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Friday, March 29, 2024

The values we live by

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By Ramon S. Ang

(Speech delivered by his son Jomar Ang for and in behalf of the awardee at the TOFIL Awards on Dec. 2, 2019)

To my fellow awardees, Congratulations! Anyone can be outstanding. Kahit po sa pang araw-araw na buhay.

For me, it’s very simple. We just have to love our country. Magmalasakit po tayo sa bayan, paunlarin ang bansa, at pabutihin ang pamumuhay ng mga Pilipino.

Today, I am reminded of how San Miguel Corp. expanded from a beer, food, and packaging company, to a conglomerate that leads in power generation, oil and petrochemicals, infrastructure—including expressways, mass rail, ports, and airports—cement manufacturing and banking.

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We transformed and diversified to keep up with the changing times. I am proud to say that 10 years later, our businesses are much stronger and today SMC contributes to more than 5 percent of our country’s GDP, equivalent to over a trillion pesos in sales revenue.

But we don’t just make profits for our shareholders. We build the foundations of our country’s growth and make the world better for our kababayans.

Let me share with you some of the things we are now doing in San Miguel:

1. We are building the Manila International Airport, with a capacity to accommodate at least 100-million passengers per year. This will create about 30-million jobs and will decongest Metro Manila traffic and develop the Central Luzon provinces of Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, Bataan, Pampanga, Tarlac, and Zambales.

2. We are connecting the north and south through our Skyway Stage 3 project. This will reduce Edsa traffic by at least 50 percent and cut travel time from Balintawak to Magallanes from 1.5 hours to only 20 minutes!

3. We are extending the Skyway all the way to Susana Heights—6 kilometers northbound, and 6 kilometers southbound. This will decongest the perennial problem areas of Muntinlupa, Sucat, and Bicutan.

4. Our MRT 7 will link many cities, running from Edsa Trinoma to Quezon Memorial Circle, Commonwealth, Fairview all the way to San Jose Del Monte Bulacan. Later on, it will extend to our airport project in Bulacan via Bocaue, Navotas, and Manila, where we will build a Loop with an Airport Express to connect all these cities to our aerotropolis. This will be a major relief for Metro Manila and more than two-million passengers, who can now live in Bulacan but work in Manila without the problems of traffic, flooding, or transportation strikes.

5. We are spending $3 billion on our food and beverage businesses to expand our grain terminals, sea port, feed mills, poultry, piggeries, meat processing plant, and ready-to-eat food facility which will products such as Pata Tim and Crispy Pata. We will be producing high quality but affordable food for every Filipino.

6. Lastly, sustainability has long been embedded in our operations. Apart from a major water sustainability initiative, we have also taken a bigger and more active role in helping address the country’s plastic wastes problem. Among our initiatives: We convert waste plastics and rubber tires as fuel substitutes for our cement plants. We’re building 15 new facilities nationwide using cement made with waste plastics as fuel. Recently, we also adopted the use of the country’s first fully certified biodegradable plastics for most of our packaging requirements. Also recently, we completed the country’s first recycled plastics road, using asphalt made with waste plastics. We have built the pilot site for this project in our logistics facility in Cavite, used by 18-wheeler trucks and heavy equipment. This is so we can fully test out this new kind of sustainable construction material.

San Miguel’s vision has always been to deliver on our nation’s goals, to set the pace for progress, and make the lives of every Filipino better. We are in a better position to get big projects done because of our scale, leadership, expertise, technology, and resources.

But as citizens, each of us can contribute greatly to the vision of a better Philippines.

It can be as simple as following traffic rules or keeping our neighborhoods clean. It is also about practicing the good values we were taught as children, and passing them on to the next generation.

Do what is right. Give your best. Be accountable. Be a good neighbor. Serve a greater purpose. Be kind and humble. These are the same values we live by in San Miguel.

But what drives everything is our greater purpose: And our collective greater purpose is to help make the Philippines better, because this is our country and our home.

To be truly outstanding Filipinos, we need to lead in taking on this challenge, every single day.

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