San Miguel planning cold storage facilities at NAIA

Merkado Barkada

September 19, 2024 | 8:10am

Bilyonaryo [link] referenced an unnamed source who claims that San Miguel [SMC 94.50, down 0.5%; 192% avgVol] plans to build cold storage facilities at NAIA to (in Bilyo’s words) “increase the airport’s revenue.” The article mentions that the cold storage facilities would keep meat, vegetables, fruits and other perishables fresh before they are loaded onto planes for export. It also mentions that “NAIA and its partner airlines have been missing out on potential revenue from perishable goods shipments due to the lack of cold storage infrastructure.” SMC recently took over management of NAIA’s operations after paying P30 billion to the government to secure a 15-year concession.

MB bottom-line: This one is super interesting to me. First, SMC’s push to build cold storage facilities within NAIA’s campus is more like front-running the other cold storage providers in the area (like Royal Cargo and Glacier Megafridge) who are already located in close proximity to the airport to offer those services. I think that having cold storage facilities on-site, rather than down the road, is an obvious upgrade, but it’s not like this service doesn’t exist. SMC isn’t facilitating something for importers and exporters that they didn’t already have access to, this is SMC using its concession to cut into the marketshare of existing players configured to handle port cold storage services. Second, I’m curious to know SMC’s long-term intentions with the cold storage market. Is this just one of several ideas they spitballed to try and recoup the massive fees SMC paid to obtain the 15-year operational franchise, or is this a new pillar of some port-based cold storage network that SMC might plan to develop between NAIA and its new airport in Bulacan, and eventually expand outward from that to serve other air and sea ports? They’re not a known player in the cold storage market here, so they’re a little bit of an unknown quantity. 

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