Saturday, 26 September 2026 · Daily Market Intel

Market IntelSat, 26 Sept

Philippine eateries stop paying US$0.52 tax on every cooking-gas tank.

Cooking gas focus · rented relief · free sorting

Your costs
- Marcos cut US$0.52 of tax off every LPG tank, so will a Manila eatery's receipt show it? — Philstar
  President Ferdinand Marcos suspended the excise tax, a fixed per-kilogram fuel tax, on cooking gas and kerosene from 25 September. That takes about US$0.52 off an 11-kilogram LPG tank for up to three months.
  Positive-sum angle: The cut reaches every stove at once: carinderias, the small home-cooking eateries, the sari-sari corner shops that sell gas refills, and the households behind them. Dealers who show the lower price on the receipt keep the regulars who shop around.
  What's the impact: A Manila carinderia burning a tank every two days should check the next dealer receipt for the cut, about US$7.9 (P500) a month by CÈ's arithmetic. The tax returns after three months, or a week after crude averages under US$80, so menu prices should stay put.
The tool
- Buried in customer chats? Fastino's free model sorts each one in 0.17 seconds, no graphics card — MarkTechPost
  Fastino released GLiNER2.5-Decide, a small open model that files text into labels the user sets, such as refund, delivery or new order. It is free for commercial use under the Apache 2.0 licence and sorts a short message in 0.17 seconds on a server processor.
  Positive-sum angle: Sorting chats is the job small teams pay a person or a pay-per-use AI service to do. A free sorter that runs without a graphics card lets a seller route messages to the right person, and lets a local developer sell the setup.
  What's the impact: A Manila or Bangkok seller answering 200 chats a day should sort them before reading them. The opening sits with local developers: Fastino ships a multilingual version and local fine-tuning, and a sorter trained on Taglish (mixed Tagalog and English) and Thai shop chats is still unbuilt.

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