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random ramblings of a japanese pork cutlet

I do not usually read the morning paper nowadays. It is predominantly bad news. For example, the most prestigious entity for rice research and development – IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) is located here in our country, yet we are the the biggest importer of rice in the world. Hilarious.

Consumer prices are rising like hell. Government scandal there, here, the list is endless.

The Gokongweis want Petron. You begin to ask, whats the big deal with one company having a different owner? Its just a different set of hands counting the income -wrong.

The Gokongweis are a prominent business family in the Philippines. Some of the businesses they own are Cebu Pacific, Digitel, Robinsons Malls, and Sun Cellular.

Petron is one of the biggest gas companies operating in the Philippines, along with Shell and Caltex.

How is this supposed purchase good news?

A few years ago, the Ramos administration passed the oil deregulation law. The intention was to make the prominent gas companies compete with each other, have a price war, all for the benefit of the consumers. That never happened. For some strange reason, the three biggest gas companies always have pump prices that are nearly identical to each other.

Fast forward today. Lance Gokongwei has expressed his family’s interest in purchasing a significant portion of Petron. If this pushes through, we might actually see the benefits of the oil deregulation law.

The Gokongwei’s have a reputation for introducing a price war in any new business that they enter into. They usually succeed. A good example would be Cebu Pacific, their low cost flights brought air travel to the masses. Another example is Sun Cellular. Sun’s prices are the lowest in the industry. Their unlimited talk time feature made a lot of people consider getting a 2nd cellphone, just to have a Sun line.

At a time where almost everyone is losing hope in our economy, this is certainly good news. I am not a fan of the Gokongweis. I hate the stench at Robinsons Galleria’s parking lot. I hate the network congested message you get from Sun whenever you try to make a call during peak hours. I am a fan however of their business strategy. A price war among the big gas companies is what we need right now. One might argue that, it’s not gonna help much because the international price for oil is going up anyway.

Something is better than nothing. We have to start somewhere.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 2:07 am and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.