Henry Sy (施至成), who became a billionaire by parlaying a shoe store into the biggest retailer in the Philippines, has died. He was 94.
He died in his sleep yesterday morning, his daughter, Teresita Sy-Coson, and SM Investment s chairman Jose Sio said.
Sy had a net worth of US$7.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the richest person in the Philippines.
Photo: AFP
“This morning Mr Sy passed away peacefully as a happy man,” Sio said.
Sy’s company started as a shoe store in 1948. Today, SM Investments is an empire that includes SM Retail, which operates the nation’s biggest supermarkets and department-store chains; SM Prime Holdings, the largest shopping-mall operator; and BDO Unibank. In the nation of more than 105 million people, his malls attract an average of 3.5 million shoppers a day.
“It’s not overboard to consider Sy as the father of Philippine retail,” First Grade Finance managing director Astro del Castillo said. “His grocery stores, department stores and malls introduced the one-stop-shop concept in the country and his malls changed not only the practice of retail, but the way of life.”
Sy amassed his fortune against a backdrop of unstable governments, political corruption and economic contractions, notably the 1997 Asian financial crisis. He continued to expand his empire with new shopping malls and a bank that eventually became the nation’s largest by assets.
Today, the group runs 62 department stores, 56 supermarkets, a network of 194 SaveMore grocery stores and 50 hypermarkets.
Henry Sy was born in Xiamen, China.
He immigrated to the Philippines at the age of 12 and started selling rice, sardines and soap at his father’s neighborhood store in Manila in 1936.
The store was burned and looted during World War II, so Sy was called on to sell goods to help the family survive, said Sy-Coson, the eldest of his six children.
Following World War II, he sold shoes imported by US soldiers and set up of a footwear store, providing him with the platform to in 1958 found ShoeMart, the nation’s largest chain and first air-conditioned shop to sell shoes.
After opening six shoe stores, he diversified the business into clothing and soft goods, because shoe manufacturers could not meet his demands for higher volumes.
In 1972, Sy opened his first department store, two months after then-Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos placed the country under martial law.
Sy first expanded into real-estate development in 1974 with the founding of Multi-Realty Development, formed to develop high-rise condominiums and townhouse units in prime parts of Manila.
In 1976, he bought Acme Savings Bank, which had originally been set up as a thrift bank, and renamed it Banco de Oro Savings and Mortgage Bank.
Initially, it provided services mainly to suppliers of ShoeMart. It was renamed Banco de Oro Universal Bank in 1996 when the Philippine central bank gave it the authority to operate as a commercial lender.
Sy opened his first shopping mall in 1985, when the economy was in its worst postwar slump.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, power outages, a cement shortage and a series of coup attempts that dogged then-Philippine president Corazon Aquino’s government did not deter Sy from opening more malls.
In 1994, he founded SM Prime to acquire existing shopping malls and land for building new ones from his group’s companies.
The same year, it raised about 6 billion pesos (about US$220 million at the time) in an initial public offering (IPO).
In 2002, Banco de Oro raised US$37 million in an IPO and, in 2005, it took control of bigger rival Equitable PCI Bank.
The Mall of Asia, Sy’s flagship mall, opened in 2006 with an Olympic-size skating rink, an eight-story movie screen and 800 shops. The US$124 million center was SM Prime’s 25th mall and at that time the nation’s biggest shopping complex.
SM Investments raised US$532 million in an IPO in 2005.
SM Prime now has 72 shopping malls in the Philippines, making it the biggest operator of shopping centers in the nation. The company bought Sy’s three malls in China in 2008 and has built four more there since then, the company Web site said.
“If I’d be given the chance, I’d do it again,” Sy said in a July 2009 interview. “Every time the country is in a crisis, I think and decide where is the best way to go. We have to always think of ways to overcome these limitations.”
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