The largest shopping mall along Manila Bay in the Philippines is the flagship Elastic [+]
Provided by SM Investment
SM Prime Holdings, the property division of the late retail billionaire Henry Sy Sm Investments family, will spend up to 33 billion pesos ($568 million) this year to expand its commercial properties to take advantage of the strong economic growth of the Philippines.
Sm Prime said in a statement Thursday that P21 billion of that will go to the mall, while the rest will be spent on developing the conference center and office buildings and renovating existing hotels.
“We expect inflation to regulate, lower interest rates and election-related spending to boost our growth,” SM President Jeffrey Lim said in a statement.
SM Prime, a diversified real estate developer and the largest shopping mall operator in the Philippines, provided a budget of up to P100 billion for expansion last year, including its ongoing 360 hectares of reclamation project in Manila Bay. According to the company's website, as of September last year, builders spent 60 billion pesos in capital expenditures, 26% and 21% of residential and coastal developments, respectively.
The company expects economic growth in the Philippines to accelerate to 6% this year after a 5.6% increase in 2024. Faster expansion will be driven by a recovery in consumer demand, which will increase half from the mid-May campaign to elect half of Senate, House members and local government officials.
SM Prime says it is “strategic” to capture the increase in consumer demand, which is said to be in the 9.4 million square meters of rental space at 87 shopping malls in the country. The planned expansion will add 205,400 square meters of new shopping mall space this year to increase SM Prime.
SM Investments (also also interested in banking thermal energy, logistics, retail and transportation, which traces its roots back to Henry Sy Sr., who sold super shoes in a store in Manila in 1958, which he happened to call Shoemart. After SY died in 2019, his six children – Teresita, Elizabeth, Henry Jr, Hans, Herbert and Harley -Granted him the wealth. This family is the richest in the Philippines with a net worth of $13 billion.
