TYCOON HENRY SY’S SM PRIME Holdings Inc. (SMPH), the country’s biggest shopping mall developer and operator, will retire this month a $150-million credit facility obtained from a syndicate of foreign banks five years ago.

SMPH senior vice president Jeffrey Lim said the company would settle on Oct. 16 the maturing loan originally contracted in 2004, proceeds from which had been used for expansion over the past years.

Lim said about $80 million of the facility was already covered by corresponding foreign exchange assets placed in an earning US dollar-denominated facility. The remaining $70 million, he said, had long been raised ahead of the maturity of this loan.

The unsecured credit facility was obtained from a group of foreign banks that included Standard Chartered and ING Bank, Lim said.

After settling this obligation, Lim said SMPH would still have about P20 billion in outstanding loans in its books.

“We’ve been expanding a lot,” he said, adding that SMPH had been able to independently raise financing on its own. As such, he said SMPH would not have any share in the proceeds of a record $500-million offshore bond foray by parent company SM Investments Corp.

Mall operations, one of the Sy family’s crown jewels alongside retailing and banking, accounted for 27 percent of SMIC’s P7.4-billion net income in the first semester.

SMPH last week opened its 35th shopping mall in the Philippines—a 32,387-square meter brand new complex along the Alabang-Zapote Road in Las Piñas. This brought the combined gross floor area of this shopping mall empire nationwide to 4.4 million sqm.

Before the year ends, SM Prime is scheduled to open SM City Rosario in Cavite, thus closing the year with 36 local shopping malls. The group also has three shopping malls in mainland China.