San Miguel Corp. is in talks with a big toy manufacturing company and a ship building firm to locate within the conglomerate’s first industrial estate development in Davao del Sur province.
San Miguel president and chief operating officer Ramon Ang said over the weekend the company received inquiries after it started inviting potential investors to locate within its 2,000-hectare Davao Industrial Estate.
“We will be bring a toy manufacturing firm that will employ 80,000 people and I will be bringing soon a ship building company,” Ang said.
He said investors in the Davao Industrial Estate would benefit from lower power prices at P3 per kilowatt hour compared with the prevailing rate of P10 per Kwh, as well as a good investment environment and strategic site with easy access to the Davao City and General Santos City international airports and Davao seaport.
The industrial estate also offers low, long-term lease rate, growing skilled workers, a 20-meter deep international port to accommodate container vessels, and a private airport.
A 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Malita, Davao Occidental, owned by San Miguel, is expected to partially go on stream by the second quarter of 2016.
Aside from the industrial estate and power plant developments, the San Miguel group has other investments in Mindanao, including the Daguma coal mine and other mining projects.
“We have planned these investments years ahead without knowing the next president will come from Mindanao. Those projects were built to help the people of Mindanao and to create jobs,” Ang said, referring to presumptive president Rodrigo Duterte.
San Miguel, meanwhile, expects to sustain its growth momentum after posting strong first-quarter earnings.
Ang attributed the company’s first-quarter performance to the robust growth of Petron Corp., which was benefiting from the higher economic yield from the expansion of its Bataan refinery.
The conglomerate’s core businesses, like food, tollways and power business, remain strong.
San Miguel posted a profit of P13.5 billion in the first quarter of the year, a huge 122-percent increase from a year ago level, on the strength of its traditional and new businesses.
San Miguel said power generation unit San Miguel Global Holdings Inc. planned to push through with a P15-billion bond offering by the end of May or early June.
SMC Global Power will issue fixed rate bonds due 2021, 2023 and 2026 to refinance the company’s short term loan provided by BDO Unibank Inc.