ALI ramps up hotel portfolio

Property giant Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) intends to invest more aggressively in affordable hotels as well as industrial estates to capitalize on the country’s increasing appeal as a tourist and manufacturing destination.

ALI commercial business group head Jose Emmanuel Jalandoni said the firm is ramping up its hotel portfolio with 2,700 new rooms to be completed before 2020.

The new rooms will bolster the company’s current hotel portfolio composed of 2,300 rooms nationwide.

“What we have right now is mostly highend hotels. Moving forward, we will be putting up a mix of provincial hotels and I guess none of the top end hotels,” Jalandoni said.

“We like the Seda brand, we like the $100 market as against the $200 market. We think the $100 market and the Seda brand will actually do much better in terms of occupancy as compared to the branded ones,” he added.

ALI, through unit AyalaLand Hotels and Resorts Corp., owns and operates Seda hotels which target the mid-market “lifestyle type” of clientele.

Seda group general manager Andrea Mastellone said earlier ALI plans to invest as much as P30 billion over the next five years to put up a slew of Seda hotels across the country.

Aside from ALI’s hotel portfolio, Jalandoni said the property powerhouse also plans to strengthen its industrial estate footprint as foreign manufacturers have been exiting China to look for greener pastures.

“We are seeing a lot of interest in that area (industrial estates). We’re looking at this product more seriously now compared to how we look at it in the past,” he said.

ALI and partner Mitsubishi Corp. own the 450-hectare industrial estate Laguna Technopark which is now full of locators.

The companies partnered again to launch last year a new development called Cavite Technopark.

Cavite Technopark is envisioned to be a special economic zone that will cater to light to medium, nonpolluting industries specializing in electronics, automotive, consumer products, food processing and pharmaceuticals.

“Clearly, Laguna Technopark did well when we launched it in the 1990s. It’s a time when many of the Japanese manufacturers relocated to the Philippines. But if you recall, there was a slowdown in the succeeding years. They decided to go to Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and China. But I think there’s a resurgence of a lot of these locators going back to the Philippines because I think China now is not as cheap anymore,” Jalandoni said.

Jalandoni said revenues from industrial estates contribute less than five percent to ALI’s total revenue at present.