From One Van to ASEAN: How Trade Missions Open Markets for Filipino Businesses
In a single month, Airspeed’s leadership was in Taipei, in Vietnam, in Phnom Penh, and in Basel.
This is not a travel itinerary. It is what market access work looks like before a market exists. Trade missions are frequently dismissed as ceremonial — handshakes, photographs, a communiqué. In practice they are where corridors get built, where buyers are found, and where the rules of a foreign market stop being abstract. For Filipino businesses hoping to sell abroad, someone has to go first.
The ASEAN Corridor Is Being Built Now
Two of those trips were about the region next door.
In Vietnam, Airspeed joined a delegation of 95 industry leaders and entrepreneurs on the Philippine Trade Mission 2025, organised by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry with the Philippines–Vietnam Business Council. In Cambodia, Chairperson Rosemarie Rafael represented both Airspeed and the Women’s Business Council Philippines at the CEO B2B Networking Roundtable, held as part of the Philippine Presidential State Visit to Phnom Penh. The sectors under discussion were concrete: consumer goods, healthcare, franchising, infrastructure, agro-processing, and logistics.
Regional trade is often described in the language of summits. It is actually built in rooms like these, where a Filipino manufacturer meets a Vietnamese distributor and discovers that the only thing standing between them is freight and paperwork.
Two Different Kinds of Learning
The other two trips were not about selling. They were about competence.
At Taiwan SMART Agri-Week, Airspeed joined the Philippine delegation through the Department of Trade and Industry’s Agrifood Mission, championing logistics for agriculture and perishables. Taiwan is a market for Philippine produce, but it is also a demonstration of how agrifood supply chains are run when technology is applied seriously.
Basel was a different exercise entirely. President and CEO Mariz Regis represented Airspeed at the Pharma Logistics Network in Switzerland — the global centre of pharmaceutical logistics — joining the Basel Pharma Cargo Airport Tour to see a fully temperature-controlled facility built to protect sensitive shipments across an entire supply chain, and taking part in the ILMAC Pharma Logistics Days.
There is no Philippine market to win in Basel. What is there is the standard. Understanding how the world’s most demanding temperature-controlled logistics operations actually work is how that standard eventually reaches medicines moving through Manila.
Why This Matters to a Business That Never Leaves the Philippines
Most exporters will never attend a trade mission. They do not need to — provided their logistics partner did.
When a forwarder has walked a corridor, met the receiving agents, seen how a destination handles perishables, and understands what a foreign regulator will ask for, that knowledge arrives in your shipment as fewer surprises. It shows up as accurate customs clearance filings, as realistic transit expectations, as air freight routing that reflects which carriers actually serve a market well. Businesses preparing for a first international shipment can start with our guide to international freight forwarding.
Presence abroad is not a vanity metric. It is inventory of a kind — accumulated knowledge about places your cargo has to go.
It Started with One Van
There is a reason this company keeps showing up for small businesses.
Speaking at the Department of Trade and Industry’s Supply Chain and Logistics Center, Airspeed President Mariz Regis put it plainly: the company understands the struggles MSMEs face because it began as one, with a single van and six people. Four decades later, it moves cargo by air, sea, and land across the country and beyond it.
That origin explains the pattern. Airspeed served as official logistics partner of Himbon, the 39th Negros Trade Fair, where handicrafts and organic products from Negros met a Manila audience. It explains the DTI partnerships, and the seat at every table where MSME market access is being discussed. A company that once needed someone to open a door tends to remember what that felt like.
Take Your Business Further
Whether your market is in the next province or the next country, Airspeed brings four decades of experience and a network built by showing up. Request a quote or email [email protected], and let Airspeed make it happen.
