Ayala rebrands emerging businesses
CEBU CITY – Ayala Corp., the country’s oldest conglomerate, has unveiled a major rebranding, reintroducing itself to the Filipino public as one that “is now touching people at different price points,” in contrast to the public perception that the company is just another successful business that is way up there.
During the launch ceremony late Monday, Ayala chairman and CEO Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala said the company’s emerging businesses – energy, infrastructure, health, education and automotive – would take on a unified brand identity and would be renamed AC Energy, AC Infra, AC Education, AC Industrials and AC Automotive.
“In the end, no matter what business we enter, our goal is not just to succeed but to reinvent the way things work to change people’s lives for the better,” he said.
In an interview, Zobel de Ayala said the conglomerate’s goal was to be able to touch a broader range of Filipinos.
“We’re trying to integrate it with a common theme – AC – something that unites us. We’re trying to emphasize that Ayala is now touching people at different price points much more than ever before. We’re trying to emphasize that rather than people looking at us always at the very top,” he said.
Ayala Corp. managing director Jose Rene Almendras said the conglomerate’s core businesses – Ayala Land Inc., BPI, Globe Telecom, Manila Water and IMI – were about “pioneering the future” while the new businesses were about “accelerating the future.”
“Globe started the cell phones, Ayala Land started the malls. The next set of five will be accelerating the future. We will not do away with the core brands but we want to reach more people, we want the country’s economy to grow faster. That’s the reason for the investment into these five new things,” Almendras pointed out.
In support of the new businesses, Ayala Corp. would continue to pour in significant
levels of capital expenditures, Almendras said.
For the past three years, Ayala’s capex has hovered above the P170 billion mark: P187 billion in 2014, P185 billion in 2015 and P174 billion this year.
For 2017, Ayala group head of corporate strategy and development Paolo Borromeo said the capex would be in the same order of magnitude as in this year’s program.
“We remain positive about the economy, our capex levels should relatively be in the same order of magnitude,” Borromeo said.
Ayala Corp. has invested over P500 billion in capex and provided 90,000 jobs in the past five years.
Through its new businesses, the conglomerate is able to provide affordable basic services and create employment opportunities, Zobel de Ayala said.
The top company official noted that in healthcare, affordability and accessibility were clearly a problem with great demand for a better alternative.
“We formed AC Health to fill in these gaps. They partnered with Generika, a leader in affordable medicine. They launched an innovative chain of retail community clinics called FamilyDoc that combines primary care, diagnostics, a pharmacy and a convenience story all in one setting,” he said.
Zobel De Ayala said the lack of access to quality and affordable education has led to massive dropout rates across all educational levels in the Philippines.
“However with rising income levels, people are willing to pay for better education but not to the levels being charged by existing private schools. We formed AC Education to address this need. AC Education partnered with Pearson to set up APEC Schools, a high school designed to train its students with the skills and values relevant to employers and help them achieve the best possible career tracks,” he said.
Apart from this, the group is backing the revival of the Philippine manufacturing industry, both as a way of remaining globally relevant and as a way to create employment with more scale.
“We continue to pursue initiatives along these lines through our newly formed industrial technologies unit,” he said.
The group’s corporate social responsibility arm, Ayala Foundation, has programs that focus on education, youth leadership, sustainable livelihood, and arts and culture.