I cannot say it enough: talking to Danielle del Rosario, daughter of PHINMA Corp. Chairman and CEO Ramon del Rosario Jr., feels like talking to her dad.
I have had them on ANC's Business Outlook, father and daughter in their first media interview together, and moderated a conversation between the two at a Finex event. I have to tell you, the experience is surreal.
Boy Blue, as we older journalists call him, talks quickly, eloquently, and with so much substance that as a child of the '70s working the beat in the '90s, transcribing him from a cassette recorder became a survival skill. Rewind, play, hit the typewriter keys, rewind, play.
Then you realize the rewinding is a gift. It buys your brain a few more minutes to catch up with what he just said.
Put the two of them on one panel and the teasing gets sprinkled so naturally over hard numbers and hard-nosed analysis that you forget you are watching a succession story unfold in real time. My recent sit-down with Danielle for The Boardroom belied a deep, unshowy grasp of the technical workings of insulated panels and rooftop solar. She did not read the brochure. She could have written the engineering manual.
SPENDING INTO A SLUMP
Here is a puzzle for every builder in this country. Construction is slowing, and PHINMA's own numbers say so: revenues down almost twelve percent in the first half, cement and steel in the red, and the group back in the black only because of the education business.
And yet, in the middle of that slump, the PHINMA board is not pulling back from its 700- million-peso insulated panel plant in Porac, Pampanga. It is coming online on schedule, foreign exchange headaches and all. The equipment came from Europe, so the euro took a bite, Danielle admits, but not enough to change the math.
The Porac plant is a 200-meter production line, fully automated, run by seven people. On three shifts, Danielle says, it can churn out 1.8 million square meters of insulated panels a year. Walls and roofs that snap together, almost like LEGO, faster to build and cooler inside. Even the plant itself is fully insulated, which is either good marketing or good sense, and in Pampanga in September, probably both.
Thickness is the whole game. Thinner panels give you comfort for homes and offices.
Go thicker and you get poultry houses (a broiler's life is short, and a hot chicken is an unhappy, unprofitable chicken), then cold storage for food and pharmaceuticals on their way to supermarkets, then blast freezers. Insulated floor slabs, insulated walls, insulated rooftops, and yes, solar on top.
Oh, and did I mention data centers? Danielle says PHINMA is game for Pax Silica too. The number she keeps coming back to is the one that should shame all of us: roughly a third of Filipino farm produce spoils before it reaches a plate, because this country does not have enough cold storage. Add this year's El Niño, which PAGASA warns could turn very strong by year-end, and heat becomes a business model. Hotter rooms mean more aircon, more aircon means fatter Meralco bills for people already wincing at them.
A wall that keeps the heat out starts to look less like a construction product and more like a household budget item.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE QUESTION
Of course I had to ask it at the tail end. How does a boardroom live with the fact that the business case on one side of the table is a disruption to the other? Every insulated wall sold is a hollow-block wall not laid, and PHINMA sells the cement that goes into the hollow blocks.
Her reply: "Our intention is not to completely eradicate cement in the business. Cement is here to stay. Steel is here to stay. What we aim is to offer smarter ways to build."
Phinma is not leaving the traditional space, she says, because there is still so much room to do better in it. But if you are putting up a warehouse and want something more than a single steel roof, instead of the tedious hollow-block laying and waiting for it to cure, an insulated wall gets you a cooler building, fifty percent easier to construct, with savings on labor and power.
And the one policy she would change if she could? Let rooftop solar export power back to the grid without so many caps, and get serious about ancillary services and battery storage. The sun, after all, is always on her side.