Chemical Industries board votes to merge subsidiaries to 'focus on real estate'

Chemical Industries of the Philippines [CIP halted] [link] said that its board voted to exclude the Unioil Group from the merger of its subsidiaries. The subsidiaries that will be merged are Addventure Properties, Citiworld Properties, Exquadra, Quantumlink Realty, Buklod Realty, and Rivertanks; Uniholdings Inc will be the surviving entity of this merger. The PSE halted trading in CIP’s shares prior to the market’s open, “pending submission of the additional information required by the Exchange”, eight minutes after CIP’s “Reply to Exchange’s Query” hit the EDGE disclosure server.

MB bottom-line: “Getting into real estate” is a pretty broad thing. We all know (or have heard of) a couple of people who were not property specialists “getting into real estate” and getting pretty wealthy from it. We all know (or have heard of) a couple of people with that same background who managed to lose buckets of money on a “sure thing” rental or get caught up in a multi-year legal battle over titles to the lot. Then there’s the third group who tried real estate investing and did so without generating any noteworthy gains or losses. Which one of these three groups will CIP belong to? I don’t know. All I know is that there are an awful lot of property-rich companies “doing real estate” on the PSE right now that aren’t actually doing all that much, so “doing real estate” is not an automatic path to easy wealth and profit. As with everything else, how they execute this plan will determine its value.

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