Ayala Land keen on BHI’s Cavite assets

PROPERTY developer Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) is interested in acquiring the Ternate, Cavite, and Puerto Azul pieces of proerty of resort operator Boulevard Holdings Inc. (BHI), a company official said.

Antonino T. Aquino, ALI president, told reporters the company is currently conducting due diligence on the BHI properties in the province of Cavite.

ALI, however, is not likely to acquire the Friday’s beach resort brand of Boulevard Holdings in Boracay, Aklan and Puerto Galera in Mindoro Oriental.

“We are always talking about leisure type of community exactly similar to what we had in Anvaya [Cove in Bataan], or something similar to what we will be doing in El Nido [Palawan]. The concept is to come around with those kinds of leisure-type of communities,” Aquino said. ALI is set to complete due diligence in about four months.

BHI has recently authorized its chairman and chief executive officer, Jose Marcel Panlilio, to sign a terms of reference and a final agreement for the sale of the firm’s units or assets.

BHI in 2009 acquired seven parcels of land in Barangay Sapang in Ternate, Cavite, with a total area of about 106 hectares. It earlier said the company originally wanted to develop the site into a third Friday’s Resort, but the plan did not pushed through.

In Puerto Azul BHI has about 3,000 hectares of land, where it also planned to put up a Friday’s Resort, this time in Paniman Beach.

Aquino said the due diligence will establish if the best deal with BHI would be a joint venture or an outright acquisition

“But it will probably be a combination or depending on the territory that we’re talking about,” Aquino said.

BHI was established in 1994 as a holding company that mainly develops hotels and resorts and tourism-related businesses and investments in strategic land locations and other real-estate property business. Its main business, however, is the operation of the Fridays resorts.

Total sales of Friday’s Boracay reached P44.34 million for the period, lower than the previous year’s P48.02 million, or an 8-percent decline.

BHI reported a lower income of P1.56 million for the first half of its fiscal year ending in November 2012, lower than the P3.49 million in 2011 as a result of lower revenues.

ALI posted a record P9.04 billion in net income for the year 2012, 27 percent higher than the P7.14 billion recorded the previous year. Consolidated revenues reached P54.52 billion, 23 percent higher year-on-year.

source:  Business Mirror