A Jollibee delivery worker rides a motorcycle through Manila’s busy streets on October 14, 2015.
CentralHub Industrial Centers—a joint venture between real estate tycoon Edgar Sia’s DoubleDragon Corp. and billionaire Tony Tan Caktiong’s Jollibee Foods—is ramping up the construction of warehouses across the Philippines to tap growing demand from e-commerce companies.
The company is building a warehouse leasing portfolio with an aggregate value of 24.8 billion pesos ($482 million) as it prepares for an initial public offering in the second half of the year. It will be the first industrial-focused real estate investment trust to list on the Philippine bourse.
“We are currently ramping up the simultaneous construction of various CentralHub industrial complexes across the country as the demand for modern industrial warehouses continues to grow,” Sia, chairman of DoubleDragon, said Monday in a statement.
CentralHub, which owns 43.8 hectares of industrial assets, said it has completed the construction of a 6.2-hectare warehouse complex in Tarlac, about 130 kilometers north of the nation’s capital of Manila. Its also building logistics facilities in the central Philippine cities of Iloilo and Cebu as well as Davao on the southern island of Mindanao.
Demand for warehouse space has increased from e-commerce companies, which has seen a rapid growth in their businesses as consumers stuck at home due to pandemic-induced lockdowns turned to online shopping and food deliveries.
Sia and Tan Caktiong are longtime business partners. Sia sold his barbecue chicken restaurant chain Mang Inasal to Jollibee in 2012 and took DoubleDragon public two years later. With a net worth of $675 million, Sia was ranked No. 28 when the list of the Philippines’ 50 Richest was published in September.
Tan Caktiong, who holds a stake in DoubleDrgaon, has a net worth of $2.7 billion and ranks No. 7 on the list. Their main source of wealth is fast-food giant Jollibee, which now operates almost 3,200 outlets in the Philippines and over 2,600 overseas—including U.S.-based chains Smashburger and Coffee Bean.
Jollibee bought a stake in CentralHub in August after injecting 16.4 hectares of industrial properties which the restaurant chain utilizes as commissaries. “We will use the proceeds from the eventual IPO of CentralHub to finance real estate investments for our new stores and commissaries which we will convert again into more investments and shares in the REIT,” Tan Caktiong said at the time. “Basically, the REIT will help continuously finance our future expansion.”
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