MAP International Relations Committee, and chief executive of The EON Group.