Max’s group not keen on backdoor listing in stock market

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MANILA, Philippines — The Max’s restaurant group, now a local casual dining powerhouse with its acquisition of the Pancake House group, is lukewarm to backdoor listing on the local stock market at this time.

The acquisition of Pancake House has consolidated in one roof 14 restaurant brands with a total network of 510 stores and manpower of 10,000 under a group led by the Trota and Fuentebella families.

Robert Trota, president of Max’s group of companies and also recently named as president of Pancake House, said in a press briefing on Wednesday that this acquisition was “strategic” and would have not happened even if the latter were not a publicly listed company.

“Keeping them separate is sill going to work for us. We can still place that synergy among the two groups, like in purchasing,” Trota said. He said this greater scale could give the combined group better leverage in dealing with suppliers and in turn unlock cost savings for both groups.

At the same time, Trota said services like those in information technology and human resource management could be shared.

Trota said Max’s by itself could have gone public years ago but decided to remain privately held.

In the first nine months of 2013, Max’s group posted system-wide sales of P8.5 billion while Pancake House had a P4.2 billion turnover for the same period, Trota said.

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