SM Investments Corporation (SMIC), the flagship of the Sy family, expects 2025 to be another banner year, following its record performance in 2023 and 2024, on the back of the strength of its core businesses and portfolio investments.

“We continue to be cautiously optimistic for 2025. We believe the economy will continue to grow at a very good pace, and the election this year will hopefully help in terms of pickup in terms of consumer spending, and that will certainly help our overall business,” said SMIC President and CEO Frederic C. DyBuncio.

He noted that, “All of our businesses—whether it be the property, the banking, the retail—will continue to grow on its own, and even our portfolio investment will continue to grow.”

He cited that SMIC’s logistics business, led by 2GO Group, is engaged in activities crucial to the growth of the Philippine economy.

“We will continue to push that and, as well as, basically, support the domestic tourism by sea, which is something new that we want to do more in the Philippines,” said DyBuncio.

In addition to logistics, he pointed out that, “Renewable energy is now the area which you want to continue to grow and really supports the government’s efforts in basically increasing the renewable sector in the Philippines, moving forward.”

SMIC Investor Relations Head Timothy Daniels said, “The momentum that we had in the fourth quarter [of 2024] means that going into 2025 we remain optimistic about our performance for the year.”

“Cautiously optimistic. We always temper it with ‘cautious’ because you never quite know what’s going to happen but we do see a good macroeconomic story, a good demographic story. And the fourth quarter has highlighted for us that it is a good consumer story coming into 2025,” he added.

Daniels noted that, “We believe in the Philippine story. We believe that there is a long-term positive demographic trend. GDP [gross domestic product] will continue to grow as the nation becomes middle income, invest in infrastructure, and, as GDP growth rates continue to pick up in the provinces, the whole country gets lifted.”

“We are a proxy for that story. We are a very consumer-centric business, and our businesses are in the major sectors that we will see within the GDP growth. So strong economic drivers drive a strong financial performance by the SM Group.”

He also pointed out that, “Although we have market-leading positions today in the markets that we are in, in all of our core businesses, we are still at the early stages of development to penetrate the whole of the country.”