SM targets 100-mall milestone in 2027

MANILA, Philippines — The SM Group is fortifying its dominance in the country’s retail industry with plans to open 15 new shopping malls over a four-year period, on its way to hitting the century mark by end 2027.

Sy-led integrated property developer SM Prime Holdings Inc. is targeting to have a portfolio of 100 malls in the country by the end of 2027.

“SM Prime, our property arm, announced a goal to achieve a milestone of 100 malls in the Philippines by the end of 2027 from 85 today,” SM Investments Corp. president and CEO Frederic DyBuncio said.

SM Prime, one of the leading integrated property developers in Southeast Asia and the largest mall operator and developer in the Philippines, has 85 malls in the country with a total gross floor area (GFA) of 9.2 million square meters.

It has 24 malls in NCR, 47 in Luzon (excluding NCR) and seven each in Visayas and Mindanao.

These malls have over 20,600 tenants, more than 89,000 car park slots, 390 cinema screens and an average daily pedestrian count of 3.6 million.

In China, it also has eight malls with a total GFA of 1.6 million square meters.

Moving forward, SM Prime said its mall expansion is geared toward the provinces, with a focus of covering most of Northern Luzon, Visayas and the progressive cities in Mindanao.

For this year alone, SM Prime plans to open four new malls that will add more than 440,000 sqm of gross floor area in the company’s mall portfolio. The mall operator aims to launch SM City Caloocan in the first half of the year.

Meanwhile, three new malls--SM City J Mall in Cebu, SM City San Fernando La Union and SM City Laoag--are targeted for launch by the second half of 2024.

“We always look at a community, a city and identify what type of consumers and what they need. So for us, as we expand out into the provinces, it’s not a case of we’re going to do a high-end mall or we’re going to do a mall. We look at the community and say what does that community need,” SMIC consultant for investor relations and sustainability Timothy Daniels told The STAR.

“But for us, usually it’s more of a mid-tier mall. We got high-end ones. We got Aura, Cebu, Makati and you will find in Megamall a wing which is quite high-end. So it’s not like we are trying to target a specific segment. What we just do is look at communities and say, what does it need? And the tenants follow that same strategy. And in our stores, the merchandise also follows that strategy,” he said.

For 2024, SM Prime is looking at P100 billion for its capital expenditure program.