the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

  DoubleDragon did not pocket its REIT windfall. It scattered it across the country. Now investors have a harder question: which of those projects can actually become the next REIT? When DoubleDragon Corp. sold down part of DDMP REIT Inc. in 2021, it did more than cash in on a mature office landlord. It created a template for how a Philippine property sponsor could turn a completed portfolio into fresh development capital — and then scatter that capital across the next layer of assets it hoped would define its future. The number was precise: ₱9.0129 billion in net proceeds from the DDMPR public offering. By March 24, 2022, DoubleDragon had fully disbursed the entire amount under its reinvestment plan, according to the final DDMPR IPO proceeds progress report. DDMPR’s 2025 annual report later confirmed that the sponsors had fully implemented the reinvestment plan.  The strategy was simple in theory and messy in practice: sell a stake in a stabilized REIT, then redeploy the mon...

  The Philippine Stock Exchange can dream of a blockbuster Mynt listing, and it should. A deep, liquid market needs new champions. But no mega-IPO can repair a trust problem if minority investors believe the exchange is a friendly place to raise public money — and a dimly lit corridor when companies decide to leave. MerryMart’s planned delisting, pursued while its 2025 audited annual financial statements remained unavailable to investors, is exactly the kind of episode that tests whether the market’s disclosure rules protect shareholders in substance, not just in form. There is a simple rule that should govern every tender offer, especially one that may end in delisting: shareholders should not be asked to sell in the dark . MerryMart Consumer Corp. is moving toward the exit doors of the Philippine Stock Exchange just as minority shareholders are being asked to decide whether the tender offer price is fair. DoubleDragon’s tender offer covered up to 4.936 billion MM common shares , ...

The market has stopped treating Converge as a fast-growing broadband compounder and started pricing it like a maturing telco. That de-rating is understandable—but with strong fibre assets, high margins, positive operating cash flow and manageable leverage, the sell-off may have gone too far. There are two ways to lose money in a growth stock. One is for the company to fail. The other is for the story to change. Converge ICT Solutions has not failed. Far from it. The company remains one of the Philippines’ most important fixed-broadband infrastructure owners, with a nationwide fibre network, strong operating cash generation, high margins, modest leverage and a fast-growing enterprise arm. Yet its share price has behaved as if something more terminal has happened. The reason is subtler: CNVRG has stopped looking like a pristine “fast-growing pure-play fibre broadband compounder” and has started looking like a maturing broadband operator wrestling with falling ARPU, heavier capital expend...

  Ayala-backed Mynt and SM-controlled BDO Unibank, Inc. are two very different machines for turning Filipino credit demand into profit. One earns fat fintech spreads. The other survives on scale, funding discipline and clean loans. Call it the new arithmetic of Philippine finance. On one side is Mynt, the GCash parent in which Ayala Corporation increased exposure through AC Ventures Holding Corp., helping push Mynt’s valuation to about US$5 billion before the planned IPO. On the other hand is BDO Unibank, Inc., the country’s largest bank and the crown jewel of the SM financial ecosystem, with SM Investments Corporation disclosed as BDO’s largest common shareholder at 40.60% as of end-2025.  At first glance, the comparison looks unfair. BDO Unibank, Inc. is a universal bank with about ₱3.8 trillion in gross customer loans in the first quarter of 2026. Mynt’s CreditTech loan portfolio was only about ₱64.1 billion as of March 31, 2026. BDO is the aircraft carrier; Mynt’s lend...

  When Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group bought into Mynt , the parent of GCash, the Japanese banking giant was not merely buying a slice of a Philippine fintech. It was buying a second chance at a familiar thesis: that a well-capitalized Japanese lender can ride the rise of consumer finance in one of Southeast Asia’s most underbanked, mobile-first economies. The price was not small. MUFG’s investment gave it an 8% direct stake in Mynt , valuing the GCash operator at about US$5 billion , more than double Mynt’s previous US$2 billion valuation from its 2021 round. Reports put MUFG’s investment at roughly US$393 million to US$400 million , or about ₱23.3 billion .  The question is whether this GCash bet will age better than MUFG’s earlier Philippine bank wager. In 2016, MUFG, then through The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ , invested ₱36.9 billion in Security Bank Corporation , buying 150.7 million newly issued common shares at ₱245 each and 200 million preferred shares at ₱0.10 ...