DAVAO CITY—The SM Group of Companies plans to construct 15 more shopping malls by 2018, including a posh premier mall in Cagayan de Oro City and two others elsewhere in Mindanao.
That would bring the total number of shopping malls to 75 in the Philippines, said Oliver R. Tiu, vice president for operations-Mindanao of the SM Shopping Center Management Corp.
The slew of construction was already planned years earlier and intended to “double the number of malls by 2018,” he said.
SM has 60 malls right now.
The new mall in Cagayan de Oro City would be the second for the city and the second premier mall in Mindanao to capture the high-end market in the region. It would be built in an area of 175,000 square meters and will have five floors.
The other malls to be constructed in Mindanao would be the one in Butuan on a 2-hectare property, and in Tagum City in Davao del Norte, from a location totaling 3.7 hectares bought earlier.
The construction of the malls in the cities of Butuan and Cagayan de Oro was previously announced by SM President Hans Sy, president of the SM Prime Holdings Inc.
Lynette Lopez, manager of the SM City Ecoland, said the SM Development Corp. would also start constructing four buildings at eight stories each at the back of the mall here, and a five-story car park.
The construction would start by the third quarter this year.
Tiu said Mindanao accounts for 18 percent of total revenues of all SM malls.
In a separate business conference on February 10, dubbed the Philippine Economic Outlook for 2017, Corazon Guidote, senior vice president for investor relations and corporate communications head of SM Investments Corp., said the company’s growth has already outperformed the country’s GDP during the last 10 years.
In terms of nominal GDP, SM posted an 8.71-percent growth, higher than the country’s 6 percent to 7 percent posted in the latter years of the 2006-to-2016 period.
She said the performance of the three SM operations—the SM malls, SM Prime Holdings and Banco de Oro—occupied slots in the top-5 publicly listed companies in the Philippine Stock Exchange.
In the comparative years ending 2005 and February 7 this year, SM’s market capitalization of P127 billion (or $2.56 billion) placed it on the third spot, improving to second spot this year with its capitalization of P821.5 billion (or $16.5 billion).
Over the same comparative years, SM Prime Holdings gained the top spot with P879.3-billion capitalization ($17.6 billion), from its eighth place, with P78.43-billion capitalization ($1.58 billion).
BDO was then on the 13th spot, with its P31.95 billion ($0.64 billion), but with a higher P499.1-billion capital ($10 billion), it became No. 5.
Guidote told business and political leaders SM’s “journey toward optimal growth” has been compared as highly similar to the performance of the Philippine economy.
She said, compared to global leading corporations, “SM is still miniscule,” and added SM would “continue to look at these world’s leading corporations for inspiration”.