Friday, March 13, 2009

Has San Miguel's Shifting Business Model Been Linked To The Philippine Presidential Elections? Lessons

In San Miguel’s Shifting Business Model: Risks and Opportunity Costs, we opined that San Miguel's drastic "overnight" overhaul of its business model could have possibly been partly motivated by tactical political developments than just strategic financial or economic goals.

Here is what I wrote, `` the company’s chairman Eduardo Cojuangco Jr., who is founder of the National People’s Coalition and has ran against Fidel V Ramos for the 1992 presidency but lost, could possibly have politically associated strings to these acquisitions with the 2010 elections only a year away."

And this from today's headlines at the Inquirer.net...

``Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro could be the “dark horse” in the ruling Lakas-CMD party’s short list of presidential aspirants, Senate Majority Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri said Thursday.

``The other day, Teodoro, a member of the Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC) founded by his uncle, San Miguel Corp. chair Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco, announced that he would run for president in 2010.

Including the fracas over the management control of Meralco, [see Beware Of The Brewing Meralco Bubble!], these actions appear to reinforce the connections of the corporate makeover to the corporate takeover to the political spectrum or the 2010 Philippine presidential elections.

What seems apparent is the solidifying alliance of the PGMA- San Miguel's Danding Cojuangco and possibly Imelda Marcos, wife of ex-President Ferdinand Marcos in preparation for 2010.

But this seems not limited to politics but likewise in the economic arena as the collaboration appears to work on securing economic rent from government imposed monopolies or heavily regulated industries.

Of course we maintain the previously risks enumerated from the San Miguel's business reconfiguration.

Nonetheless all these goes to show how the Philippine political economy functions- operating under the Keynesian framework, political elites battle for control over government ordained economic and political privileges.

And of course the only way to secure such bounty is to assume command of the Philippine government, with the affiliates or political constituents gaining control of the said institutions- we describe this as our "crony capitalist" paradigm.

Hence, the moral is that the belief in "virtuous" leadership to emancipate the Philippines from poverty bondage seems like an eternal fantasy-an impossible dream which almost everyone seem to fail to grasp.

The dismantling of the Keynesian political economic structures and a broader adaptation of economic freedom is required more than just an "honest" bureaucracy, whose underlying incentive is driven primarily by politics than by virtuous.

No comments: