the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

  The Asian Financial Crisis did not merely humble the conspicuous losers. It also forced one of Philippine business’s eventual winners into an extended and rather unsentimental workout: raise equity, sell what can be sold, renegotiate what cannot, and, if necessary, surrender even the trophy asset. In Philippine business memory, the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian Financial Crisis is often told through the ordeals of the most visible dynasties and the most politically charged conglomerates. Yet the period was just as revealing for another camp: the First Pacific–Metro Pacific group led in the Philippines by Manuel V. Pangilinan . The group did not implode. But it most certainly bent. Metro Pacific Corporation (MPC) , then First Pacific’s Philippine flagship outside PLDT and a few other holdings, suffered a genuine balance-sheet squeeze as the peso weakened, interest rates rose, and foreign-currency borrowings suddenly looked less like clever leverage than an expensive misjudgment....

  In the Philippines’ small fraternity of listed holding companies, A. Soriano Corporation (ANSCOR) looks, at first glance, like a relic from an older business age: an investment house with old-family roots, a sprawling portfolio, and an address in Makati. Yet its modern shape is more interesting than that. ANSCOR is less a sleepy conglomerate than a hybrid machine—part public-markets investor, part owner of operating businesses, part collector of dividends and fees from a web of subsidiaries and associates. In 2025, the group reported ₱36.2bn in consolidated assets, ₱19.5bn in revenues and gains, and ₱5.53bn in net income , while the parent company itself earned ₱5.60bn and kept enough unrestricted retained earnings to declare a ₱0.50-a-share regular cash dividend for payment on April 8th 2026 .  To understand ANSCOR, one must resist the temptation to treat it as a simple industrial company. Its most visible operating assets are concrete enough: Phelps Dodge Philippines En...

  There is a temptation, when a company posts handsome headline earnings, to stop reading just as the numbers become interesting. First Gen’s 2025 results invite exactly that mistake. The group reported a stronger consolidated profit, helped in no small part by the sale of 60% of its gas business to Prime Infra and the resulting gain on sale, deconsolidation effects, and associate income. Yet the more revealing story lies elsewhere: in Energy Development Corporation, or EDC, the renewable-energy platform that now carries a larger share of First Gen’s strategic identity—and, increasingly, its valuation burden.  EDC is not merely one asset among many. It is the center of gravity of First Gen’s continuing business. In 2025, EDC contributed about US$785.7m of First Gen’s consolidated electricity-sale revenues, or roughly 87% of the total, and it accounted for around 1,464.76 MW of installed renewable capacity. After the gas-business sell-down reduced First Gen’s consolidated po...

  Jollibee Foods Corp. is still growing fast, still opening stores at a record pace, and still telling a compelling story about Filipino corporate ambition. But as its 2025 Annual Report makes plain, the Philippine business remains the group’s financial anchor, while the global portfolio is asking more of shareholders than it has yet conclusively given back. Jollibee Foods Corp. had, on paper, a very good 2025. Revenues rose 13.0% to ₱305.1 billion , systemwide sales climbed 16.6% to ₱455.1 billion , and operating income increased 19.3% to ₱20.15 billion . The group opened 1,126 stores , the highest annual total in its history, and management quite understandably presented the year as proof that both the Philippine and international businesses retain momentum. But equity investors are not paid in momentum; they are paid in returns. And here the 2025 numbers are much less flattering. Net income after tax rose only 1.9% to ₱11.01 billion , while net income attributable to parent ...

  Technically defaulted loans, a ₱50‑billion gas windfall elsewhere in the group, and the quiet limits of relationship banking. In the Philippines’ compact world of family capitalism, debts are rarely just financial. They are social, reputational, and, at times, inter‑dynastic. That is why the technically defaulted bank loans of ABS‑CBN—once the country’s most powerful broadcaster—are being watched not merely by credit committees, but by the inner circles of three of the nation’s most prominent business families. On one side stand the Lopezes , controllers of ABS‑CBN and First Gen Corp. On the other sit their creditors: UnionBank , controlled by the Aboitiz family , and the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) , long dominated by the Ayala family . The sums at stake—roughly ₱12–13 billion in consolidated bank loans—are manageable for institutions of their size, but the issues they raise are not purely about recoverability. They go to the heart of how elite Philippine conglomerates ...

  On the screen, ABS-CBN still looks like a going concern with options. Its shares last traded at ₱3.39 , even as the company’s September 30th, 2025 consolidated book value worked out to only about ₱1.77 per share , implying a price-to-book multiple of roughly 1.92 times . In markets, that is the sort of rating ordinarily reserved for firms with a comfortable balance-sheet cushion, or at least a credible story about earnings power just around the corner. ABS-CBN has neither in abundance.  The balance sheet is the awkward part. ABS-CBN reported ₱38.54bn of total assets as of September 30th, 2025, against ₱36.95bn of total liabilities, leaving just ₱1.59bn of total equity. Put differently, roughly 96% of the asset base already belongs, in one form or another, to somebody else. Equity is not the substance of the enterprise so much as the thin residue left after everyone else has been heard from. Start with the people who keep the machine running. ABS-CBN had ₱13.07bn  i...