OP ED EDITORIALS & CARTOONS: … HENRY SY TRIBUTE

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THE FILIPINO business community has lost one of its strongest pillars with the demise on Saturday of property and banking taipan Henry Sy Sr., patriarch of the SM group.

Sy’s life is a true rags-to-riches story, a Chinese immigrant who saw vast opportunity in a foreign land, transforming in the process the Philippine economy and providing livelihoods to countless Filipinos.

Born in Xiamen’s Jinjiang county on Oct. 15, 1924, Henry Sy was given the Chinese name Si Chì-Sêng, which means “to attain ultimate success.”

Sy, through patience and hard work, business acumen and ambition, achieved exactly that. His SM conglomerate, based on mall and property businesses, is unrivaled in the country and the rest of the region.

Today, the SM group has a total of 72 properties, 2,149 retail stores and 1,827 banking branches. Its malls are five times the size of Monaco, its offices occupy a space as big as the Vatican, its convention centers are equivalent to 75 basketball courts, and its stores are the size of 500 football fields.

To his more than 80,000 workers, Henry Sy was “Tatang,” a great and dear father, who rose from very humble beginnings as a shoe retailer in Carriedo in the late ‘50s to become the richest man in the Philippines and, perhaps, Southeast Asia, but who remained simple and could eat with pancit noodles in one of his own food courts.

A true visionary, Sy’s thinking was well ahead of the competition. He introduced air-conditioning at his Shoemart in Carriedo when others felt it unnecessary and drew customers to his store and its wide selection of shoes. “Shoemart” became a household name.

In 1985, he blazed the trail with the opening of SM City on North EDSA, and was scoffed at by the older and more experienced property developers for putting up a mall in what they thought was the middle of nowhere.

But Sy saw on North EDSA a crossroads of people from Central Luzon and northern Metro Manila, an untapped foot traffic from Quezon City residents, and motorists and commuters passing along the metropolis’s main thoroughfare. Today, there are three malls in the heavily congested area — SM City and two owned by rival Ayala group.

Hardly anyone sneered when Sy opened the SM Mall of Asia in 2006, the seaside complex that catalyzed the development of the Manila Bay reclamation area, and which has become a major destination of foreign and local tourists.

Sy opened his first shopping mall in China in 2001; today there are seven in the mainland on top of 72 malls in the Philippines.

Aware that the ubiquitous SM malls could be displacing smaller businesses, SM’s mall-and-retail network has accommodated homegrown food products and handicraft, as well as restaurant
businesses. The nationwide expansion of SM also meant the expansion of many small and medium enterprises.

These are just some of Henry Sy’s visible accomplishments; hardly noticed by media is the SM group’s activities in corporate social responsibility. Sy, who was unable to finish college, and his wife Felicidad have sent some 4,000 students through college, and the Sys have expanded their educational philanthropy with the acquisition of National University in 2008.

The Manila Times extends its condolences to the Sy family and the SM group for the untimely death of their founder. Henry Sy leaves a sterling example of success through sheer hard work and patience, which all Filipinos would do well to emulate.