Tanduay President and COO Lucio Tan III is among the 16 personalities who were declared People Asia’s Men Who Matter for 2022. In the article, “Destiny’s Man”, People Asia editor-in-chief Joanne Rae Ramirez wrote that the young Tan was “destined to inherit, not just the title, but the responsibility of being ‘Kapitan’ Lucio Tan, Sr.’s crown prince.”
Lucio III assumed the presidency at Tanduay at only 27 years old after his father, the beloved Lucio “Bong” Tan, Jr., passed away in 2019. Before coming home to the Philippines, he was a software engineer at Lyft in the United States.
By 2020, the pandemic swept the globe and a number of companies had to downsize or even close down. Despite this, Tanduay’s performance in the last two years under the young Tan remained strong. Its international business has even expanded.
It is now present in 12 U.S. states and the territory of Guam, China, Singapore, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Plans are underway to expand in Canada and Costa Rica.
In 2021, the company also won its 4th consecutive World’s Number 1 Rum award from Drinks International Magazine for outselling brands from other countries as part of its haul of 23 international awards for that year alone. These included its seventh consecutive Brand of the Year Award from the London-based World Branding Awards. Tanduay was also declared the Philippine Distillery of the Year by the New York International Spirits Competition.
Lucio III shared that he likes to take things day by day, and recognizes that success can’t happen overnight.
“It’s all in the day-to-day things that you do. Each action that I take every day, I see it as a vote for the person I want to be in the future,” he said in the People Asia interview. “It’s the everyday actions that you take that sum up, that accumulate, success at the end of the day,” he added.
