Builder

For the first time, a Filipino was included in the prestigious Bloomberg 50 – the top 50 individuals who helped shape 2019. The tycoon dutifully travelled to New York earlier this month to receive the recognition.

In this year’s Bloomberg 50, San Miguel chief operating officer Ramon Ang joins the likes of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist also named Time magazine’s person of the year. The list also includes New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, artists, innovators, the US women’s soccer team and the Hong Kong protesters. Collectively, they defined the year we are about to close.

For reasons of space, those in the list were described only briefly. Ang was cited for undertaking the breathtaking diversification of San Miguel from a food and beverage company into a sprawling conglomerate that is into, well, everything. He is specifically cited for the $2.15 billion acquisition of Holcim Cement and his plans to build a $170 billion airport just north of Manila.

Those are big things, to be sure. But the brief write-up on the man does not do justice to the breadth of his accomplishment.

In terms of sales, the San Miguel conglomerate accounts for nearly seven percent of the country’s GDP. It is involved in infrastructure, power generation, oil refining, cement manufacturing, property development, food processing and banking. And, yes, it still brews beer and distills spirits.

The conglomerate directly employs tens of thousands. As a matter of corporate policy, the conglomerate reinvests its earnings in the economy. Its recent projects have provided a magnet for foreign direct investments in the domestic market.

In terms of driving local business, San Miguel is second only to the national government and its P4-trillion budget. If the conglomerate is robust, the domestic economy will be strong.

Ang was the first Filipino businessman to invest in infrastructure, bringing the financial prowess of the conglomerate to address the nation’s logistics needs. He built the STAR expressway (that he now wants to extend to Bicol) and acquired the SLEX. He built an elevated road to connect the airport with the rest of the city. He is about to complete the Skyway Stage 3 that connects the SLEX to the NLEX. 

San Miguel is completing construction of the TPLEX that will extend up to La Union province. Ang wants to eventually extend this to the Ilocos provinces.

The conglomerate is building the LRT-7 that begins at the EDSA-North Avenue junction and goes up to San Jose del Monte. Ang wants to extend this service further to link the projected Bulacan airport and loop around back to the City of Manila. When it becomes operational, this rail line is expected to ferry 350,000 commuters everyday.

Ang was in the news the past few months for two projects. The first is the notice to proceed he finally received from government after a decade for the unsolicited proposal to build the New Manila International Airport in Bulacan. This will be one of the largest in the world. The second is when he imposed a deadline on himself to clear the traffic on SLEX caused by the extension of the Skyway ramps to beyond the Alabang junction.

On the second, he promised commuters the bottleneck would be cleared by Dec. 1. He delivered on that promise on the exact schedule, inspiring many commuters to call on him to be the nation’s chief executive.

A few months ago, Ang proposed to build an elevated all-steel 10-lane expressway along the length of congested EDSA. It is a project, he says, that could be completed in 30 months. In the first year, he says, he could clear the bottlenecks in the Makati business district and Cubao. The entire expressway will stretch for 24 kilometers above the nation’s most congested road.

This is a project so audacious our bureaucrats are still catching their breath before they could respond to it.

We visited Ang recently in his office and there he showed a scale model of the Edsa expressway, with all the engineering required to do it. I remember, a few years back, he had a scale model of the rail carriages for LRT-7 built to his specification. For years, a scale model of the Bulacan airport was on display at the lobby of San Miguel’s head offices.

This man wants to see his dreams in all three dimensions. Then he keeps improving on those dreams.

The Skyway Stage 3 project, for instance, began simply as an elevated expressway cutting through the city and reducing travel time for everybody. Then Ramon Ang thought it would be good to incorporate a rapid bus transit system into it to give our harried commuters an option. In our last conversation, he announced he now had 60 hectares in Pandacan, where the oil depots once stood, to provide the city a transport and logistics hub. That is more than half the size of the Makati business district’s 100 hectares.

In his plan, Pandacan will now be the heart of the metropolis. Buses coming in from both NLEX and SLEX could backload produce from the farm areas. This will bring down food costs for the harried citizens of this urban tangle.

Stage 3 is about to be serviceable, delayed only by some problematic oil pipes in Pandacan. The revolutionary transport and logistics hub in the area comes only months after. Metro Manila will be a different metropolis after that.

Ramon Ang constantly wonders what else he can do to help ease the traffic situation.