Ayala Corp. creates logistics unit as 'vehicle for investments in the logistics sector'

Ayala Corp [AC 818.00 0.37%], the Ayala Family’s holdco of holdcos, announced yesterday that it had created a subsidiary called AC Logistics Holdings Corp (ACL) to act as a “vehicle for investments in the logistics sector”.

This announcement is only about the creation of the corporate entity of ACL; we don’t have any information about the company’s capitalization, or who will lead it, or the short and long-term strategic mandate for how the company will make its investments in the logistics sector. It is trivially cheap and easy for large companies to create subsidiary corporations like this, so we can’t read too much into ACL’s mere establishment.

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While creating subsidiaries is kind of “nothing”, the fact that AC wanted to talk about it makes me think that it’s probably something worth watching. It is true that AC already has a subsidiary with “logistics” in its name, AyalaLand Logistics Holdings Corp [ALLHC 5.12 0.78%], but even a quick glance at ALLHC’s financials would tell you that the Ayalas mostly use that entity as a means of flipping industrial real estate.

The actual business of logistics (as broad as that term is) is such a small component of ALLHC’s performance, but that makes sense considering ALLHC is an offshoot of Ayala Land [ALI 34.10 0.89%] and not AC itself. Maybe we’ll be in for a minor reshuffling of AC’s actual logistics assets from ALLHC to ACL. That AC would create a top-level holdco dedicated to the logistics sector makes me think that the Ayala Family has finally come around to the value of the logistics sector as a whole, and perhaps this move is a way for the family to focus its investments (both existing and future) in the sector around a particular theme/thesis with a management team that is properly dedicated and experienced in operating warehouses, cold storages, distribution centers, truck fleets, and the like.

As someone who thinks this sector is going to play a critical role in PH commerce for generations to come, I’m going to be watching ACL very closely.

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