The third brother

Television has become even more interesting these days to companies with consumer goods to sell. You see, the two biggest stations – Channels 2 and 7 – have significantly brought down their advertising rates.

For both ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp. president and chief executive officer Federico Garcia and GMA chairman and CEO Felipe Gozon, the name of the game is volume rather than yield.

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The Philippine office of Air France may just have its best year ever. So far, it has sold 2,000 tickets, all for next month’s canonization of Fr. Escriva, the founder of the Opus Dei movement, in Rome.

Aside from almost half the round trip fare offered by other airlines, the other come on of Air France is – to state the obvious – an excuse to spend a cozy night or two (it’s autumn, after all) in the City of Lights.

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Bank notes 1: Did you know there’s a third overachieving Tan brother? Aside from Philippine National Bank president and chief executive officer Lorenzo Tan and Banco de Oro Universal Bank president and CEO Nestor Tan, there’s Raul Tan.

The third brother is said to be a robotics genius based in the United States. Given his field of specialization, there’s obviously no job opportunities here for him.

Yesterday, PNB celebrated its 20th year of doing business through automated tellering machines in the country. The celebration made sense since it was PNB, not the Bank of the Philippine Islands, which locally introduced the ATM.

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Bank notes 2: To increase government revenues, Finance Secretary Jose Isidro Camacho intends to put the fear of God and something else in delinquent or non-paying taxpayers.

Aside from the recent appointment of Guillermo Parayno – a graduate and former teacher at the Philippine Military Academy who saw action in Mindanao as a lieutenant – as Internal Revenue Commissioner, Lito Camacho is said to be seriously thinking of giving the job of Bureau of Customs commissioner to another PMA alumnus.

Under this scenario, current BoC Commissioner Antonio Bernardo (whom Mr. Camacho remains terribly impressed with) will be moved laterally to another government posting.

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Bank notes 3: The second winner of Philippine Savings Bank’s ongoing "Megamillion" promotion is Manuel de Jesus, a 22-year-old industrial engineering senior at San Francisco State University.

The six-month promo, which is open to depositors with at least P10,000 or $500 in the bank, is giving out a major prize of P1 million every month until December, where the grand prize is P3 million.

Mitch de Jesus, who maintains a PSBank dollar account, has opened a second account – this time in pesos – for his prize money. He intends to use the money to help defray expenses should he be accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology next fall.

To date, the promo has increased PSBank’s deposits by nine percent, not bad a showing in an industry where a 10-percent to 15-percent deposits growth a year (basically by poaching on the deposits of other banks) is considered excellent.

Under president Pascual Garcia III, PSBank has moved two notches up and is now the second largest thrift bank in the country with 103 branches.

Within the next 15 months, Tito Garcia intends to increase the network to 120 by buying existing branch licenses of merged banks. Given that there are more branch licenses for sale than buyers, the going price has dropped by a least a third to P2 million.