When ATMs dispense water instead of money

United Laboratories majority owner Jose Campos doesn’t like unions and his people have never formed one.

Then again, it’s hard to convince workers that they need protection when benefits include complete lunch meals, including dessert, at a subsidized price of P12 – significantly lower than the P35 lunch meals that employees of Asian Development Bank boasts of.

As everybody knows, Unilab controls a dominant 20-percent market share of the P80 billion-plus pharmaceutical industry in the Philippines. Among its many subsidiaries is Rite-Med Phils., Inc., a generic drugs company which is expected to contribute the most to Unilab’s revenue stream within the next three years in large part because of a projected annual sales growth of 50 percent vis-á-vis the industry’s eight-percent growth.

Last year, Rite-Med generated sales of P500 million on the sale of 13 generic products.

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Did you know 1: When Quedan & Rural Credit Guaranty Corp. president Nelson Buenaflor recently visited seaweed farmer-beneficiaries in Mindanao, he found that their homes were bigger – if not nicer – than his in Metro Manila.

Here’s why. The farmers harvest every 45 days, netting P1,000 from a quarter of a hectare of seaweeds.

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Did you know 2: Some ATMs do no dispense money but water. That’s because ATM is not the acronym for automated tellering machine but for Automatic Tubig Machine, the brand name as well as the name of the company which fabricates a version of the water vendo machines found in American supermarkets.

The Philippine version, which Teodulo Berdugo has patented, is plugged to the local water source and goes through 16 filters before it is dispensed at the retail price of P5 per gallon. Daily net take per machine averages out at P650.

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The more aggressive overseas expansion of Jollibee Foods Corp. raises some interesting issues which management led by president Tony Tan Caktiong will have to resolve.

One, JFC is still run pretty much like a family. (Why the mommy of Mr. Tan is called "Mommy Tan" by all the employees). Key positions here and abroad are given to managers who have shown not only their loyalty but their competence – consider Chowking Food Corp. president Rufino dela Rosa, who used to be JFC’s chief financial officer – but that managerial pool is not that deep.

Two, JFC has never felt proprietary about its food. To a certain extent, such flexibility – its willingness to adjust the taste of its food to the requirements of the local community – is a plus factor but it’s winning taste profile is still basically Filipino.