Yuchengco pays P2.5B for Vito Cruz property in Mapua expansion
The Yuchengco Group has acquired a half-hectare property along Vito Cruz in Makati for P2.5 billion for the planned expansion of the Mapua University.
According to the grapevine, Malayan Educational System Inc., the corporate parent of Mapua, concluded last month the acquisition of the 5,114-square-meter Bormaheco office warehouse for over P488,000/sqm, a hefty premium against the zonal value of P160,000 for Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue six blocks away. Known for its distinctive post-World War II quonset hut-style warehouse, the Bormaheco property is about a kilometer away from the present Mapua Buendia campus, with tricycles offering door-to-door transportation.
That strip of Vito Cruz, it is actually now formally known as Pablo Ocampo Sr. Extension in honor of the pro-independence congressman who served the First Philippine Assembly during the early US occupation years, has been slowly undergoing gentrification, radiating from the congested tri-intersection of Pablo Ocampo with Metropolitan and Chino Roces avenues.
According to an unconfirmed report, Mapua plans to build a multi-story building in the Bormaheco property for the school’s expanded hotel and restaurant management program.Short for Border Machinery and
Heavy Equipment Co., Bormaheco was born out of the post-war reconstruction years to become one of the biggest machineries and heavy equipment suppliers in the country, with branches in Cebu, Davao, Bacolod, Bukidnon and Butuan.
Its listed chairman and chief executive is Modesto Cervantes, whose family used to control the EasyCall paging business that was popular in the 1990s before the onset of cheaper mobile telephony killed it. Cervantes turned 80 this year. The Vito Cruz expansion comes in the wake of the Yuchengco Group’s acquiring earlier this year the education business of Ayala, creating a seven-school empire – Mapua, Malayan Colleges Laguna, Malayan Science High School, University of Nueva Caceres, National Teachers College, and APEC chain of high schools – with an enrollment of almost 60,000 students.
The Phinma Group, with six schools, has about 70,000 students.
• One listed company that could actually benefit from the intensifying tariff war between the United States and China is food ingredients manufacturer D&L.
D&L president Alvin Lao could not really talk much about it, considering the company’s sensitive B2B ties with its industrial customers, but he did disclose that D&L had received serious inquiries from ironically both Chinese and US customers seeking to navigate the soybean tariffs front.
• Senatorial candidate Ronald dela Rosa was in Taipei over the weekend, a guest of the I-Mei Foods factory which has more than 200 employees recruited from Manila and Davao.
Disgraced former Comelec chairman Andres Bautista has hired immigration counsel and anti-Duterte lawyer Ted Laguatan to represent him in his bid to prolong his stay in the United States.
Laguatan did not respond to several e-mails seeking comment.
Earlier, Bautista had been sighted in the San Francisco area, where, according to estranged wife Tisha, the former chief of the good government commission had acquired a brand-new condo unit unbeknownst to her.
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