Tycoons stay optimistic amid Middle East conflict

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March 18, 2026 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines — Tycoons Tessie Sy-Coson and Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, leaders of two of the country’s biggest conglomerates, are keeping their optimism amid fears that the country’s economic growth will be derailed by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“For us, we are really confident about the Philippines’ growth. We may be disrupted by all of these conflicts and we have gone through that. Last year, we were doing OK. Then the internal politics of flood control came in. We all went down and by December we’re up again,” Sy-Coson, vice chairperson of SM Investments Corp. and chairperson of BDO Unibank, said during the InvestPH conference of the Philippine Stock Exchange Inc. (PSE) yesterday.

“Philippines is a country where I guess it’s always up and down, and maybe we’re used to disruption that after a while, it will just go up. We think that this one may take a while because it’s beyond us. This conflict, we can’t do anything but be the recipient of whatever bad news. So it may lengthen, but I guess right now it’s a time for us to prepare for another upswing,” she said.

Despite the fear being instilled by the conflict in Middle East, however, Sy-Coson said life as well as business go on.

“Of course, there are more risks. And maybe the thing that will be higher is the opex (operating expense). So we just have to make our business more efficient, lower our margins to survive this temporary hiccups. And I like to think that it’s temporary and I can see from the survey, I think most of us are optimistic that it’s not going to take very long,” she said.

For Zobel, chairman of conglomerate Ayala Corp., his concern is less on the price volatility of what is happening to the energy sector, but more on a drying up of supply.

“I think we have to do whatever we can, hopefully as a country, to build either on relationships we have and the like to make sure that we don’t have a situation that we move back to something that happened in the 70s, which was really a drying up of supply. That would really have a big effect on all of us. We’re not there yet,” Zobel said.

“So I do remain optimistic for the kind of results and the leveling out of prices by the end of the year. But I think the way my mind works is, when you have a crisis of this magnitude, you have two frames of mind. One is a crisis frame of mind, which is the now, and the other one is the longer term that stays there,” he said.

Zobel said that similar to what happened during the COVID pandemic, there is no escaping the fact that a short term plan is needed to handle the situation.

“And I think all of us are faced with a situation where we have to have our brains work on those two fronts, make sure that we continue on our long term commitments, whatever they may be. But at the same time, be very conscious that we are dealing with the real crisis globally on a component of the economic equation that is important to all of us, given that we’re a net importer of, basically, energy and fuel,” he said.

PSE chairman Jose Pardo said markets are also navigating heightened volatility driven by geopolitical tensions, shifting rate expectations and an uncertain global output.

“Even our own market, which had climbed to a 14-month high, has felt these shocks. But volatility reveals character. It separates those who invest in stories from those who invest in substance. And when we look at the Philippines, our macro economic fundamentals, our young population, our expanding sectors, we find a country that remains resilient and relevant. Our exchange, however, is only as strong as the breadth of the economy it represents,” Pardo said.

“The Philippine story is not written on the trading screen alone. It is written in the fields, the communities and the enterprises waiting to be discovered,” he said.