Ayala Corp. is looking at further expanding its cold storage business.
Rene Almendras, Ayala Corp. senior managing director, said the conglomerate is enjoying robust business for its first cold storage facility in Cagayan de Oro where it partnered with Glacier Megafridge Inc. (GMI) for the 5,348 industrial pallets facility.
The facility is positioned to service the cold storage needs of various industries in Northern Mindanao.
“We are very happy with the fact that the cold storage facility we opened in CDO reached 100 percent utilization in less than six months, until today it is fully utilized,” said Almendras who is also chief executive officer of AC Logistics Holdings Corp.
Almendras said the group is in various stages of talks with other parties for possible acquisition. The group is also studying the possibility of venturing into greenfield sites for the cold storage business.
“We have 7,500 islands and moving between those islands is a challenge. (But) it’s not about (how many sites), it’s about the location and the pallet size. It’s about enabling better movement,” he said.
Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, Ayala Corp. chairman, said the cold storage business is the group’s “indirect” venture into the agriculture sector.
“We decided to put a little focus on the logistics side of the business. We’re building cold storages, we’re building a network of linkages that will help starting products, commodities, and the like to move to the country efficiently. So we decided to tackle it in that angle,” Zobel said.
“We can’t tackle everything but that’s an area we put an emphasis on. There are many ideas on what could work on. Structurally, we have a difficult situation in the country because of land ownership and the limitations on that you can’t build scale but we can provide and that’s what we’re trying to do at least as one step, to provide a logistical support to make goods and services be able to move efficiently around the country,” he added.
