WYNDHAM PHILIPPINES PARTNERS
The Fund
Wyndham Philippines Partners, L.P. is a fund dedicated to acquiring majority control of key Philippine companies, with an emphasis on export-oriented and manufacturing businesses, in negotiated transactions ranging in size up to $500 million. The initial platform acquisition for building a portfolio company is usually a leading Philippine company, but US companies are also acquired as initial platforms where Wyndham Philippines sees a major opportunity to increase profitability in moving manufacturing and/or other operations to the Philippines. Transactions include acquiring financially distressed companies and rehabilitating them, as well as healthy businesses and early stage projects, such as infrastructure, mineral and energy-related businesses. Besides the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc, the Philippines’ main export markets are the US, Europe (specifically the European Union), China and Japan.
Wyndham Philippines’ objective is to exploit the key advantages of the Philippines, namely its
- Key location at the crossroads of the trading routes of the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea
- Proximity to one of the world’s fastest growing regions, East Asia and China
- Access to the whole of the Pacific Rim, particularly the continents of North and South Americas
- Membership of the ASEAN trading bloc – 570 million people and more than $1.5 trillion in trade
- Free trade agreement with Japan
- Rapidly deregulating markets, with increasing privatization of state-owned enterprises
- Tight fiscal and monetary policy is increasing international confidence in investing in the Philippines
- Young, literate, well-educated, highly trainable and English-speaking labor force
- Vast, unexploited mineral resources
- Rapidly growing consumer class
- Growing importance as a regional and global low-cost manufacturing center
The Philippines’ role as a low-cost outsourcing center providing goods and services to developed markets is expected to grow significantly. Given the country’s resources, Wyndham Philippines believes that there is opportunity for substantial growth in
- Food processing and agribusiness
- Mineral exploration, production and refining
- Machinery and equipment production
- Shipbuilding
- Automotive industry
- Tourism
and, in conjunction with and to support such industrial and economic growth
- Energy – particularly alternative energy – and
- Infrastructure development – private investment in infrastructure projects is particularly being encouraged by the country’s innovative and progressive Build-Operate-Transfer law that establishes the relevant legal and administrative framework for public-private cooperation.
The Philippines has already proven itself as a global leader in information technology (IT), particularly in electronics and semiconductor manufacturing and business process outsourcing (BPO).
Moreover, the Government is supporting such growth with a variety of inducements, including tax holidays and other financial and non-financial incentives. This will permit the total of pre-tax cash flow from such businesses to be reinvested for further growth.
A broad range of incentives is available to companies establishing operations in so-called “special economic zones” which exist throughout the country, particularly those at the former US military bases in the Philippines, Subic and Clark. Such zones comprise industrial estates, export processing zones, free trade zones, tourism ecozones for resort complexes and IT parks and buildings.
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