the Outsider - PSE Points to Ponder

We’ve been blogging for free. If you enjoy our content, consider supporting us! Disclaimer:  This is for informational purposes and is  not  investment advice. Figures are taken from company disclosures and exchange data; valuation ratios include the author’s calculations based on cited inputs. If investors are looking at Filinvest Land, Inc. primarily as a dividend name, the 2025 results offer more reassurance than alarm. The company kept its cash dividend at ₱0.05 per common share in 2025, the same rate as in 2024, and paid a total cash dividend of about ₱1.123 billion , including the preferred payout. That matters because FLI did not defend the dividend with accounting smoke: it reported ₱4.81 billion in consolidated net income , ₱4.17 billion attributable to the parent , and ₱7.88 billion in operating cash flow for 2025. On the face of it, that is the profile of a company that can still write the check.  The first reason the dividend looks sustainable is that F...

  Universal Robina Corp. has sent the market a clear message: despite a year of margin pressure, it still believes its cash-generation capacity and balance sheet are strong enough to justify a higher payout. The company’s board approved a cash dividend of ₱2.10 per share , payable in May 2026, which is 5% higher year on year . That matters not only because dividend increases are never declared lightly, but because the move comes after a year in which earnings growth was constrained by elevated commodity costs, particularly coffee. At first glance, URC’s 2025 results tell a two-speed story. On one hand, the topline remained healthy. For the first nine months of 2025, URC posted sales of ₱124.6 billion, up 4.8% , driven by growth in branded consumer foods and commodities. For the full year, sales reached ₱168.0 billion, up 4% , with management describing the performance as “volume-led” and broad-based across divisions. On the other hand, profit growth lagged. In the first nine months...

The Department of Energy deserves credit for insisting on a competitive rebidding of the Semirara coal blocks instead of granting an outright extension to Semirara Mining and Power Corporation’s current coal operating contract, which expires in July 2027. The DOE has made clear that the Semirara area will be included in the 2026 coal bid round, and that awards will be based on technical, financial, legal, and work-program qualifications rather than on a simple highest-bid-wins formula.  That is the right policy. But good policy does not guarantee intense competition. The more difficult question is whether many serious players will actually want to commit capital to a coal asset at a time when the economics of coal are no longer what they were just a few years ago. Semirara’s own results suggest the answer may be more complicated than the optics of an open auction imply. Coal is clearly no longer in the 2022–2024 supercycle conditions. In 2025, Semirara Mining and Power Corporation ...

  D.M. Wenceslao has lifted its annual cash dividend again, extending a record of steady shareholder returns. The increase looks justified. Whether the next one comes just as easily is another matter. D.M. Wenceslao & Associates, Inc. has once again done what income investors want well-run property companies to do: share more of the bounty. On March 12, 2026, the board declared a regular cash dividend of ₱0.10 per share , payable on April 28, 2026 to stockholders of record as of April 10, 2026 , for a total payout of ₱339.59 million sourced from 2025 unrestricted retained earnings . That is up from the ₱0.095 per share or ₱322.61 million cash dividend declared in March 2025. The increase is modest in size, but not in significance: it tells the market that management still sees enough resilience in the business to keep moving the payout upward.  The dividend hike is not cosmetic. It rests on a business that has become meaningfully more lease-driven and financially forti...

  We’ve been blogging for free. If you enjoy our content, consider supporting us! Disclaimer:  This is for informational purposes and is  not  investment advice. Figures are taken from company disclosures and exchange data; valuation ratios include the author’s calculations based on cited inputs. There is a difference between a stock that is merely cheap and a stock that the market no longer fully trusts. PHINMA Corporation increasingly looks like the latter. The chart tells the story before the financials do. PHINMA’s share price appears to have drifted from the high-₱20s in 2024 to about ₱14.30 recently, tracing a long, patient decline rather than a sudden collapse. That distinction matters. Sharp selloffs are often emotional. Slow, grinding devaluations are usually analytical. They suggest that investors have had time to study the numbers — and have still chosen to mark the company down. That markdown is now hard to ignore. As of March 6, 2026, PHINMA’s market ca...

We’ve been blogging for free. If you enjoy our content, consider supporting us! Disclaimer:  This is for informational purposes and is  not  investment advice. Figures are taken from company disclosures and exchange data; valuation ratios include the author’s calculations based on cited inputs. There are times when corporate ambition deserves applause. And there are times when ambition becomes expensive. Jollibee Foods Corp. now looks uncomfortably close to the second category. To be fair, JFC’s 2025 numbers were not weak on the surface. Revenues rose 13.0% to ₱305.1 billion , systemwide sales climbed 16.6% to ₱455.1 billion , operating income increased 19.3% to ₱20.15 billion , and EBITDA grew 13.8% to ₱41.83 billion . But the most important line for shareholders was far less impressive: net income rose only 1.9% to ₱11.0 billion , while net income attributable to parent increased 5.4% to ₱10.87 billion . That gap between operating progress and bottom-line reward should ...

  We’ve been blogging for free. If you enjoy our content, consider supporting us! Disclaimer:  This is for informational purposes and is  not  investment advice. Figures are taken from company disclosures and exchange data; valuation ratios include the author’s calculations based on cited inputs. By most measures that matter to dividend-minded investors, Converge ICT’s latest numbers read like a company stepping into a more mature phase—still growing fast, still investing heavily, but now increasingly comfortable returning cash to shareholders. The question, of course, is whether this comfort is a one-off or the start of a durable pattern. The answer from Converge’s 9M2025 (17‑Q) and its FY2025 performance update is nuanced: earnings momentum is clearly upward, cash generation is still robust, but the path to higher dividends will likely be paced by working-capital discipline and capex intensity. A topline that keeps compounding—without losing its margin edge Start...