Ayala’s Counter-Revolution: Why a 192-Year-Old Philippine Giant Is Refusing the GE Breakup Playbook

(SeaPRwire) –   By: Christian Pierce

Wall Street is drunk on corporate breakups. GE became three companies in 2024 and its combined value jumped to $689 billion from $89 billion in 2018. Johnson & Johnson spun off Kenvue and got rewarded. Activist funds keep circling boardrooms, demanding sharper focus. Then you have Ayala, born in 1834 under Spanish colonial rule, doing the opposite. Its CEO is not splitting anything. He is making the machine tighter.

Cezar Consing did not plan this job. He had left BPI, Southeast Asia’s oldest bank, and spent eighteen months on golf courses and travel. Then Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala rang. Fernando Zobel de Ayala, the chair’s younger brother and then-CEO, was resigning for health reasons. Consing’s retelling is pure candor. He ran to his wife, she said it would get him out of the house, and he was at work the next day. He is the first non-family member to run the group. That is a big deal for a conglomerate that has been family-led for nine generations.

The pressure on him is immediate and real. Ayala had record profits last year. Then the first half of 2026 delivered 22.1 billion pesos ($359 million) in net income, a 7% decline. Ayala Land, the property arm and one of two historical pillars alongside BPI, saw its profit fall 19% to 11.5 billion pesos ($186 million). MSCI even demoted it from the Philippine Standard Index to the Small Cap Index. That is a brutal signal. Markets are voting against complexity.

Consing refuses to follow the vote. His diagnosis is sharp: the parent company was too generous. “The group did an excellent job of seeding capital to companies, but I thought it was almost too selfless,” he says. The new order is simple. Capital comes with strings. Business units must return better dividends. “We now tell them what we require in return,” he explains. His blunt formulation deserves quoting: “If we don’t extract value from them, how can we remain relevant?”

Here is where I see the real strategic wager. Ayala is leaning into interlocking businesses rather than decoupling them. AC Logistics already draws a fair share of revenue from Globe Telecom and ACEN, the renewables unit. The electric vehicle push is a bigger laboratory. Consing built a board from nearly every major group company. Ayala Land installs chargers in malls and condominiums. ACEN supplies clean power. Globe connects the charging stations. BPI finances the purchases. Every unit owns a piece of the outcome.

The early data is mixed. ACMobility became the Philippines’ third-largest car distributor with 10.9% market share. It also lost 57 million pesos ($925,000) in the first half after heavy spending on marketing and chargers. So the model creates scale, but it burns cash. The market will not wait forever.

Consing concedes that cross-business cooperation is not automatic. He admits managers naturally focus on what is in front of them. His instruction is to “look sideways.” That is an unusual ask in a company where each unit has its own profit-and-loss pressure. But he frames it as necessity, not ideology.

GE’s former chief Larry Culp took the opposite route. He said the old attempt to find shared benefits across GE units was expensive and failing. “Focus beats synergies every time,” Culp argued. Consing’s rebuttal: shared benefits work better when units are similar, but making a diverse portfolio work together is the harder, more valuable trick.

I find the deeper context more persuasive than either argument. Asian conglomerates exist because they plug institutional voids. Ayala’s history proves it. The Ayala Distillery in 1834, the bridge over the Pasig River in 1872, the first tramcar in 1888. Since the 1950s, real estate and banking have been the constant pillars. In the Philippines, weak capital markets and thin infrastructure make standalone companies fragile. A solo EV distributor would probably struggle to finance its charging network. A standalone logistics firm would face brutal fundraising conditions.

Consing knows this from personal history. He did corporate banking at BPI from 1981 to 1985, spent 28 years abroad, came back to run the bank, and pushed it downmarket. He forced digitalization at BPI so it could serve middle and lower income customers without overwhelming branches. That experience frames his current move. He is not an idealist about conglomerates. He is a pragmatist who wants the structure to earn its right to exist.

The next two quarters will be the test. Ayala Land’s slowdown is the danger zone. If the parent cannot squeeze better performance from its largest asset, the breakup argument becomes harder to dismiss. But if Consing’s discipline works, Asia’s conglomerate model gets a powerful new defense. The result will not be decided in boardrooms or press releases. It will be decided in the numbers. If the dividends flow and the EV bet matures, Manila will prove Wall Street wrong. If not, the GE playbook will be waiting.

Author bio: Christian Pierce, a chief financial columnist and markets commentator covering corporate strategy, capital allocation, and family-controlled conglomerates across global markets.