Empire East eyes 25% sales growth

Andrew Tan-led Empire East Land Inc. sees acceleration in sales this year as demand for low-costs homes, driven largely by the availability of cheap bank funds, continues to grow.

At the company’s stockholders’ meeting on Tuesday, the company said it had also set a five-year budget of about P12 billion for new projects.

“We are projecting at least a 25-percent increase in sales,” Empire East president Anthony Charlemagne Yu told reporters. Last year, the company booked P10 billion in reservation sales, Yu said.

“So far, it has been a very good past six months,” he said.

Yu said this should translate to 35 to 40 percent year-on-year growth in net profit by the end of the year.

If the full-year targets are achieved, this will be a sharp acceleration from the company’s first quarter performance of a 3-percent year-on-year growth in consolidated revenue.

This led to an 8-percent rise in net profit to P25.17 million.

Empire East, the Andrew Tan group’s low-cost subsidiary, earlier said it would bid for the Food Terminal Inc. or FTI complex that the government was planning to bid out.

While FTI will be part of the Aquino administration’s public private partnership (PPP) infrastructure scheme, the government has said it prefers to lease the 103-hectare property out instead of an outright sale.

Yu said Empire East was open to leasing the property from the government. Other interested parties are conglomerate Ayala Corp., Gokongwei-led Robinsons Land, San Miguel Corp. and SM Investments.—Paolo G. Montecillo