It doesn’t hurt that the price is right, too.
In the Philippines, ube or purple yam is one of the top three. Guess which one ube dislodged?
This is an opportunity for Rafa Ortigas’s main man, chief operating officer Rex Drilon II and his team led by Greenhills general manager Joselito Santos, to redevelop (read: get rid of some, uh, unwanted tenants like those selling triple X VDC/DVD films and bring in new business concepts) the two buildings.
Virra Mall is, of course, well known to techies while Shoppesville is viajera paradise and an incubator of many RTW business. Fact is, some brands which started in Shoppesville such as Bayo have returned into the newly opened 2,000-square meter upscale section called, "The Shops", which used to be the unprofitable dry goods section of Peter Ng’s Unimart.
Greenhills is estimated to have a daily pedestrian traffic count of 100,000 during weekdays and up to 130,000 during weekends. The average consumption per person is about P1,500 (which purchases from tiangge stuff to mobile phones).
Why, he has assigned men to watch each production line in all factories producing cigarettes. That means that if a cigarette factory has three production lines, then Willy Parayno has three men whose only job is to count how many packs of cigarettes are being produced.
Mr. Parayno also has another man assigned to the warehouse of each factory. This man’s assignment is to make sure that all stocks withdrawn from the warehouse carry the BIR stamp that the appropriate tax has been paid.
Now here’s where money can be made. You see, exported cigarettes, which are tax exempt, occasionally do find their way back to the Philippine market.