Description

Introduction

Family is the basic unit of social organization in the Philippines. Families are at the heart of both political and business networks. National identity is, for most Filipinos, secondary to their more strongly ingrained senses of local identity, and kin loyalty. The Confucian concept of “filial piety” (the virtue of respecting one’s parents and elders) has been inherited and fully adopted into Philippine culture.

Key sectors of the economy including power, real estate, oil & gas, shipping and logistics, and retail are dominated by a small number of conglomerates – mostly organized along family lines. The influence of these families is such that from 2010 to 2011, it was estimated that the nation’s 40 richest families had captured 76.5 percent of national GDP growth. In 2017, the wealth of the top 50 richest Filipinos as ranked by Forbes (USD 73.9 billion) was equivalent to almost a quarter (24.24 percent) of the Philippines’ 2016 GDP (USD 304.9 billion). Understanding these family conglomerates is crucial to successfully doing business in the Philippines.

Some of the wealthiest families can trace their bloodlines and their wealth to the Spanish colonial era – many of these families built their early fortunes on holdings in the country’s cash crop trade in sugar. Aside from families of Spanish-ancestry, ethnic Chinese have been a major presence in the commercial life of the Philippines, preceding the arrival of the Spanish.

Among the wealthiest Filipino families, those of Chinese ethnicity tend to dominate. The term “Tai -Pan” Typically refers to these ethnic-Chinese (but Filipino national) tycoons – the phrase means literally “top class.” Over generations, many older Chinese families have fully assimilated into the Filipino national identity – often adopting Hispani-cized names. For example, the Cojuangco name of the powerful political and business family is an adaptation of an early ancestor, named “Kho Huang Ko.” Many of the ethnically Chinese families included in this report owe their linages to the wave of Chinese migration to the Philippines that occurred in the early and mid-20th Century, many of them coming specifically from Fujian province.

While conglomerates dominate the Philippine economy, they are by no means unitary in their organization and nature. There is a considerable degree of variation with respect to key characteristics – including how concentrated a conglomerate’s industry interests are, and to what degree ownership has remained concentrated among family lines, or alternatively, how much ownership has been diversified (including foreign partnerships and investors). It is also worth noting that many conglomerates have overlapping business interests and frequently engage in joint ventures Indeed, certain key management personnel appear in multiple conglomerate profiles.

PSA Consultancy has produced this report to help shed light onto who these powerful and influential family conglomerates are. This report otters an overview of the nation’s top 50 conglomerates, profiles and histories of the families that control them, information on each conglomerates’ key constituent businesses, as well as profiles of key family and management personalities. ‘Snapshot’ versions of conglomerate link charts have also been included for 10 of these conglomerates.