More Facts & Trivia About the Philippines

There are more than 10 million Filipinos living overseas, of this, about 8 million are OFWs or Overseas Filipino Workers. According to the Central Bank of the Philippines, overseas Filipinos remitted a record high of US$ 17.348 billion to the Philippines in 2009, a 5.4% increase compared to 2008. The bulk of the remittances comes from the U.S., Canada, Saudi Arabia, U.K., Japan, U.A.E., Italy, Singapore and Germany. These remittances account for 10.8% of the country’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product).


Dr. Jose Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines can read and write at the age of 2. He grew up speaking 20 foreign languages including French, Greek, Chinese, Latin and German.


The karaoke is a Filipino invention, not Japanese. Karaoke meaning “singing without accompaniment” in Japanese was invented by Roberto del Rosario. He called his invention “Sing-Along-System”, which was later called karaoke.



The Philippine flag is the only flag in the world that is displayed upside-down when the country is in war (red on top and blue at the bottom when in war).



The Philippines is considered the “text capital of the world”. In 2006, there were an estimated 35 million cell phone subscribers in the Philippines and about 350 to 400 million SMS (Short Message Service) or text messages are sent daily. This figure was more than the total daily text messages sent in the U.S. and Europe combined. However, China has overtaken the Philippines by sheer volume of users. It is estimated that in 2007, the Chinese sent an average of 1.6 billion text messages daily with more than 500 million cell phone users. While Filipinos sent an average of a billion text messages daily with about 50 million cell phone users. Even though the Chinese sent more text messages in total, they send an average of only 3 text messages per cell phone per day, while Filipinos sends on average 20 text messages per cell phone user per day.



Although the land area of the Philippines is roughly 1/30th of the United States, The Philippines has a total coastline of 36,289 kilometers while the total U.S. coastline is a modest 19,924 kilometers.



The world’s rarest and most expensive seashell, the “Conus Gloriamaris” is among the 12,000 species of seashells found in the Philippines. And 488 coral species out of the known 500 coral species worldwide are found in the country.