This writer agrees with Malacañang’s recent appeal for the public to save gasoline, but saving only gas is not enough. We must launch a comprehensive energy-saving campaign nationwide to also save electricity. I challenge our politicians to start the ball rolling with leadership by example — sell costly gas-guzzling limousines and SUVs, take public transport or the MRT, or ride a bike to Malacañang, the Senate and Congress!
Government, business, civic organizations, churches and schools must push an aggressive save-energy campaign tapping top showbiz stars and tri-media.
One of the best ways to drastically reduce the country’s imported oil imports is to declare martial law on Metro Manila streets and enforce draconian discipline and efficiency to ease our horrendous traffic jams, which cost many billions of pesos in wasted gasoline and even bigger economic losses in lost productivity!
* * *
Can the Philippines’ electric power billionaires — the Lopezes, the Aboitizes, and the state-owned GSIS — help bring down power costs? The recent battle of the titans between the billionaire Lopez clan and the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo government — led by GSIS boss Winston Garcia for control of electric power giant Meralco — will hopefully end with the consumers as the ultimate winners. Can we finally see an end to foreign investors’ perennial complaint of the Philippines having Asia’s second most expensive electric power rates, next only to Japan?
The corporate feud has resulted in the unprecedented slump of Meralco stock prices from a high of P110 per share in July last year to a record low of P56 per share on May 29, offering long-term investors a golden opportunity to accumulate this stock. Will this bargain stock price attract other tycoons to buy into this solid, blue-chip, public-utility monopoly — perhaps the billionaire Aboitiz clan of Cebu, who are leaders in the power industry and well-known political allies of President Arroyo? Erramon Aboitiz recently said Meralco is “an attractive investment.” We hope the warring titans can reach a win-win solution and decisively lower power rates!
* * *
Lopez clan patriarch Oscar Lopez, 77, recently climbed the Philippines’ tallest 9,688-foot Mount Apo in Davao. Sources say his doctors once told him he needed a heart bypass operation, but the billionaire wanted to disprove them. Unlike his younger executives who always take the elevators, Lopez climbs the stairs every day to his sixth-floor office in the Benpres Building in Ortigas Center, Pasig City. That’s why his executives cringe whenever they bump into the big boss and have no choice but to follow him up the stairs. Perhaps we should all just climb the stairs in countless office buildings nationwide to save on power costs and to strengthen our hearts’ staying power?
* * *
A young, rising star in Philippine business has again matched his solid business management with a new sporting conquest. Mikee Romero’s Harbour Centre team recently won the PBL Lipovitan Amino Sports Cup. He runs a big port operation and huge realty projects in Tondo, Manila and other places. His dad is low-cost housing tycoon and motorcycle enthusiast Reghis Romero II of R-II Builders.
Can Mikee Romero and top sports patron Manny Pangilinan of PLDT help revive the lost glory of Philippine basketball? Can more tycoons also please help popularize the world’s No. 1 spectator sport, soccer? As with our economy, we should rid Philippine sports of useless, corrupt and selfish politics for us to really be globally competitive!
* * *
Liwayway Marketing/Oishi snacks taipan Carlos Chan and his investor group are reportedly selling their newly established Chinese-language newspaper Philippine Chinese Daily or “Fei-li-pin Hua-bao.” Interested buyers reportedly include Xavier School valedictorian and UP alumnus Ambassador Francis Chua. Tycoon Dante Go, who has sold Sugarland to San Miguel Corp., last year reportedly tried to buy the No. 2 Chinese-language newspaper United Daily News.
The biggest of Manila’s four Chinese-language newspapers is the No. 1 World News or “Xi-Jie Ri-bao,” led by its publisher, self-made man Atty. Florencio Tan Mallare. World News was able to build its own new building due to booming circulation and advertising revenues fuelled mainly by new immigrants. Mallare started as a young reporter and was also once the 30-year-old lawyer tasked with putting the Alaska Lumber Co. and Lee Tay & Lee Chay, Inc. sawmills under receivership during a family corporate feud in the 1960s.
* * *
Condolences to the family of the late United Laboratories (Unilab) co-founder Mariano K. Tan, who passed away at the age of 88. Tan was the partner, treasurer and loyal friend of the late “Pharmaceuticals King” Jose Yao Campos. Both Tan and Campos were immigrants from Jinjiang county (now a city), Fujian province, south China, and both of them were self-made men. Tan once told this writer that he was a Manila cigarette vendor as a youth. Campos and Tan started Unilab as a small drugstore in Manila’s Chinatown in 1945. Another partner in Unilab is lumber tycoon scion Ambassador Howard Q. Dee, whose elder sister is the widow of Campos.
The last time this writer saw the low-profile elder Mariano Tan was at the grand wedding of his eldest grandchild Stephanie Catherine Tan Lee to PCCI president and Automatic Appliances boss Samie Lim’s eldest son, Sam Frederick Lim, at Shangri-la Makati, where no politicians were invited. Among the godparents were Megaworld founder Andrew Tan, Zesto taipan Alfredo Yao, Ambassador Francis Chua’s wife Betty Lao Chua and the bride’s uncle Mariano John L. Tan, Jr. of Unilab.
* * *
Wilfred Stevenson Uytengsu, Jr., 46, of Alaska Milk Corp. (AMC) won the Philippine “Entrepreneur of the Year” Award from Ernst & Young accounting firm. He recently represented the country in the global competitions on May 31 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. Alaska holds 85 percent of the Philippine milk market and has market capitalization of P4.8 billion. He is grandson of the respected prewar Cebu Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce leader Don Tirso Uytengsu, who was among the courageous taipans who passionately opposed Japanese militarism in China and Asia and whose son Wentworth Uytengsu was a pre-law student at Silliman University when he died in the anti-Japanese resistance movement in 1945. The younger son of Don Tirso is 81-year-old Wilfred Uytengsu, now chairman of Alaska Milk and father of award-winning entrepreneur and athlete Wilfred Steven Uytengsu, Jr. A daughter married businessman George Young and got the family’s General Milling business.
The family originated from Fujian, south China, and they first settled in Dumaguete City of Negros Oriental before going to Cebu and Metro Manila. AMC chairman Wilfred Uytengsu said he learned from his late dad the value of hard work, that “the best business plan without the effort is just a dream” and that “complacency is the enemy of the great.”
* * *
What should entrepreneurs, professionals and other folks do when news headlines report lower Philippine economic growth and possible higher inflation? I urge the public to invest more, not only in new businesses that will boost the economy, but also to invest now in incredible bargains among the Philippines’ blue-chip stocks. Heed the world’s wealthiest billionaire Warren Buffett, who advised in 2004: “Investors should remember that excitement and expenses are their enemies. And if they insist on trying to time their participation in equities, they should try to be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”
* * *
Thanks for your messages; all will be answered. Comments, suggestions and jokes welcome at willsoonflourish@gmail.com or wilson_lee_flores@yahoo.com.