MEGAWORLD WINS ‘BEST DEVELOPER’ IN 2016 PHILIPPINES PROPERTY AWARDS The photo shows the men and women of Megaworld Group, headed by Lourdes Gutierrez-Alfonso, chief operating officer, Megaworld, (ninth from left), together with other officials (from left) Eugene Em Lozano, VP for sales and marketing for Makati CBD, Megaworld; Isaias D. Berdin Jr., VP for operations, Suntrust Properties Inc.; Harold C. Geronimo, AVP and head for PR and communications, Megaworld; Jerry R. Rubis, FVP for marketing and business development, Suntrust Properties Inc.; Atty. Basilio C. Almazan Jr., FVP for legal, Suntrust Properties Inc.; Deanna Jean A. Claveria, EVP and COO, Suntrust Properties Inc.; Jericho P. Go, SVP, Megaworld; Kevin L. Tan, FVP and head of commercial, Megaworld; Monica Salomon, president, Global-Estate Resorts Inc.; Noli D. Hernandez, SVP for sales and marketing, Megaworld; Glennford L. Heraldo, VP for sales and marketing, Global-Estate Resorts Inc.; Mylene Manlogon, AVP for retail partners management, Megaworld Lifestyle Malls; Bimbo Andrade, senior marketing manager, Megaworld Lifestyle Malls; and Rowena Espiritu, sales director for Makati CBD, Megaworld.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2016 Vol. 11 No. 185
Telcos’ feud over 700-MHz band could drag on for years
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@lorenzmarasigan
HE whole telecommunications industry is keenly awaiting the outcome of the case lodged before the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) on the “unfair” allocation of a digital real estate, considered one of the key answers to the relatively slow Internet speeds in the Philippines.
INSIDE
MELISSA McCARTHY’S ‘THE BOSS’ EDGES ‘BATMAN v SUPERMAN’
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700 MHz
Spectrum key to the deployment of a highcapacity LTE-based wireless and fixed broadband network While Globe Telecom Inc. has called the uneven distribution of the 700-megahertz (MHz) frequency band to one mobile services group as “anticompetitive,” the telecommunications regulator believes that moves to block out competition will also result in more dismal services down the line. S “T,” A
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CARING FOR YOUR EMPLOYEES news@businessmirror.com.ph
The Millennials BusinessMirror
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Caring for employees a source of young restaurateur’s success
NOZAR Inc. President Ryan Razon (right) poses with his employees at the Teresita’s restaurant inside a shopping mall. Razon credits his experience working for a beer company, as well as thinking of employees’ interests as the key to the success of his restaurant chain.
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HIRTYISH Ryan Razon realized his background in human resources (HR) was a vital element in building the restaurant brand that was inspired by his mother’s passion in the kitchen.
A graduate of industrial psychology from the University of Santo Tomas, Razon said his realization came after working for two-and-a-half years in a major beer company and a computer-education institution.
When his stints in the corporate world did not meet his expectations, Razon decided to help his mother Teresita run the business in Guagua, Pampanga. Upon joining the business, the
young Razon introduced disruptive methods to make the business more competitive and sustainable. At that time, the Razon family was already contemplating to enter the lucrative Manila market. The older generation was shocked by my methods, he told the BusinessMirror. The president of Nozar Inc., the operator of Teresita’s, brought the restaurants into cyberspace by opening a web site, Facebook and Instagram accounts. He implemented a more shocking practice by allowing the staff to eat the meals, like palabok and halo-halo, they serve. “The first week was a disaster, because I saw an employee consume a pitcher of halo-halo and a group of workers finished a basket of palabok,” he said laughing. Inspired by the Chinese maxim
of one step backward, two steps forward, Razon believed this practice would click in the long run. After one week, he brought dried fish for the staff and asked them if they like to try eating it. “They said yes, because they got fed up eating our products,” he recalled. Razon applied this practice because he wanted to satisfy their curiosity and get a feedback on the quality of the products they are selling. Since the staff is on the front line, Razon said they are in the best position to tell customers that their products are good. “They will not also be tempted to steal and bring home the items.” Moreover, he was encouraged to implement this policy, because he discovered an illegal activity by some crew members. “When I went to the toilet for a break, I noticed the toilet bowl was clogged with a lot
of chicken bones thrown by the crew.” As part of his preparation in running the restaurant business, Razon finished his Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) degree at the Ateneo de Manila University. “One of the good things in Ateneo’s MBA program is you can apply the knowledge you learned in class the following day,” he told the BusinessMirror. “Moreover, I have an advantage, because I am already managing a business. I also learned the value of quantitative analysis taught me that everything not measurable is a loss in business.” There he discovered he was also able to apply “all the things I learned in human resources.” “I know the sentiments of being an employee.” Razon approached the Franchising Corp. of the Philippines (Francorp) to evaluate the Teresita’s business model and determine if it is ready to mix up with the big boys. After getting the green light from Francorp, Razon rushed to Pampanga to standardize the processes and operations of Teresita’s. He also asked the family to drop the name Razon to make the Teresita’s distinct from the other businesses carrying the same name. “We also wanted to give our mother the credit, because of her recipes.” The halo-halo was the only product that originated from the restaurant, while the other recipes were created by the different members of Razon clan. In 2011 Teresita’s opened its first branch on Tomas Morato, Quezon City, initially offering halo-halo and palabok to clients. Razon later introduced dishes from his mother’s recipes, like kare-kare and caldereta. In 2012 Teresita’s opened its second branch in Waltermart Muñoz, which got stronger response because of the bigger foot traffic. In 2013 Teresita’s opened a branch in Vito Cruz area near the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas office. In 2014 the family decided to go into franchising and opened its first halo-halo store. Last year Teresita’s went into a higher expansion gear by opening seven branches. For the meantime, Razon said he wants to remain cautious in their expansion and stabilize the business first and build the brand.
Play bares difficulty to talk about the birds and the bees B V V
ACK in the day when my uncle Elmer still lived in the neighborhood, he would accidentally leave seedy tabloids in the parking lot. These I would “accidentally” pick up and, from the paper’s raunchy covers graced by the likes of scantily clad sirens, I would, again, “accidentally” jump to the entertainment section and read the comics, titled “Buhulbuhol na Init” (Tangled Heat). I was 10 years old. That time I thought the people in the neighborhood minding their own businesses might suspect what’s up with this boy perusing what was obviously a filthy newspaper. “Ahahaha!” I would laugh out loud, so that they wouldn’t harbor on the thought and it would appear as though I were just reading a fable. “This is so funny!” This, as I was afraid the neighbors might tell my mother, because that time when I was just beginning to discover the sexual tingling inside me was also the time most fraught with hurt. That time I would “experiment” smooching my playmates on the lips. That time I would get a hard-on over pinup calendar girls and kiss-and-tell autobiographies. That time I would be caught touching myself under the bed covers just when I was about to climax. That time I wondered whether it was the all-knowing and omnipresent God telling my mother. Or maybe I was just terrible at timing, because I was getting caught with such a depressing regularity. If you managed to get away from so much ribbing, what was deemed a “mis-
mother, who talks endlessly to her dead “santo friends”. Preceded by Diego’s sexual advance, the utter neglect and her stumbling one night upon a peepshow of her parents petting and canoodling stoked her sexual curiosity. She was forced to perform a balancing act between desire and all the virtue and fear of God her Lolita body could hold. Diego wants the same attention from her catatonic mother, whom he finds mooning by the window day in and day out, as if stuck psychedelically in an emotional past, as if waiting for Diego’s father to come back. It is a youth pockmarked with grit and gray and where being turned down for premature sex was the first heartbreak. Julio, on the other hand, was an obvious pansy. Time was he covered up how he rummaged her mother’s closet of ermine dresses and lipstick by saying he was sweating out in the sun by playing basketball with Diego. It was in a household where being gay was condemned and the marching order was to develop muscles and break his neck like a man. The play is awash with sexual innuendoes and sinister lighting so as adult thespians Thea Yrastorza (Luna), JC Santos (Diego) and Abner de Lina (Julio) assumed otherwise juvenile roles when they play house. The technique works in a way always suggestive of something about to happen and demands the audience to stifle their coughs when that finally occurs. One day they would play hide-andseek against the benighted backdrop of cardboard mockups of a remote castle
and a church and the woods in an eventide. The next day, Luna would act to suggest she’s pleasuring herself in solitude, while Julio pleasures Diego. In the intimate and personal black-box setting that is the “Power Mac” spotlight, the ritual is an obligation of solidarity, at once raw, straight from the shoulders and shows how theater transcends film, devoid of any subterfuge to mask a flawed and ill-equipped 11-year-old fondling and caressing with the sleight of a fancy camera angle. The silence that wrapped the audience was punctured by a sound effect of lip-smacking. Perhaps the need to talk was to escape the agony of being point-blank grilled and the feel of being put on the spot, the way you blather words without meaning to extinguish an already-excruciating silence. Just being there watching young adults break down their unadulterated innocence and titillate oneself was to partake in an act deemed “sinful”. The “unfortunate” turn of events gradually give way to when these childhood friends have grown older. Now strangers to each other, they meet for the first time. Sighs were heaved; heads snapped to attention; onstage there was at once the need to talk about something. But about what? And how? Diego ventures upon the games they played. But, again, awkwardness ensues. What brought them together now sets them apart. The actors show their characters apparently refuse to talk about the past, if only because childhood was just a phase. And that was a long time ago.
Stateline.org/TNS
THE MILLENNIALS MILLIONAIRES! THIS undated photo shows Games People Play actors Thea Yrastorza (Luna, foreground), JC Santos (Diego) and Abner de Lina (Julio, right). behavior” would be met with corporal punishment. However, it’s unlike being ostracized and treated with a cold shoulder. Rather than a direct confrontation, your parents would sit you down and beat around the bush. Compare this with the people you’ve done it with who would rather shove the memories of a raunchy evening to the back of their heads. They would be unwilling to talk about that evening either because that was a difficult conversation or because that was a long time ago. Glenn Sevilla Mas and Ed Locsin’s Games People Play, an opus centered at heartbreak, coming of age and coming out, brought these awkward conversations out to the fore and nailed it there. Mas and Locsin’s opus is twin-billed with Si Maria Isabella at ang Guryon ng mga Tala at the recent Children’s Play
for Adults theatrical. The latter is the latest brainchild of Hero Blueberry & West and Bit by Bit Co., which also produced a seminal theatrical adaptation, Maxie the Musical: Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros, in 2013. Games People Play stages what happens when fairy tales and bedtime stories actually become “bedtime stories.” In it, Luna, Diego and Julio are soulmates whose narratives and checkered back stories are pushed forward in the “games” they play. These games form part of the rites of passage, beginning from their being innocuous childhood best of friends to when they begin to lust over each other’s precociously seductive bodies. The virtuous girl Luna grew up in a home where she existed from one bedtime to the next, invisible to her oblivious drunkard father and overly religious
@caiordinario
A FARMER in Barangay Amaya in Tanza, Cavite, tends to his cow amid the searing heat due to the effect of El Niño. The farmer said the two-cropping season he is used to having in his two-and-a-half hectare farm has been reduced to one this year due to El Niño. NONIE REYES
THE Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. (Freddie Mac) also predicts continued growth in apartments this year, saying the key drivers of the boom are still in place: rising incomes and more young people setting out on their own. Some of the cities where construction increased the most in 2015—Dallas, Nashville, Tennessee and Salt Lake City—still have low vacancy rates, the report said.
COMING HOME
COMING HOME
Farmers suffer El Niño’s wrath Wretched countryside sends poor to desperate measures
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| TUESDAY, APRIL 12, 2016 sports@businessmirror.com.ph Editor: Mike G. Besa | www.pinoygolfer.com
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THE home hole at Marapara
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HE next Congress must prioritize the amendment of a law which allowed Manila to protect the rice sector by limiting the entry of cheap rice imports, a senior official of the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) said on Monday. Neda Deputy Director General Rosemarie Edillon said Republic Act (R A) 8178, or the Agricultural Tariffication Act, should be amended before the extension of the quantitative restriction (QR) on rice granted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) expires in July 2017. While the QR on rice has temporarily given palay farmers a reprieve from the deluge of cheap imports, its extension has necessitated the grant of concessions that were detrimental to other farm sectors. “July 2017 is less than two years away and when the new Congress begins its session, I suppose [the amendment of RA 8178] will have to be one of the first bills that should be filed and passed,” Edillon told the BusinessMirror in an interview. After July 2017, the Philippines may no longer be allowed to enjoy the QR, as it has been over 20 years since the country joined the WTO. The Philippines officially became a member of the WTO on January 1, 1995. The country’s accession to
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Turning point
T hit me like a ton of bricks. In the 10 years that I’ve been writing and following the game in the Philippines, I have played just about every golf course of import in the country but I had not played a full round on the firm, fast fairways of the Negros Occidental Golf and Country Club, known to us all as Marapara. » F
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B T H ENVER—Jason and Rebecca Petersen’s lives are in flux, just as they are for many young families. They like life as renters in the urban neighborhood here called LoHi, where apartments are steadily replacing single-family houses and crowds of millennials flock to trendy shops and restaurants. But will they buy a house in the suburbs as their son, 3-year-old Lucas, nears school age? It’s a possibility, if jobs lead them there, or they go in search of better schools. But they would miss the lively neighborhood and its short walk downtown, through a scenic park where Lucas loves to ride his bicycle. “We’d like to stay here. It’s just more vibrant,” said Jason, 30, a stay-at-home dad who develops software while wife Rebecca finishes her medical residency. The Petersens, like other millennials— who were born after 1980, have a taste for city life, and are willing to move in search of work—have helped fuel a boom in apartment construction unlike anything in recent decades. They tend to have careers that were delayed by the recession, and to lack the job security or savings to settle down and buy a home. Construction started on 386,000 new apartments last year, according to census data, the highest number since 1987. Apartments, defined as housing units in buildings with five or more units, made up 35 percent of all home construction last year, the highest share since 1973. Forty-seven states saw construction shift from houses toward apartments, as measured by approval of permits, between 2005 and 2014, the most recent complete year of census data. The shift was especially dramatic in western states, such as Colorado, where multifamily units made up 38 percent of new construction permits in 2014, up from just 10 percent in 2005. Other states where the share rose more than 25 percentage points were California, Oregon, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington, North Dakota and Nebraska. The only states to buck the trend were Wyoming and Rhode Island, where apartment-construction permits dropped by more than half since 2005.
DEBATE rages over whether a turning point has been reached as millennials begin to enter their late 20s and early 30s. Will they stay in the urban spots they’ve come to love or will many move to the suburbs to have children, just as their boomer parents did, for more space, better schools and less crime? The National Association of Home Builders predicts little growth in multifamily construction this year, with renewed emphasis on single-family homes, economist Robert Dietz said. But Jonathan Spader, a research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, said the need for new urban apartments is likely to continue. The center released a study of rental housing in December. Rents are rising and vacancy rates for apartments are near 30-year lows, Spader said, and if some older millennials are buying houses, younger ones are still waiting for a chance to move out on their own. The annual share of first-time homebuyers is at its lowest ebb in three decades, according to a National Association of Realtors report, and a new 3-percent down program had little effect in 2015. Buyers have been discouraged by higher home prices and mortgage rates, and rising rents are making it harder for them to save, the report said. “Those things together suggest a bull market at the national level,” for apartments, Spader said. “Growth in demand is rising and new multifamily construction, at least in the short term, is here to stay.”
‘PASSAGE OF NEW RICE IMPORTS POLICY A MUST’
30%
World Bank’s proposed tariff rate for rice after the QR expires in July 2017 the WTO means it agreed to liberalize trade for all commodities, including rice—the country’s staple. Over time, other countries, like Japan and South Korea, were no longer allowed to impose the QR, allowing rice imports to arrive freely in their markets, provided traders would pay the corresponding tariff and duties. Edillon said Manila’s decision to retain the protection for rice is due to the fact that Filipinos consider it irreplaceable as it is a cheap everyday food. The exemption also aims to protect farmers, many of whom could not compete in the international market. Only farmers living in plains like those in Central Luzon will be able to compete with international rice sellers. “What we’re saying is that protection doesn’t have to be in the form of QR. In fact, if you replace QR with tariffs, the money could be used to modernize our agriculture,” Edillon said. “ T he government could C A
World Bank still not sold on PHL tax administration
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Millennials fuel boom in building of apartments
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The number of households the Kidapawan city government has identified for direct food assistance and food-for-work program
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 46.1920
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@awimailbox
IDAPAWAN CITY, North Cot abato —78 -yea r - old Valentina Berdin looked up from where she stood at Saguing River, when she heard the sound of gunfire coming from the bridge above. “I just finished taking a bath
from the river below when I heard the pop! pop! pop!,” the Arakan Valley resident said. And then people, men and women, ran in all directions to hide, she said in this province’s language. One of those was Dionisio Alagos, 68, from Barangay Kalodkod, also of Arakan Valley. He hid inside a small hut near the river. It was C A
HE next administration should increase taxes and reform the country’s tax system so the government could hike its spending for infrastructure and social services by P900 billion a year, according to local economists and the World Bank. In a report, the World Bank said the Philippines needs to increase its investment in the infrastructure and social services sectors by 6.8 percent of GDP, which is equivalent to P900 billion, to achieve inclusive growth. The World Bank said this could be financed via reforms in the government’s tax administration and tax policy. “Higher and more efficient public spending, underpinned by increased revenue mobilization, is needed to raise physical and human capital and sustain inclusive
₧900B
Annual infrastructure and social service spending backlog of the Philippines, according to World Bank growth,” World Bank Philippines senior country economist Karl Kendrick Chua said. “Relying solely on tax-administration reforms is not enough,” Chua added. Former Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno told the BusinessMirror that the country’s tax system needs to be overhauled, as it is “highly unequal.” This, he said, is crucial as the country’s tax collection is among the lowest in the region at 15 percent of GDP. Diokno said increasing the tax S “W B,” A
n JAPAN 0.4275 n UK 65.2554 n HK 5.9542 n CHINA 7.1416 n SINGAPORE 34.2290 n AUSTRALIA 34.8472 n EU 52.7051 n SAUDI ARABIA 12.3195
Source: BSP (11 April 2016 )