‘State of the station’ report

Once a month, GMA Network Inc. (Channel 7) chairman and chief executive officer Felipe Gozon hosts a lunch for employees celebrating their birthdays. Aside from having a free (and extremely satisfying) lunch, Mr. Gozon makes sure the birthday celebrants are the first to hear the latest "state of the station" report.

Through the office grapevine, everybody naturally learns about how the company is doing – including a 64-percent increase in advertising revenues for October – before the GMA board does.

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Perhaps ABS-CBN Broadcasting chairman Eugenio Lopez III should seek the advice of Sen. Manuel Villar on how to handle the financial mess the Lopez holding company, Benpres, is currently in.

Gabby Lopez, who is about the same age as 52-year-old Manny Villar, is more open to new ideas than his uncles, First Philippine Holdings chairman Oscar Lopez and Manila Electric Co. chairman Manuel Lopez.

Manny Villar has been in the same situation as the Lopez family with C&P Homes and the property company is now doing well, thank you very much.

What Mr. Villar did was to default on his loans. While he lost face (and his pride was hurt), he forced his creditors to negotiate rather than to dictate the terms under a restructuring agreement.

Mr. Villar offered to buy back some off his loans at a significant discount, in effect, reducing his outstanding loans. The creditor-banks agreed because that was cash in hand on an account what would have been written off.

Had he opted for restructuring, Mr. Villar would have continued to pay interest on the principal, which would stay unchanged. In effect, he would have worked for his creditor banks rather than for himself for the entire restructuring program with the odds against him that the financially-burdened company would have survived intact, with his family as majority stockholders).

Because he knew he couldn’t borrow anymore, Mr. Villar then placed whatever extra money he had into the business to keep it going and to generate revenues.

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That President Macapagal-Arroyo has now made small-and medium-sized enterprises her number one priority must be the reason why Small Business Corp. (which used to be Small Business Guaranteed Fund) chairman Zoraida Alonzo is off to Japan this Sunday for a two-week learning program and why president Benel Lagua will be returning home from a one-week Washington D.C. trip early next week.

Oh yes, Trade Secretary Manuel Roxas III is the main man for this program, which replaced information technology as the flavor of the month.

The heart of government’s SME thrust is to nurture SMEs at the Barangay level by exempting SMEs from paying their workers the minimum wage (which they don’t anyway) and granting tax exemptions (which they don’t pay either).

To implement this top priority program, the Department of Trade and Industry has sought a higher budget for next year but has been turned down.