ALI sees 17% yearly profit growth

ALI prexy Bernard Vincent Dy and CFO Augusto Bengzon brief the media after ALI’s annual stockholders meeting on April 18, 2018

Property giant Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) expects to sustain an annual net profit growth of at least 17 percent this year through 2020, driven by continued expansion in its shopping malls, offices, hotels and residential property inventory.

This is in line with ALI’s “vision 2020,” a roadmap launched in 2014 to grow net profit by an average of 20 percent each year to attain an annual net profit of P40 billion by 2020.

Although this goal was initially deemed ambitious by some analysts, ALI achieved a compounded annual rate of 21 percent in the last four years. To meet the P40-billion profit goal, ALI only needs to sustain a growth of 17 percent yearly through 2020.

“Given continued economic growth in the country ranging from 6-7 percent GDP (gross domestic product) growth, we feel very positive that we will be able to continue to introduce new projects in the market that will bring us closer to achieving our target of P40 billion by 2020,” ALI president Bernard Vincent Dy said in a briefing after the company’s stockholders meeting yesterday.

The P111-billion record capital spending budgeted this year, Dy said, was an indication of ALI’s optimism.

For mixed-use estates, ALI is set to launch two more this year, to add to the 24 in its pipeline.

On the shopping mall business, ALI is set to open four new shopping malls this year, adding a total of 300,000 square meters of gross leasable area (GLA). These are Ayala Malls Bay Area, Ayala Malls Circuit, Ayala Malls Capitol Central and One Bonifacio High Street. Occupancy rate for shopping malls remained good at 97 percent, Dy said.

Three new office buildings will also be opened this year with a total GLA of 77,000 square meters. About 5 percent of the portfolio had been taken up by online gaming firms but ALI intends to limit its total exposure to 10 percent.

Four new hotels under ALI’s homegrown boutique hospitality brand Seda will also be opened, adding 620 rooms in the hotel portfolio. Of these, three will open this year: Seda Bacolod, Seda BGC expansion and Seda Lio.