Market set to elevate Yao to billionaire status

The hot stock market will add a new member to the country’s one percent in the person of juice king Alfredo Yao.

Ironically, it is not his market leader Zest-O beverage company or his Zest Airways that will formally elevate Yao to that rarefied status but instead his lesser advertised thrift bank, Philippine Business Bank.

PBB plans to raise as much as P4 billion net in a forthcoming initial public offering and if the stars are aligned with the calculations from its red-herring prospectus, the 15-year-old bank should be worth about P14.4 billion by the February 19 listing date.

At that valuation, the Grace Park-based bank would be catapulted into the big-boys territory, just below the Aboitizes’ Union Bank, whose market cap last Friday was close to P17 billion.

While the 68-year-old Yao and his family would reduce their PBB shareholdings to about 67 percent from the current 90 percent, the Yaos would nevertheless see the value of their combined stake ballooning to, voila!, more than P9.6 billion.

Originally named Total Savings Bank, the PBB was one of the two thrift banking licenses awarded by the Bangko Sentral to two aspiring taipans, the other one was for Citystate Savings Bank of insurance and media magnate Antonio Cabangon Chua, right before the outbreak of the Asian currency crisis in 1997.

Both Yao and Cabangon Chua, incidentally, lost their fathers in their boyhood years and had to learn to juggle school and trade to pull themselves out of the ruins of World War II.