Philippine dollar reserves fall to $104.6B in April

BSP head office

Updated at 7:01 pm on May 8, 2025

MANILA, Philippines — The country’s gross international reserves (GIR) continued to decline in April, with outflows stemming from foreign debt payments of the government and foreign exchange interventions of the central bank.

The GIR settled at $104.6 billion as of end-April, from the end-March level of $106.7 billion, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) reported.

Despite the decline, the BSP said the latest GIR level provided a “robust” external liquidity buffer, equivalent to 7.2 months’ worth of imports of goods and payments of services and primary income.

READ: Gold bull run tempers GIR decline

Moreover, the latest dollar reserves are enough to cover about 3.6 times the country’s short-term external debt based on residual maturity.

Dissecting the GIR components, foreign investments declined by 3.1 percent amid tariff-induced market volatility.

But the value of the BSP’s gold holdings went up by 4.5 percent to a new record high of $13.3 billion, while foreign exchange holdings grew by 23.5 percent.

“The country’s strong external position could help stabilize the peso exchange rate,” said Michael Ricafort, chief economist at Rizal Commercial Banking Corp.

The month-on-month decrease in GIR also reflected the following:

• The government’s drawdowns on its foreign currency deposits with the BSP to meet its external debt obligations and pay for its various expenditures, and
• BSP’s net foreign exchange operations to temper excess foreign exchange volatility.

Similarly, the net international reserves decreased by $2 billion to $104.6 billion as of end-April 2025 from the end-March 2025 level of $106.6 billion.