the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

  The Ayala group appears to be entering a new phase at Globe Telecom Inc.: after years of heavy network buildout, the Philippine carrier is finally easing capital expenditure. But rather than immediately channeling that breathing room into richer shareholder payouts, the numbers suggest Globe may first use the savings to defend its balance sheet and manage a costlier capital stack.  Ayala Corp., one of Globe’s two principal shareholders, owned 30.64% of the company’s common shares as of Dec. 31, 2025, alongside Singapore Telecom International Pte. Ltd., which held 43.36% . That makes Globe’s capital-allocation choices especially relevant to one of the Philippines’ most closely watched conglomerates, whose listed units are often judged on dividend discipline as much as on growth. There is a clear reason investors are focusing on the spending cycle. Globe’s cash capex fell 18% to ₱46.2 billion in 2025 from ₱56.2 billion in 2024 , with management saying the figure was in line ...

After a bruising 2024, Marcventures Holdings, Inc. found its footing in 2025. The rebound was not subtle. It arrived in the blunt language of mining accounts: more tonnage, better realised prices, stronger cash generation and a balance sheet with less strain. In an industry where optimism is often buried under mud, regulation and weather, FY2025 looked refreshingly like a year in which the ore market, and MARC’s operations, finally cooperated. For much of the previous year, the company had the air of a miner waiting for the tide to turn. In 2024 MARC’s revenue had sagged to ₱1.716bn , and net income had slumped to ₱118.1m , as weaker ore prices crimped margins and dulled the benefits of steady shipment volumes. Then, in 2025, the numbers snapped back. Revenue climbed to ₱2.708bn , up 57.8% year on year; net income surged to ₱471.1m , a rise of 298.9% . Total assets expanded to ₱6.225bn , equity rose to ₱5.375bn , and liabilities edged down to ₱850.2m . The result was not merely an imp...

  The most revealing feature of First Gen’s recent governance controversy is not the family drama. It is the architecture of control. In its clarification to the Philippine Stock Exchange, First Gen confirmed that its agreements with Prime Infrastructure contain Change of Management Control provisions that could force the company to sell its hydropower stake at a 25 percent discount , worth about ₱15.5bn , and could also expose its remaining gas-plant stake to a further ~₱8bn discount if Prime Infra exercises that right. In corporate language, that is not a trivial covenant. It is a deterrent with teeth. And whatever label one prefers — “key man clause” or “poison pill” — it functions as a defense against a hostile reordering of control. Strictly speaking, First Gen’s clause is not a classic poison pill. It is not a shareholder-rights plan of the Delaware kind, where all investors except a hostile bidder get discounted shares once an ownership threshold is crossed. But in econom...

  The quiet compounding machine In Philippine banking, dividends rarely make for gripping prose. Balance sheets matter more than bravado; prudence beats spectacle. Yet at East West Banking Corporation, the Gotianun family’s mid‑tier lender, the numbers are beginning to speak with unusual clarity. From 2022 to 2026, EastWest’s regular cash dividend rose from ₱0.40 per share to ₱0.82 , implying a compound annual growth rate of roughly 19.7% . That is not a one‑off windfall, but a four‑year pattern. The more interesting question is whether the bank’s fundamentals, as laid bare in its 2025 Annual Report , genuinely justify such compounding—or whether the dividend is merely running ahead of the balance sheet. The evidence suggests the former. From caution to confidence The early years tell a restrained story. In 2022 , EastWest paid ₱0.40 per share , equivalent to total cash dividends of roughly ₱900 million , at a time when net income stood at ₱4.6 billion . The payout was conservative...

The Lopez family’s listed holding company has, over little more than a decade, transformed ABS-CBN from a fully consolidated operating subsidiary into an associate carried at zero on a consolidated equity-accounting basis — a shift that says as much about accounting architecture as it does about the fall of one of the Philippines’ best-known media groups.   There was a time when ABS-CBN sat squarely inside Lopez Holdings’ numbers. In its 2025 annual report, Lopez Holdings explicitly recalls that ABS-CBN had been treated as a subsidiary in 2012 and prior years , meaning its revenues, costs, debt, and losses flowed line by line through the parent’s consolidated accounts. That changed after the adoption of PFRS 10 , when Lopez Holdings said it reassessed control and concluded that it did not control ABS-CBN but did control First Philippine Holdings. From   January 1, 2013 , the group deconsolidated ABS-CBN and began accounting for it under the equity method .  That accounti...

  For much of the past few years, PhilWeb looked like a company trapped between eras. Its legacy business—built around electronic gaming sites, service-provider arrangements, and venue-linked operations—was still generating cash, but less of it. Revenue fell from ₱816.1m in 2023 to ₱774.6m in 2024 , then again to ₱659.4m in 2025 . EBITDA deteriorated from ₱88.1m in 2023 to ₱51.5m in 2024 and then to just ₱9.3m in 2025 . The company remained loss-making, reporting a net loss of ₱71.8m in 2023 , a far larger ₱599.2m loss in 2024 , and a still substantial ₱211.2m loss in 2025 . By the end of that year, the message from the numbers was plain enough: the old model was not collapsing outright, but it was plainly weakening.  The annual report explains why. Management attributed the decline in 2025 revenue to the closure of non-performing sites, intensifying competition from integrated resort casinos, and the spread of alternative online gaming providers. The figures show that even...

In the business of solar power, one learns quickly that not every dazzling number is created by sunshine alone. Raslag Corp. (ASLAG), a Philippine renewable-energy developer with four solar plants in Pampanga, reported that consolidated net profit surged to ₱509.4m in 2025 from ₱66.0m in 2024 , while revenue climbed to ₱723.7m from ₱438.9m . On the face of it, the result looks like the kind of operating inflection that growth investors dream of: a utility-scale solar platform finally beginning to show the earnings power of its expanding asset base. And indeed, part of the surge was operationally real. Raslag’s RASLAG-4 solar plant , with a capacity of 36.646 MWp , became a meaningful earnings contributor in 2025 after commercial operations began during the year; the company also expanded contracted sales through power-supply agreements, most notably the 10-year, 15MW PSA with PELCO I , which pushed contracted capacity to roughly 80% . Combined with a larger fleet—Raslag’s operating por...