The 2026 Philippine CEO Survey, conducted by Isla Lipana & Co./PwC Philippines with the Management Association of the Philippines, surveyed 176 CEOs and senior business leaders across industries in the Philippines. Some 83% expressed confidence in their industry’s 12-month outlook and 81% expect revenue growth.

The same respondents cited regulatory uncertainty and climate change at 93% each, geopolitical conflict at 92%, technology disruption at 85%, and supply-chain constraints and skills shortages at 84% each.

That is not a contradiction. A company can see opportunity in the Philippine economy while recognising the operating environment has become harder to read. The more useful question is what happens when these risks stop arriving one at a time.

The Risks Stopped Arriving One at a Time

Corporate risk management typically sorts exposure into categories: geopolitical, financial, operational, cyber, supply chain, regulatory, climate, technology, talent. Each gets its own owner and its own line in the annual report. Actual disruptions rarely respect those categories.

A geopolitical conflict raises oil prices. Higher oil prices raise electricity, transport and logistics costs. Higher operating costs compress margins and consumer demand. Slower demand pushes companies toward automation to protect productivity, which deepens dependence on AI, cloud infrastructure and the cybersecurity, data governance and skills base that dependence requires.

A geopolitical shock ends as a technology-and-talent problem, several steps removed from where it started.

The World Bank’s August 2026 assessment identifies two compounding shocks weighing on the economy: policy uncertainty and a surge in global energy prices. The Bank held its 2026 growth forecast at 3.7%, down from 4.4% in 2025. Headline inflation averaged 4.8% in the first half, driven largely by energy costs.

Energy Is Where the Chain Starts

The clearest evidence of convergence sits in the energy system, because the Philippines is a net importer of petroleum products and remains exposed to global fuel markets.

After hostilities involving the United States, Israel and Iran began on 28 February 2026, the Strait of Hormuz, a critical corridor for global oil shipments, was closed to shipping. On 24 March 2026, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr declared a state of national energy emergency under Executive Order No. 110.

Initial Independent Electricity Market Operator of the Philippines (IEMOP) simulations indicated that the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) supply could exceed PHP9/kWh, compared with pre-conflict average WESM prices of PHP5/kWh or less.

For energy-intensive businesses, a WESM price spike can feed into procurement and tariff costs, depending on their supply contracts and exposure to spot-market pricing. It is an input-cost risk that can move faster than annual budgeting cycles can absorb.

The World Bank’s June 2026 financing package for Philippine energy and water security linked affordable, reliable electricity directly to business growth and investment, while highlighting reduced exposure to global fossil-fuel price shocks as a resilience priority.

The IMF’s 2026 assessment of Asia’s exposure to the same shock found the effects running through inflation, external balances and narrower monetary policy space, with knock-on disruption to fertiliser and petrochemical supply chains.

Its Philippines Article IV consultation separately named heightened geopolitical tension a downside risk precisely because it generates commodity volatility that reaches confidence, investment, tourism, trade and supply chains simultaneously, and can quickly move beyond the government-affairs function that first identifies it.

AI Adoption Is Compressing Several Risks Into One

More than eight in 10 surveyed CEOs have incorporated AI into their strategic or business plans, up from 68% a year earlier, and 79% have begun implementing AI initiatives. Read against the same survey’s 85% concern about technology disruption, 84% about skills shortages and 82% about cyber risk, AI adoption is not one more item on the risk register. It is the mechanism connecting several existing ones.

AI adoption requires specialist skills. Meeting that gap increases dependence on external providers and platforms. Platform dependence raises cybersecurity and data-governance exposure, which intersects directly with regulatory compliance, a concern already topping the survey at 93%.

In July 2026, President Marcos signed Executive Order 119, updating government data classification and establishing a risk-based data residency framework for government data, against a backdrop of expanding cloud and AI infrastructure. The 2026 Strategic Investment Priority Plan identifies cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and data science among its priority activities.

Meeting rising compute demand also raises electricity consumption, looping the chain back to the energy exposure above. The IMF has separately warned that AI and cloud dependency can create concentration risk, where an outage or breach at a single critical provider affects multiple institutions at once.

The Philippines is expanding its AI infrastructure regardless: its AI+ Infrastructure Masterplan 2026–2033 targets a 30-fold expansion in AI data-centre capacity, from a 50MW baseline to 1.5GW by 2033.

The binding constraint on all of this may increasingly be execution rather than capital. Skills shortages sit at 84% in the same survey, and the IMF’s Philippines assessment identifies skills development as central to digitalisation, including the exposure this creates for the country’s outsourcing sector.

The constraint is organisational: whether a company can recognise an interconnected risk quickly enough to act before the chain reaction it triggers has run its course.

Five Questions Replace the Old Risk Register

The shift for boards is from listing risks independently to interrogating how they interact. Five questions can reveal what a conventional risk matrix may miss:

1. Where are the critical dependencies across energy, suppliers, cloud, data, logistics, geography, financing and talent?
2. Which risks amplify each other when two or three materialise together?
3. What happens to unit economics under simultaneous stress from energy prices, currency movement, supply disruption and higher financing costs?
4. Where is transformation creating new dependencies, particularly through AI and cloud?
5. Which investments improve growth and resilience at the same time, rather than trading one for the other?

None of this replaces conventional risk management. It reorganises it around connections a category-based register cannot see.

Where the Convergence Becomes an Advantage

The Philippines is not short of policy momentum to work with. Digital infrastructure, AI, renewable energy, semiconductor investment and the Luzon Economic Corridor all sit inside the same growth agenda the government has set out.

Companies that understand interconnected risk can do more than limit exposure. The same visibility that helps them prepare for compounding shocks can also improve how quickly they identify and act on opportunities.

The Philippines is not facing one defining business risk. It is facing an environment in which geopolitics, energy, technology and talent increasingly move together. The question for management is no longer simply which risks are biggest. It is which risks amplify each other, and what happens when several land at once.

The Asia Pacific Loan Market Association held its first Dubai conference in January 2026, drawing roughly 300 attendees, nearly half from outside the region. Asian banks had extended more than USD 17 billion to Gulf borrowers in 2025, a record and roughly triple the 2024 total. The Gulf expansion came as Asia-Pacific syndicated lending outside Japan entered one of its weakest periods in more than a decade.

Home markets were shrinking. The Gulf was absorbing the capital instead. That trajectory lasted barely five weeks. After the United States and Israel struck Iran on 28 February 2026, Asian lenders did more than reassess Gulf exposure. New deal discussions and Asian-balance-sheet participation slowed sharply.

The Freeze Had Names Attached

By the time APLMA members regrouped in Hong Kong in March, the market conversation had inverted. HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered, two of Asia’s largest loan arrangers, told some Middle East clients that transactions drawing on Asian balance sheets would need to pause.

A major Singapore bank shelved its 2026 Middle East expansion plans and redirected its Hong Kong team towards South Korea and Australia.

One major Chinese bank went further, restricting a drawdown on a bilateral facility involving the Abu Dhabi government. People familiar with the matter described the move as rare. Hong Kong-based bankers at multiple institutions were required to provide daily updates to headquarters on regional loan exposure.

Taiwanese banks, previously among the most aggressive lenders to Gulf borrowers, stopped taking new exposure. “It is still far too early for us to reopen balance sheets to Gulf names,” a senior Taiwanese banker said.

The Capital Had Nowhere Else to Go

Five months later, the freeze began to thaw, though not because the conflict ended. Qatar National Bank, Boubyan Bank and Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund secured financing involving Asian lenders in August 2026.

Saudi Energy Co, the state utility formerly known as Saudi Electricity, entered talks for a USD 300 million facility expected to be anchored by a major Chinese lender. Together, the transactions and financing requests in motion exceeded USD 6.8 billion, though the amount ultimately funded remained unclear.

The return did not signal broad confidence in Gulf risk. Asia-Pacific syndicated lending outside Japan had entered its deepest slump in 16 years, leaving banks with fewer opportunities to deploy large pools of capital. That made selective Gulf transactions more consequential, not automatically safer.

Gary Ng, senior economist at Natixis, said banks would continue to lend “more cautiously and to selected clients.” They also had “an incentive to protect the relationships” built in the Gulf.

The August deals point to selective franchise preservation: banks are keeping access to established borrowers while limiting the risk they hold directly.

A third view is that the freeze was always temporary. Tatsuya Hasegawa of Sumitomo Mitsui called the pullback “largely cyclical” and said investors would return “absent any major disruptive events.”

His colleague Yuji Harada said communication with Middle East borrowers had slowed rather than stopped, with financing moving forward “once the timing aligns.”

The Exposure Is Not What It Was

The clearest evidence of selective re-entry sits inside the deal structures. In the Kuwait Investment Authority financing, Asian lenders including China Construction Bank and Korea Development Bank accounted for roughly 30% of total lending. A year earlier, Riyad Bank SJSC’s USD 1.5 billion loan drew 34 participating banks, all from Asia.

This is not a return to the 2025 model. Asian banks extended USD 2.3 billion to Gulf borrowers through August 2026, down 72% from the same period in 2025. The difference is not only volume. It is also the share of risk Asian banks are willing to retain in each transaction.

A proposed USD 7 billion financing for infrastructure projects in Syria shows how credit enhancement may compensate for political risk that lenders are less willing to hold directly.

Bloomberg reported that Qatar National Bank, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank and JPMorgan were involved in arranging financing for projects linked to Qatar’s Power International Holding.

IFR reported that Gulf lenders were seeking wider compensation for renewed political and liquidity risk, including an additional 50 to 60 basis points in some cases. The signal is not that guarantees eliminate war risk. It is that lenders are demanding a clearer allocation of who holds it.

What the Headline Number Misses

A headline announcing that Asian banks have restarted Gulf lending should not be read as proof that Iran-related risk has been priced out. Deal-level evidence instead points to case-by-case underwriting, lower participation and internal exposure guardrails that bankers say have remained in place since the conflict began.

The forward signal is not the USD 6.8 billion in requests. It is the participation ratio inside each deal that closes. A Gulf borrower attracting a broad Asian syndicate again, at the scale Riyad Bank achieved in 2025, would be stronger evidence that risk appetite is normalising.

Asian banks are not lending into this war because the risk has passed. They are lending into it because they have found ways to make someone else hold that risk instead: a Qatari guarantor, a smaller slice of the syndicate, a wider spread charged to the borrower.

That is not a return to 2025 confidence. It is caution that has found a business model.

AirAsia Group Berhad reported a net loss of MYR 830.5 million for the second quarter on 13 August 2026. It was the last of three regional carriers to report results within three weeks. Jet fuel averaged USD 183 a barrel that quarter, a 58% year-on-year jump tied to the Middle East conflict that began on 28 February 2026.

Every Southeast Asian carrier absorbed the same input cost shock. The results that followed did not look remotely similar.

Cebu Air, the operator of Cebu Pacific, posted a net loss of PHP 5.49 billion for the same quarter. That reversed PHP 8.51 billion in net income a year earlier. Singapore Airlines Group, hedged, still swung to a net loss of SGD 76 million, against a SGD 186 million profit the year before.

All three carriers faced the identical oil price. The scale of the damage did not track company size, brand strength or market share. It tracked whether the fuel had already been hedged before the shock or bought at spot price afterward. One of the three hedged well and lost money anyway. Read on to find out which.

The Unhedged Carrier Paid Twice

Cebu Pacific entered the second quarter with no meaningful fuel hedge in place, leaving it exposed on both the fuel and currency lines at once. Operating expenses surged 40.9% to PHP 37.97 billion. That drove an operating loss of PHP 2.73 billion, against PHP 5.96 billion in operating income a year earlier. Jet fuel reached USD 184.63 a barrel in April.

A weakening peso then compounded the fuel bill. The currency lost 8% against the US dollar in the quarter. That magnified the cost of dollar-priced fuel and leases. Cebu Air’s foreign exchange loss widened to PHP 667.1 million, from a PHP 142.8 million gain a year earlier. For the first half, that swing reached PHP 2.46 billion.

Those currency dynamics are explored in the companion analysis: When Four Currencies Fall Together, Fuel Is Only Half the Bill.

Cebu Air CEO Michael Szücs did not soften it. In a regulatory filing on 6 August 2026, he called it “one of the most challenging operating environments we have faced post-pandemic.” Cebu Pacific has since hedged about 30% of its third-quarter fuel needs at below USD 120 a barrel. The move came only after the damage was already booked.

Pass-Through Bought Time, Not Protection

AirAsia Group took a different route. Rather than hedging the fuel price itself, it moved fares. The Group recovered about 70% of its higher fuel cost through dynamic fare increases and non-fuel cost cuts.

Revenue per available seat kilometre rose 11% year-on-year even as capacity fell 11%. Cost per available seat kilometre excluding fuel dropped 7%.

The pass-through was not instant. April fares rose only 4% year-on-year, since seats were largely pre-sold before the spike. Fares then jumped more than 20% across May and June as the pricing strategy took full effect.

That timing gap explains most of the difference between AirAsia’s MYR 830.5 million reported net loss and its ex-FX result. Stripping out a MYR 331.0 million foreign exchange charge leaves a MYR 499.6 million loss.

AirAsia Group CEO Bo Lingam framed the quarter as an inflection point. The Group is “treating 2Q26 as our floor quarter,” he said. AirAsia is taking a calculated, tactical approach to Q3, trimming capacity by 20%-25% year-on-year, typically the softest travel period.

The Group plans to restore capacity to pre-war levels in the fourth quarter.

Hedging Cushioned the Blow, Not the Loss

Singapore Airlines Group shows what a hedge book can and cannot do. Gross fuel cost before hedging more than doubled, up 118.7% to SGD 2,629 million. A fuel-hedging gain of SGD 376 million softened the blow. Net fuel cost still rose 78.5% to SGD 2,253 million.

Within the Group, Scoot’s passenger unit costs rose 21.7% to 7.3 cents per available seat kilometre. That pushed its break-even load factor to 100%, against an actual load factor of 90.6%. Scoot’s operating loss nearly doubled to SGD 32 million, from SGD 17 million a year earlier, despite fare increases and hedge coverage.

Operating profit still fell 73.8% to SGD 106 million, alone enough to tip the Group into a loss. A further SGD 42 million hit from its 25.1% stake in Air India widened it to SGD 76 million. That reversed a SGD 186 million profit the year before.

The hedge did exactly what it was built to do. Air India was the risk nobody was hedging against.

Hedging Explains Exposure, Not Every Outcome

The pattern across all three carriers holds on one point and complicates on another. Hedging posture, or the speed of fare pass-through in AirAsia’s case, decided how directly each carrier felt the fuel shock. It did not decide whether a loss appeared at all, as Singapore Airlines Group’s own results just showed.

BofA Global Research’s Nathan Gee, head of Asia-Pacific transportation research, offers a second lens. Full-service carriers weathered the shock better than budget carriers, cushioned by stronger premium demand and loyalty programmes that low-cost models lack.

Hedging determines fuel-price exposure. Business model determines how much of the rest gets absorbed.

Whether that discipline extends into the fourth quarter, or reflects only a bet on cheaper fuel, is addressed in the companion analysis: Q4 Will Test Whether Southeast Asia’s Airlines Learned the Right Lesson.

Independent aviation analyst Brendan Sobie offered a blunter view. “The short-term outlook is rather bleak,” he said. Any fourth-quarter improvement, in his assessment, remains too early to call with confidence.

Market share and brand loyalty are not the numbers to watch. The fuel hedge book is the starting point: it shows whether protection was built before the war started or assembled afterward. Whether that protection was enough is a different question. Singapore Airlines Group hedged as well as any carrier in the region. It still posted a loss.