the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

No fair-value gains, but plenty still hidden in plain sight. DoubleDragon’s first-quarter report for 2026 contains a line meant to reassure investors. The company booked no unrealized fair value gains on investment properties during the period, unlike the same quarter last year, when such gains contributed ₱1.93bn to income. In a sector where paper revaluations can flatter profits, that sounds like progress. Yet the reassurance comes with an asterisk. A remarkably large portion of DoubleDragon’s revenue came not from rent, hotel rooms, or property sales, but from a broad and insufficiently explained bucket called “Others – net.” That bucket was not small. DoubleDragon reported ₱4.66bn in consolidated revenue for Q1 2026, up 4.6% from ₱4.45bn a year earlier. But “Others – net” accounted for ₱2.82bn , or 60.5% of total revenue , compared with ₱872.5m in Q1 2025. In other words, more than half of the quarter’s revenue sat inside a line item that the report describes only generally, ...

  Ayala Land and Megaworld both build urban ecosystems. But in the first quarter of 2026, the smaller builder looked surprisingly more efficient. In Philippine property, scale is usually treated as destiny. The bigger the landbank, the grander the estate, the larger the mall, the stronger the developer’s gravitational pull. By that measure, Ayala Land, Inc. should tower over most rivals. At the end of March 2026, it had ₱ 1.015 trillion in assets, more than twice Megaworld Corporation’s ₱492.8 billion. Its investment properties, inventories, and capital program all spoke the language of national scale. Yet the first quarter of 2026 offered a useful reminder: in property, bigness and profitability do not always move in step. ALI generated ₱37.5bn in revenue , far ahead of Megaworld’s ₱21.6bn . But at the level that matters most to common shareholders, the two were almost neck-and-neck: ALI reported ₱5.37bn in net income attributable to parent shareholders , while Megaworld rep...

  SM Prime is the empire of scale; Robinsons Land is the portfolio of balance. Their first-quarter numbers say as much about Philippine property as they do about the companies themselves. In Philippine real estate, size has a geography. It looks like the Mall of Asia complex, the thick lattice of SM malls across provincial capitals, and a balance sheet large enough to resemble a small financial system. By that measure, SM Prime Holdings remains the country’s great property leviathan. In the first quarter of 2026, it produced ₱33.3bn in revenue and ₱11.9bn in net income , on assets of ₱1.11trn . Robinsons Land Corporation , by contrast, is less a leviathan than an archipelago: smaller, more varied, and in this quarter, livelier. It posted ₱12.3bn in revenue , ₱4.4bn in net income , and ₱286.4bn in assets. The difference is not merely one of magnitude. It is one of character. SM Prime is still, above all, a mall company with residential and integrated-development appendages. Its m...

  In Philippine property, size is both a shield and a burden. Megaworld Corporation, one of the central pillars of Andrew Tan’s Alliance Global empire, entered 2026 with a vast portfolio of condominiums, offices, malls, and hotels spread across Metro Manila and provincial growth corridors. Its first-quarter results suggest that the empire remains sturdy. But they also reveal the trade-off facing large developers in a slower, costlier market: margins can be polished, but growth is harder to manufacture. For the three months ended March 31, 2026, Megaworld reported ₱21.60bn in consolidated revenues , up 3.21% from ₱20.93bn a year earlier. Net profit rose faster, climbing 6.08% to ₱6.18bn , while net income attributable to parent shareholders increased 3.88% to ₱5.29bn . Earnings per share improved to ₱0.163 , from ₱0.156 . On the surface, this is the kind of quarter investors usually tolerate gladly: modest sales growth, better profit growth, and no obvious balance-sheet scare....

  ABS-CBN and DITO once stood on opposite sides of the Philippine corporate fate. Now, both are being kept aloft by creditors, suppliers, and hope. There is a certain symmetry in corporate misfortune. In 2020, ABS-CBN, the Lopez family’s media empire, lost the congressional franchise that had long underpinned its free-to-air broadcasting business after a House committee voted 70-11 to deny its bid for renewal. Around the same era, DITO Telecommunity, backed by Dennis Uy’s Udenna group and China Telecom, was being cast as the disruptive third telco that would break the Globe-PLDT duopoly and bring competition to the Philippine connectivity market.  Six years later, the tables have not so much turned as collapsed inward. ABS-CBN is no longer the mighty broadcaster whose franchise became a national political drama. DITO is no longer merely the insurgent challenger promising cheaper data and faster speeds. Both have become variations of the same Philippine corporate specimen:...