Megaworld named among Asia’s best managed firms

Megaworld Corp. has been named one of the "Best-Managed Companies of 2001" in a poll conducted early this year by the Hong Kong-based Finance Asia magazine.

Megaworld was cited as one of Asia’s best-performing companies in the areas of management, investor relations and commitment to shareholder value.

Fund managers, analysts and institutional investors from Asia, Europe and the United States participated in the poll, reportedly the most extensive of its kind ever done in the region.

One of the most successful and financially strong local real estate-based companies, Megaworld registered a stockholder’s equity of almost P15 billion at the end of the third quarter of 2000, compared with P1.5 billion in 1994, when it became a publicly listed company. Even during the crisis years of 1997 and 1998, with the property sector dragged down by the economic turmoil, the company continued to chart a growth course in the industry.

Emerging even stronger from the Asian crisis, the Megaworld group is now an acknowledged leader in residential development in Metro Manila. Since 1994, the Megaworld groups has completed a total of 35 projects. It currently has 15 ongoing projects in various stages of completion.

In December 1999, Megaworld bolstered its reputation for quality by becoming the country’s first ISO 9001-certified property company.

Megaworld, an old economy company that has embraced the new economy, pioneered in information technology-based property development through its Eastwood City CyberPark in Quezon City, now a model for other IT parks to the region. The CyberPark targets 17,000 jobs for a local pool of IT and computer professionals and P50 billion in export revenues by 2005. It now hosts m ore than 30 IT firms and a 5,500-strong work force expected to double by yearend at its anchor office towers, IBM Plaza, Citibank Square and Eastwood Incubation Center.

The CyberPark will also be home to Customer Contract Center, a state-of-the-art call center majority owned by the Lopez Group, which forecasts export earnings of $29.472 million annually and employment for over 2,000 workers.

A key CyberPark support facility set to open this June is the International Center for Information Technology Education (ICITE). The ICITE will supply manpower requirements of CyberPark locators, besides serving as an IT research and development center in the region.

Besides the Philippines, The FinanceAsia poll focused on the best-managed companies in China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand. FinanceAsia is the most widely read financial publication in Asia, according to a survey conducted in Sept. and Oct. last year among leading banks and investment companies in the region.