At the BizNewsAsia anniversary night Nov. 25, the weekly business and news magazine honored outstanding CEOs for their entrepreneurship and management excellence.
Of the 30 awardees, five stand out—Teresita Sy-Coson, chair of BDO and vice chair of SM Investments Corp.; Felipe L. Gozon, chair and CEO of GMA Network, Inc.; Edgar “Injap” Sia II, chair and CEO of DoubleDragon Properties, Inc., Andrew Tan, chair and CEO of Alliance Global, Inc.; and Ramon S. Ang, vice chair and president of San Miguel Corp.
With Tessie Sy’s broad experience in retail merchandising, malls and banking, she helped transform SMIC into one of the biggest conglomerates, with four core businesses and where it is dominant or a leader—retail, banking, real estate, and tourism, in the process making the Sys the Philippines’ richest family.
SMIC has a market cap of P667 billion and owns the biggest bank, BDO with assets of P2 trillion (it is No. 1 in assets, loans, deposits, and assets under management.) and also Chinabank, fifth biggest local bank.
By end-2015 SMIC would have 310 retail outlets (up from 267 from end-2014), 55 malls in the Philippines plus six in China.
Next year, SMIC will spend P100 billion in capital expenditures, up from P85 billion in 2015.
In the 10 years since its listing, SMIC assets have grown by an average of 17 percent per year, market cap by 19 percent, revenues by 15 percent, net profits by 13 percent, and its stock price risen by 17 percent.
For his part, Yale-educated lawyer Henry Gozon turned around GMA Network from a sluggish, second-fiddle network 15 years ago into a dynamic network that is No. I in ratings, audience share, credibility and public trust—qualities essential in sustaining corporate viability.
In November this year, the market value of GMA Network Inc. rose by P5.49 billion or 28 percent to P25.5 billion from a low of P20 billion barely nine months ago.
That GMA is now valued by the market at nearly 30 percent more than a year ago is an indication of investors’ renewed confidence in the network’s growth strategy. The network claims to be the largest.
In the nine months to Sept. 30, 2015, GMA Network revenues grew 16 percent to P10.3 billion. Profits rose more dramatically, by 80 percent to P1.8 billion from P1 billion in the first nine months of last year and exceeding the network’s full 2014 net income of P1.08 billion, which was down 40 percent from 2013.
So whatever GMA failed to chalk up in profits in 2014, the network has more than made up for, in the first nine months of 2015.
For every P100 of revenue, GMA generated more than double more profits, 17.5% percent compared with 6.8 percent of ABS-CBN.
Young entrepreneur Injap Sia, 38, embodies the quintessential qualities of the 21st century entrepreneur. He has vision, a disruptive product, a customer focus, and brilliant execution.
He built Mang Inasal into the largest fast food chain—barbecue chicken—in far less time than Jollibee did for its burgers and chicken. No other barbecue fast food chain comes close because Mang Inasal is so dominant.
In 2010, sensing competition, Jollibee bought 70 percent of Mang Inasal, making Injap P3 billion richer. He retained the 30 percent.
Now, Injap is bent on building the country’s largest mall chain—100 malls under CityMall brand, and one of the largest hotel chains, with his Hotel 101 brand. In 20 years, he will become one of the biggest real estate market players.
His DoubleDragon Properties has tripled its value, to almost P50 billion, in just nine months.
Meanwhile, Andrew Tan of AGI is the king of brandy, casinos, hotels, and live-work-play malls and cities that are livable. Lately, he has gone into high-end resorts—by the bay (like Boracay), by the lake (like Taal), by the golf course (like Southwoods), and on mountains (like Batangas).
His Alliance Global Group began in 1994 as a glass container maker. Now hugely diversified (property, food and beverage, fast food restaurant, gaming, and distilled spirits),
AGGI is now valued at P183.82 billion. Tan’s majority holdings make him one of the country’s three richest Filipinos.
Ramon Ang is the superstar. He diversified SMC, the beer, food and packaging behemoth, into many areas–power distribution, power generation, infrastructure, wireless telephone, airlines, airports, and yes, even cement and banking and became dominant or a major player in each sector.
The businesses RSA manages have a value of $25 billion in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes and depreciation) terms.
RSA executed the most dramatic and largest transformation ever undertaken by a corporation in the Philippines, and perhaps in Asia.
The idea is not simply growth. SMC is a key player in the country’s tremendous growth and has made life better for millions of Filipinos.
As SMC Chair Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. puts it: SMC needed “to leverage our scale, our reach and our broad-based capabilities and at the same time, “sustain the Philippines’ growth.”
Today, SMC is No. 1 in beer, packaging, branded manufactured foods, power generation, tollways, and petroleum refining and marketing.
SMC is only a poor No. 3 in telco or cellular phones but it has promised to unleash beginning next year “the cheapest, fastest, and best cellular phone service” using bandwidths analog TV stations are abandoning in favor of digital. Those bandwidths, in turn out, are faster and can penetrate through buildings and underground structures, at much less cost.
About time we had a better phone service.
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