MANILA – Infrastructure holding firm Metro Pacific Investments Corporation (MPIC) is optimistic about hitting its core income guidance of PHP12 billion this year despite the strictest lockdown measure against Delta variant of the coronavirus, as it gears up to offer vaccination services to the general population.
In a virtual press briefing Wednesday, MPIC president and chief executive officer Jose Ma. Lim said they expect the new lockdown will affect the transport segment of their portfolio but not to the same degree as when the first lockdown was implemented last year and the economy was totally shut down.
Lim said MPIC directly benefits from the country’s gradual economic recovery with industries continuing to resume operations amid less restrictive quarantine measures.
“In fact, our tollways traffic is now at about 774,000 vehicles per day that is only 12 percent below what it was pre-pandemic,” he said. “I think all our businesses are doing well, particularly the hospitals, they have already learned how to adjust to Covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019).”
The National Capital Region (NCR) will be placed under the most restrictive enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) from Aug. 6 to 20 to prevent the spread of the more infectious Delta coronavirus variant.
MPIC chairman Manuel Pangilinan said “We are seeing that people are no longer letting the virus run their lives and are able to bounce back more quickly than we did during the start of the pandemic. As such, we expect that the volumes of our core businesses will continue to recover towards the end of the year with the continuous inoculation efforts for the rest of the population.”
Metro Pacific Hospital Holdings Inc. (MPHHI) president and chief executive officer Augusto Palisoc Jr. said all their hospitals are currently prepared to offer vaccination services to the general population.
“But in terms of timetable, this (rollout of the vaccination services) is really very largely dependent on the timing of the arrival of the vaccines which is something that is actually that cannot be sort of projected with a lot of certainty,” he said.
MPHHI operates the largest private hospital network in the Philippines with 18 hospitals, six provincial cancer radiotherapy centers, two healthcare colleges, and one central laboratory nationwide.
It administered a total of 49,313 doses of Covid-19 vaccines to its hospital staff –98 percent of MPHHI’s health care workers have received their first dose while 90 percent are already fully vaccinated.
The Group currently has a total of around 1,000 beds dedicated to Covid-19, with average NCR utilization rates maxing out during the April 2021 surge.
By the end of June 2021, the NCR hospitals’ average utilization rates eased to 30 percent but provincial hospitals remained high at 70 percent.
Meanwhile, the MPIC reported a 13-percent increase in consolidated core net income of PHP6 billion for the first six months of 2021 from PHP5.3 billion in the same period last year.
It attributed the substantial improvement from the 26-percent decline in the first quarter of 2021 largely to improved traffic on its toll roads and higher volume of electricity sold.
Its core net income for the second quarter of PHP3.5 billion also rose 37 percent quarter-on-quarter, and climbed 82 percent from PHP1.9 billion during the same period in 2020.
“This acceleration of growth reflects an improvement in performance notwithstanding the continued imposition of varying levels of quarantine across the country, and was partially augmented by the impact of the Corporate Recovery and Tax Incentives (CREATE) law which lowered income tax rates from 30 percent to 25 percent,” MPIC said in a statement.
The Group on a consolidated basis has saved about PHP600 million on the current tax due to the passage of CREATE law.
The Group has power, toll roads, water, light rail and logistics, and hospital businesses. (PNA)
