Go to a party in the Philippines and you’re likely to find bottles of San Miguel beer but the country’s largest brewery is no fair-weather friend. When disaster strikes – be it a typhoon or a pandemic – San Miguel is usually among the first responders. The conglomerate, which has been a food and beverage company for most of its 135-year existence, diversified this century into petrol, power, infrastructure and banking. It now has the reach to provide food, fuel and other emergency essentials at a speed that the government would be hard-pressed to match. The sense of corporate responsibility comes from the top. Ramon Ang, San Miguel’s CEO and majority owner, is the son of Chinese immigrants. He has set the company the goal of uplifting the lives of 15 million Filipinos by 2030.

Achieving this will require drawing on every arm of the conglomerate and also depends on the efforts of several of Ang’s children who work across the business. Chief among them is his eldest daughter, Cecile. The 43-year-old leads two of the company’s highest-profile projects: the creation of a new multibillion-dollar airport to serve Metro Manila and the overhaul of the capital’s existing hub, Ninoy Aquino International Airport. Cecile is also plotting a new course for the San Miguel Foundation, transforming a reactive body respected for its one-off disaster relief, medical missions and food donations into an active change-maker. Though these projects couldn’t appear to be more different, they all involve fixing problems and making a lasting difference.

“We can give away a million food packs but the next day people will be hungry,” says Cecile, sipping dalandan juice at a hotel next to San Miguel’s headquarters in Ortigas, a business district of Manila. “That’s not the type of foundation that we want to be.” She started her career at a family-owned luxury hotel and she clearly knows the hospitality industry well. “We measure our impact with the number of lives that we have actually changed. And you can’t change lives if you’re only there once a year.”

Cecile has worked for different San Miguel subsidiaries for about 20 years, including oil refiner Petron Corporation. She officially became the foundation’s chair in March but her involvement dates back five years. “We don’t have a set budget as a foundation,” she says. “We knock on every subsidiary’s door to see who is interested in giving us money for our projects. Some resonate with certain subsidiaries more than others.” It was during a stint at San Miguel’s property arm that she was inspired to do something different. Tasked with auditing the company’s idle property holdings, she decided to offer an old beer warehouse in Manila to the foundation. The outcome was the first Better World Community Centre, a school, health clinic and food bank that feeds 400 children a day in Tondo, one of the country’s most impoverished areas.

“These children have never had a place to play safely and don’t get fed so we provide them with meals every day and groceries for their families,” says Cecile, a strong critic of the Philippines’ growing income inequality. Though she lacks her father’s experience of coming from nothing, she has an authentic perspective of her own. Her childhood home is three streets away from the original Better World location. The neighbourhood has since become known for people scavenging for pagpag, a Tagalog term for food from bins. “The area has gone down quite drastically,” she says. “My parents were pretty poor but they weren’t that poor.”

Since the first Better World opened in 2019, the foundation is averaging one centre a year. Every branch works with a different set of charities and not-for-profits. The services on offer, such as free meals, counselling and micro loans, are tailored to the most pressing needs of the specific community. The AHA Learning Centre, an education-focused not-for-profit, is the only anchor partner. “We would like to do more but you have to have the right partners too,” says Cecile. “We are not into just giving money and I don’t believe in padding numbers just so we can say that we have a certain number of centres. We don’t know how successful we are yet because it’s all new but we are trying to commit to something and sticking to that is the most important thing.”

Monocle joins Ang on a visit to one of the newest Better World community centres and a return to Tondo. The Smokey Mountain centre opened in 2023 alongside one of the Philippines’ most infamous landmarks: a smouldering landfill site and slum that the government officially closed in the 1990s. Today, Smokey Mountain is a fraction of the size. Though families still live on the remaining hill, the surrounding community can generally afford to eat, freeing the centre to go beyond the basic needs of providing food and water to focus on providing opportunities for the whole family.

Better World Smokey Mountain has 39 classrooms spread across four storeys. On the ground floor, we meet Marille Hernal, a mother who grew up in the neighbourhood, who speaks glowingly about a gender-empowerment class that she has just attended. About 500 children attend the centre every day and the sewing shop will soon start making their uniforms. Other products, made using recycled clothes and fabrics, already generate an income and could one day reach an international market. Cecile has her eye on a shop at the new airport so she takes a keen interest in the quality of the craftsmanship.

“San Miguel is the only corporate foundation with a long-term community project,” says Jaton Zulueta, founder of AHA Learning Centre. In his experience, many international donors usually like to invest in short-term projects in the Philippines that can deliver quick results – outcomes that can only be achieved by selecting the brightest and best students. By contrast, Better World allows his non-profit organisation to behave as an incubator for the most-in-need young people and achieve genuine local engagement. “When the community knows that it is a multi-year programme, the response is different,” he says. “They trust us more because they know we are not rushing children towards outcomes.”

After visiting Better World Smokey Mountain, Cecile has to rush off to attend a meeting about Ninoy Aquino International Airport. San Miguel will officially take over the terminal in September and the transition requires monthly sit-downs with the state-owned operator.

Given all of the headaches of her day job, it would be easy to characterise Cecile’s work as chair of the foundation as her release but that’s not how she sees it – not by a long shot. “We don’t necessarily need a foundation to make us look nice and it is not representative of the bigger picture that we are really doing,” says Cecile, who gives short shrift to examples of corporate whitewashing.

Her motivation and purpose comes from doing her day job – a job satisfaction that she shares with her colleagues. San Miguel is regularly voted as the best employer in the Philippines and staff wear their liveried polo shirts to work with pride. “We started out as a food and beverage company but, after that, we really made this conscious decision to invest in projects that are going to benefit the country, even if they are risky or have small margins,” says Cecile. “As a company, I’m comfortable to say that we do good.”
Cheers to that.

For frequent flyers travelling in and out of the Philippines, September can’t come soon enough. That’s when the state-owned operator of Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), Metro Manila’s chronically congested main gateway, hands over the keys to a consortium led by the San Miguel Group.

The publicly listed conglomerate has taken on the challenge of fixing NAIA and expectations are sky-high. The public-private partnership even got a mention in president Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s July state-of-the-nation address. “Once considered among the world’s worst and most stressful airports, [NAIA] will soon be a world-class international hub that we can be proud of,” he said. Is the president correct? “Yeah, 100 per cent. I have no doubt that we can turn around the airport,” says Ramon Ang, San Miguel’s CEO and largest shareholder. “Within a year you will not see any runway or terminal congestion,” he adds, before committing to notable improvements by Christmas – peak travel time for a majority Catholic country with millions of overseas workers.

San Miguel might sound like an unlikely saviour. The beer brand is principally known outside the Philippines for its eponymous pilsner, which dates back to the company’s formation in 1890 during the Spanish colonial period. But much has changed under Ang’s stewardship. A series of acquisitions over the past 15 years have transformed what was predominantly a food and beverage company with an annual turnover of €3.7bn into a €24bn-a-year juggernaut with interests in power generation, oil refinement, water, banking, roads, railways, seaports and cement. “Whatever business we do, our purpose is to make money for the shareholders and develop the country,” says Ang, explaining the logic behind his diversification strategy.

Monocle visits Ang at San Miguel’s headquarters in Mandaluyong, one of the 17 cities that make up the Metro Manila region. The understated captain of industry, a child of Chinese immigrants, arrives at the office most days behind the wheel of a Toyota Camry or Land Cruiser. A car enthusiast and mechanical engineering graduate, he began his career importing Japanese vehicles before joining San Miguel in his forties and becoming one of the Philippines’ richest tycoons.

Ang’s approach has been to buy small existing businesses and grow them into industry leaders. San Miguel’s infrastructure division began 15 years ago with the acquisition of a tollway company and is now the biggest operator in the country. It opened a series of elevated “skyways” in recent years, drawing traffic away from local roads and decongesting the sole expressway linking the capital’s north and south. A two-hour journey in heavy traffic can now take 30 minutes and a few crosstown friendships have been reconnected in the process.

Ang’s enthusiasm for building roads, however, has attracted criticism for tethering Metro Manila’s future to four wheels. But as with the San Miguel-owned oil refinery Petron, which is gradually moving away from fossil fuels, the green transition has to be incremental, realistic and government-assisted. “Cars are the main transportation in Asia,” says Ang. “Our problem is we are adding hundreds of thousands of cars a year without phasing out the old ones.”

Rail is the one mode of transport where San Miguel has almost had to start from scratch. The company is building a 14-station rail line that, once operational at the end of 2025, will carry up to 850,000 passengers a day between the Bulacan province and Quezon City, Metro Manila’s largest municipality. The first major mass-transit project this century, MRT 7 will allow commuters to switch to two other lines at an interchange station – a national first. A north-south commuter railway and a subway funded by the Japanese government will soon follow, as part of what President Marcos labelled a “railway renaissance”.

“San Miguel has a lot of projects that help the development of the Philippines,” says Janno Quinto, project manager at station six in Quezon City, where construction is almost complete. Quinto, who is dressed in an obligatory high-vis vest and hard hat, recently joined from a rival toll-road company to work on elevated structures. The 29-year-old engineer stands on an empty, unfinished platform, pointing out the electrified third rail – another first. “Transportation is the way to our development,” he says.

A seasonal typhoon has just passed by Metro Manila, cancelling flights and causing flooding. San Miguel has been dredging rivers to facilitate drainage and Ang shares his opinion on what structural improvements are required to weather future storms – both natural and manmade. The patriotic Filipino is fully invested in the country’s disaster resilience and the decisive leadership he demonstrated during the coronavirus pandemic – distributing food, medical assistance and other aid – even led to calls for him to run for president in 2022. “If I become a famous politician for six years, what’s the good of that?” he says, dismissing the idea. “I will have divested all of my shares in my company and made thousands of enemies.”

RSA, as he is known to colleagues, can achieve more by sticking to what he’s good at. What’s his best deal to date? NAIA, he says, without hesitation. “We’ve been given the opportunity to improve the main gateway to the Philippines,” adds Ang, who turned 70 this year. It’s a surprising choice given that the commercial terms have been pilloried in the business pages for, oddly enough, being overly generous. A consortium in which San Miguel owns a stake won the NAIA public tender in 2022 with a bid that will earn the government $20bn (€18.5bn) and a 60 per cent cut of profits. Characteristically confident, Ang believes that he can’t lose. After all, what’s good for the Philippines is ultimately good for San Miguel.

Re-engineering NAIA is part of a slate of major infrastructure projects that Ang wants to see completed over the next three to five years before handing the San Miguel reins over to his eldest son, John Paul. Building an entirely new airport to serve the capital is unquestionably the jewel in his crown and the $7bn (€6.5bn) investment will almost certainly define Ang’s legacy. 

The New Manila International Airport, as it is currently known, is in Bulacan, a province immediately north of Metro Manila. Site preparation was completed this year and construction will soon get under way. Once up and running, three or four years from now, Bulacan will become Metro Manila’s equivalent to Incheon in Seoul or Narita in Tokyo, while NAIA will be a Gimpo or Haneda. “There is no compromise in our new airport. It will be ideal,” says Ang, while scoring all of Asia’s major airports, from an engineering rather than tourism perspective. “Four parallel runways with 2km separation, good for 100 to 200 million passengers a year and a 30-minute drive or train journey to anywhere in Metro Manila.”

It’s a case of better late than never. During the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, when most developed Asian capitals were building a second airport, consecutive administrations in the Philippines dithered. Southeast Asia’s fourth-largest economy is now 30 years behind many of its peers and the aviation industry’s shortcomings are emblematic of a broader infrastructure deficit.

Closing this gap has been a flagship policy of the past three presidents. In any democracy, though, forming policy is one thing and implementing it is quite another. Ang first pitched his new airport to president Benigno Aquino III in 2012. Aquino’s successor, Rodrigo Duterte, finally approved it in 2018. The straight-talking CEO has little to gain, though, from picking sides or apportioning blame. All governments are basically the same from his perspective and he must work with whoever occupies the Malacañang Palace – the Filipino White House.

Is Ang betting his company on aviation? The new airport must attract about 36.5 million passengers to break even, he says, while NAIA will reach almost 50 million this year. “There is a risk but we have to take it,” he adds, revealing the missed opportunities that motivate him more than any fear of failure. By his own count, he has walked away from five potential investments that have “cost” the company a whopping $100bn (€92.7bn) – and Ang countless hours of sleep. “My greatest mistake is not to be more aggressive,” he says. “You win some, you lose some.”

Towards the end of the decade, once San Miguel’s airports, toll roads and railway projects are complete, its visionary CEO envisages vehicular traffic and investment dollars beginning to flow from the national capital, home to most of the economic activity, to the north of the Philippines’ largest island, Luzon, where land is cheap. Traffic in Metro Manila will ease, seasonal flooding will be less severe and the country will be better placed to attract Thailand’s tourism numbers and compete for the foreign direct investment typically funnelled into Vietnam.

Metro Manila’s reputation for violence will be the last remaining sticking point – no amount of concrete can cover up international headlines about kidnappings, drug wars and extrajudicial killings. This bad publicity will have to change, Ang says, if the Philippines is going to attract the likes of Samsung and Taiwan Semiconductor. His passionate monologue has the makings of a future stump speech delivered to a crowd of potential voters. President Ang in 2028? “Politics is not me,” he says, definitively. “I’m happy now that I’m able to prepare San Miguel’s succession plan, see the company continue to do well and be able to help the community. Mission accomplished.”