Aside from selling cars to Filipinos, or building highways for these automobiles, Ramon S. Ang is also building commuter railways and airports
By Daxim L. Lucas, Inquirer Business
It is easy to associate Ramon Ang with cars.
After all, the president and CEO of San Miguel Corp. is known to be a motoring aficionado, having hundreds of automobiles in his personal collection. Some are kept in the sprawling basement of his home, while more and kept in warehouses in and around Metro Manila which he visits regularly to take his pick of the day out for a spin, either on the city’s roads or out on the racetracks outside the metropolis.
It is thus, nor surprising that the automobile business is one of those that the head honcho of the country’s largest conglomerate by assets devotes a lot of time on.
We’re talking about BMW Philippines, which Ang acquired in 2017 to become the exclusive distributor of the German luxury carmaker in the country. Under his leadership, the company revamped its local operations, introduced more models at various price points, and opened more dealerships (now totaling six) including one in Pampanga and another in Cebu.
More importantly, Ang and his new management team led by BMW Philippine president Spencer Yu introduced a more comprehensive system that improved all aspects of the firm’s operations from marketing to after-sales service, the latter being all too often overlooked by local luxury car dealers once the sale has been made.
Ang and Yu also made the bold move of introducing BMW Motorrad’s high end, big bikes in the local market which had, for far too long, depended on gray market imports for its luxury motorcycle needs. The timing couldn’t have been better as the sudden spike in some people’s disposable incomes — after the coronavirus pandemic curtailed other discretionary spending like holiday travel — resulted in record sales in the Philippines for Motorrad motorcycles.
Note that in the year immediately following the Covid-19 pandemic, the local unit of BMW Motorrad was recognized not only for having the highest sales in the region… but in the entire world. Talk about good timing.
And now, word going around in corporate circles is that Ang has recently sealed the deal to become the official dealer of Ferrari in the Philippines.
The deal was a fortuitous one after the Italian supercar maker went shopping for a new partner in the Philippines following the financial challenges encountered by Davao-based businessman Dennis Uy who was tapped to revive the brand’s fortunes in the country a few years ago. But to think of Ang’s transportation-oriented businesses simply in terms of cars would not do the man justice. That’s because the tycoon is also heavily invested in building roads on which these cars — and that of other carmakers — will be driven on.
Since Ang took the helm of San Miguel Corp. in the early 2000s, the food and beverage giant expanded into other areas of business that were originally far from what was traditionally accepted to be its core competence.
“People though I was crazy when we started expanding,” Ang likes to relate when remembering the early days when San Miguel’s original “boss” — the late Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco Jr. — started to give him more and more management and strategic responsibilities.
One such bold move was the group’s expansion into the infrastructure business, specifically toll highways.
One after another, Ang bought the companies that operated or had the rights to the South Luzon Expressway, the Metro Manila Skyway system, the Southern Tagalog Arterial Road and the Tarlac-La Union-Pangasinan-Expressway.
To this portfolio, he later added the NAIA Expressway, the stage three portion of the Skyway, the and has plans for at least three other tollroads in Luzon.
At present, San Miguel has a portfolio of almost 300 kilometers worth of toll highways. This is expected to grow to almost 800 kilometers once the conglomerate breaks ground on the extension of SLEx initially to Lucena in Quezon within the next three years, and a further extension all the way to Bicol eventually.
“People often complain that economic development is uneven, with most of it happening only in Metro Manila,” Ang said. “With the road system we’re building, development can easily extend to the provinces outside Metro Manila.”
“For one, people working in Manila no longer have to cram themselves into the city,” he said. “They can work here and return after work to their homes outside the metropolis where the air is fresher, rent is cheaper, and the quality of life is better.”
Plus, he said, improving access of city dwellers to the nearby provinces also helps economic development since tourism revenues in these nearby environs rise, as do property values with the increased accessibility.
Again, it’s easy to stereotype Ang’s business model as being car-centric, but the tycoon has an answer to his critics in this department.
Under his leadership, San Miguel is building Line 7 of the Metro Rail Transit commuter train system which is now in its final stages of construction.
Once completed next year, MRT-7 will ferry as many as 650,000 commuters daily to and from its North Avenue, Quezon City station to as far as the growing city of San Jose del Monte in Bulacan, north of Metro Manila.
The commuter line will have a total of 14 stations, and will be linked to the lines of the MRT-3 and LRT1, as well as the future Metro Manila subway which will all have their common station in Quezon City’s north triangle area.
But Ang’s biggest contribution to improving mobility in the Philippines will come not on land, but in the air.
San Miguel Corp. is currently building the New Manila International Airport in Bulacan which, at the projected cost of P740 billion, will be the single most expensive infrastructure project — public or private — in the country’s history.
Once operational, the airport will serve an initial 35 million passengers annually and, at full capacity, can efficiently handle as many as 100 million passengers per year. This is a quantum improvement from the present facilities of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport which is already bursting at the seams with the current annual traffic of 8 million passengers.
“What we want to do is to build an airport that will make it easier for Filipinos to travel, and make it easier for foreign travelers to come to the Philippines,” Ang said. “Once completed, this will be a facility that we can all be proud out.”
Indeed, there’s more to Ramon Ang than selling cars to Filipinos, or building highways for these automobiles. He is also building commuter railways and airports.
In other words, what he brings to the table is a comprehensive mobility package for the country.
