SM president and CEO Frederic DyBuncio said the group remains committed to its main segments but is also leaning on emerging businesses to sustain momentum, as growth naturally moderates from an already massive base.
“We need to look at other new sectors that can grow faster and can actually help with synergies with these other core businesses,” he said in a rare television interview with CNBC Squawk Box Asia hosts Chery Kang and JP Ong.
Logistics, clean energy
“So, at the moment, we’re looking at logistics as one example. We control one of the largest logistics companies in the Philippines, which is 2GO,” DyBuncio said.
“And we’re also looking at renewable energy, which we have through our Philippine geothermal production company. And we look at those two as possible growth engines for us moving forward,” he added.
Through Philippine Geothermal Production Co., the group supplies steam with an equivalent of approximately 300 megawatts powering the Luzon grid.
Faster second half of 2025
SM Investments Corp. posted a 6 percent rise in first-half 2025 net income to P42.6 billion, lifted by strong results from SM Prime Holdings, BDO Unibank and China Bank, its retail group, and portfolio firms.
Revenues also grew about 6 percent to P319.2 billion.
“The second half of the year tend to be stronger for us. Because of Christmas coming up. So we’re still very optimistic that for the full year we’ll be able to achieve a much better growth trajectory moving forward,” DyBuncio said.
Data center exit
The group is also learning to become more agile, shifting gears when new investments no longer align with its strategy.
DyBuncio reiterated plans to exit their data center business, held through a minority stake in YCO Global Cloud Centers, citing the high cost of power in the country. (See InsiderPH's report here.)
“We’ve been pushing now for renewable energy, and that’s going to help bring down the cost of power,” he said.
“So hopefully in the not too distant future, there’ll be more big hyperscalers who will come, move to the Philippines, and be able to really make the Philippines another data center hub in the region,” he added.
Listening to investors
“And that’s also why we also believe that our share price at the moment we think is significantly undervalued. And that’s something which we’re trying to see and really look at how our foreign investors and locals will view us moving forward, right?”
With the second half of the year underway, DyBuncio hopes investors take notice of the firm’s solid performance and growing dividends.
“We know, for example, that they wanted an increase in the dividend rate and we paid a higher dividend rate this year to our investors. And that hopefully will make them sort of realize that we actually want to give back cash to our investors to stay with us in the shares,” he said.
Apart from its healthy performance, the company announced last February the country’s biggest stock buyback valued at P60 billion.
It had spent about P541 million or 0.9 percent of the total budget, a recent regulator filing showed.
Miguel R. Camus has been a reporter covering various domestic business topics since 2009.
