the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

  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...

  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...