the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

  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...

  A Philippine aviation veteran has become something more complicated—and perhaps more interesting: a holding company whose fortunes now rest on a mix of airport meals, runway logistics, water pipes and a prized maintenance joint venture. For most of its modern life, MacroAsia Corporation has been easiest to describe by the noise around it: jet engines, catering trolleys, baggage carts and hangars. Born in 1970 as a mining concern, it reinvented itself in the 1990s as a holding company and spent the next three decades assembling a portfolio that sits close to the choreography of air travel—feeding passengers, handling aircraft, servicing fleets and operating the economic zones around them. Today, however, the listed Philippine group is no longer merely an aviation adjunct. It is a broader infrastructure-and-services platform whose earnings now depend as much on corporate structure and capital allocation as on aircraft movements. That distinction matters. In 2025 MacroAsia’s consoli...

Conglomerates often encourage a dangerous illusion: that companies sharing a surname, a boardroom culture, and a controlling shareholder must share a financial destiny. They do not. The recent divergence between Robinsons Land Corp. (RLC) and Robinsons Retail Holdings, Inc. (RRHI) —both controlled by the Gokongwei family—offers a neat corrective. One spent 2025 becoming sturdier. The other spent it becoming tighter. Both may remain respectable businesses. Only one, however, made itself appreciably safer. Begin with the less glamorous of the two stories, which is usually where prudence hides. RLC, the group’s property arm, ended 2024 with ₱261.83bn in total assets, ₱100.32bn in liabilities, and ₱161.51bn in stockholders’ equity , according to PSE financial reports. By September 30th, 2025 , assets had risen to ₱273.22bn , liabilities had fallen to ₱91.98bn , and equity had climbed to ₱181.24bn . By full-year 2025, commentary based on company disclosures put total assets at about ₱275bn...

  Property developers prefer to be admired in hard hats. They like cranes, groundbreakings, and the sort of investor presentation in which every vacant lot is a “future growth node”. Robinsons Land Corporation (RLC), the Philippine property arm controlled by JG Summit Holdings , which owned 65.91% of the company at the end of 2025, is discovering a less glamorous talent: looking safer. In 2025, safety began to look surprisingly attractive. Gross revenues rose 13% to ₱48.52bn , EBITDA increased 10% to ₱25.70bn , EBIT climbed 11% to ₱19.62bn , and net income grew a still respectable but less dazzling 5% to ₱16.17bn . Earnings per share reached ₱2.80 , up from ₱2.73 the year before. The pattern mattered more than the headline. Operating growth was brisk; bottom-line growth was merely good. That was not because the business had weakened, but because 2024 had been flattered by one-off gains that were absent in 2025. That left RLC to earn its keep the old-fashioned way: through te...

In the LPG trade, resilience is not a slogan. It is built in tanks, terminals, truck routes, and the balance sheet. Pryce Corporation has spent years assembling all four. Some businesses draw admiration by dazzling consumers. And then there are businesses, like Pryce Corporation’s LPG arm, that win by doing something far less glamorous but much more durable: moving an essential fuel, reliably, across a difficult archipelago. In the Philippines, where liquefied petroleum gas is both a household staple and a brutally practical business, Pryce’s strength lies not in theatrics but in infrastructure—steel, storage, and disciplined logistics spread across the country. That infrastructure, coupled with an unusually comfortable liquidity position, gives Pryce an advantage that becomes most visible precisely when conditions turn unfriendly. Pryce’s LPG franchise is housed mainly in Pryce Gases, Inc. (PGI) , with Oro Oxygen Corporation (OOC) supporting LPG distribution in Luzon. In the company’...