Century Pacific Group's CEO on his growth mantra

Century Pacific Group has expanded beyond its core business and now has a number of restaurants within its portfolio including Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, Peri Peri, Charcoal Chicken and Potato Corner. It’s also ventured into property with its real estate development unit Artheland. Within its food processing business, the company has further diversified its product range to include canned meat, plant based meat, coconut and milk products. What was the biggest challenge you face getting into these new fluid segments? So growth requires us going into different fields because we were quite dominant already in the tuna category. So looking into diversification, I would say they’re both external and internal challenges, right. So the external, so we look for categories or areas where first of all it has to align with our mission right, which is affordable nutrition. Second, it has to be a large market, addressable market, so that if we do a good job that you know the we’ll be rewarded with scale they have. We have to have good unit economics, right, so that if we do a good job, we can take the gains and then reinvest in future growth, right. And then the 4th is we have to have the right to win. So all these four different things we look for, when we look at different areas where we can, where we can grow or diversify. It’s not easy and we’ve had many challenges. But I want to say that our batting average is still, I mean, we don’t succeed all the time, but our batting average is pretty decent. With all this inflation and rising cost pressures feeding into your system, how do you grow your margins in a healthy and a sustainable way? The state of the competition, the market that we serve, the margins, there’s a limit to the margin that we can, we can try to earn, but then the way we bring up our margin profile over time is to get into the categories where the margins are better. The new categories that we’ve entered in the last five years tend to be higher margin categories. For example, the plant based category, the margins are significantly better than let’s say the tuna or the meat category, the the pet food category. The margins are also accretive to our existing business. So when we choose new categories, the margin profile is actually important. And then as those business grow, businesses grow, then overall the business sort of the the margins of the entire business as a whole also improves. As a food producer, you are one of the few businesses that boomed during the pandemic. What is demand like now post pandemic for your consumer branded product long term good 80% of our business is in the Philippines. If you look at the track record of our country, take away the pandemic years, we had 20 years of uninterrupted GDP growth averaging around four 5%, right. And in an environment and now that the pandemic is over, I think it will continue on that trajectory, call it 5-6 percent type of growth going forward. So long term, this is a very fertile sort of market for us. What kind of growth are you looking at? We try to grow 2X GDP, so 10 to 15%, that’s kind of like the mantra. So when I wake up in the morning 10 to 15, when my colleagues wake up in the morning, 10 to 15 and what happens if you don’t meet at 10 to 15 times, then it’s a bad year. Then we would have not done our job but but but it’s looking good so far. It’s looking good so far. The last five years we’ve compounded at around 13%. The last 10 years we’ve compounded around 12% thereabouts. So yes, the pandemic was a test for a lot of businesses and I think we, we passed that test some would say with flying colors, the prospects going forward I think are good long term, short term there are, there will always be headwinds, inflation, one of them and others, right. But I mean I I have confidence in our, in our business platform, our business model, our team that we’ll figure whatever challenges come, we’ll figure it out.