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Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2003 Winners

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Entrepreneur Of The Year Philippines 2003

Master Entrepreneur 2003



Tony Tan Caktiong
Jollibee Foods Corporation

Tony Tan Caktiong truly has something to be happy about.

What started as a franchise of Magnolia Ice Cream House turned into the undisputed leader in the Philippine fast food industry – this despite competition from the number one fast food chain in the world. Since its incorporation in 1978, Jollibee Foods Corporation has seen several milestones; reaching P500 million sales mark in 1984, joining in the Philippines’ Top 100 corporations in 1987, breaking the P1 billion sales mark in 1989, and becoming the first food service company to be listed in the Philippine Stock Exchange in 1993.

Today, Jollibee commands 65% of the market and leads in three major segments – Jollibee in chicken and burgers, Chowking in oriental fast food, and Greenwich in pizza and pasta. It has grown from two stores to around 900 in the country and overseas, having store in such locations as the United States and Hong Kong. It is continuing its expansion in China and Indonesia and is exploring opportunities in the Japanese dining segment.

Jollibee – son named to connote the hardworking insect, happy to do its work – has transformed from a mascot to a Philippine cultural icon. The Jollibee phenomenon is such that Philippine economic officials sometimes look at Jollibee’s monthly sales figures as a virtual indicator of consumption trends in the country.

For revolutionizing the Philippine fast food industry, Tan Caktiong has received a number of awards: the Agora Award for Outstanding Marketing Achievement,

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Small Business Entrepreneur 2003

Pacita U. Juan
Figaro Coffee, Inc.

Pacita Juan’s willingness to take risks, coupled with her passion for coffee, led her to create Figaro. Together with friends, Juan opened the first Figaro coffee shop in 1993 before Starbucks and Seattle’s Best were introduced to the country. Figaro is now the second largest coffee shop chain in the country, grabbing 30% market share. It is, in fact often mistaken for a foreign brand. From its first store in Makati, Figaro now has more than 30 in the Metro Manila and an outlet in Hong Kong. Juan is now keen on settling up shops in Vietnam, Singapore and China.

While growing the business, CEO Juan saw firsthand the dismal state of local coffee planters. She felt strongly that something had to be done to improve the situation. Through the Figaro foundation, she invites her employees and customers to contribute time, effort and resources to projects that support the local coffee industry such as the Save the Barako tree-planting activities and the Adopt-a-Coffee-Farm project. Through Adopt-a-Coffee-Farm, Figaro taps idle or underutilized farmlands for the cultivation of coffee beans, which the company buys for its coffee blends. The project was first implemented in Amadeo, Cavite and is now being undertaken in some of the remotest and most depressed areas in Mindanao.

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Information and Communications Technology Entrepreneur 2003

Ernest Cu
SPI Technologies, Inc./eTelecare International, Inc.

Ernest Cu, Director, President, and CEO of SPI Technologies, Inc. (SPI) and Chairman of eTelecare International, Inc., is credited for transforming a “mom and pop” business into one of the continent’s largest outsourcing service providers. SPI started in 1980 as a simple data entry service company. The company was listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange in 1991 and has consistently outperformed other stocks in the past 10 years. However, SPI’s core business depended on contracts that were basically project-based, making revenues not quite consistent.

In 1997, Cu joined SPI as president and chief operating officer. He was able to acquire an American operation that was effectively SPI’s first direct sales and marketing organization in the USA. Cu the paved the way for SPI to render a suite of other services in business process outsourcing (BPO), customer relationship management (CRM), and information technology (IT). The company’s services continued to expand and in late 1999, SPI launched eTelecare International, the first call center in the Philippines focused on US outsourcing. Today, SPI is a market leader as Asia’s largest independent BPO provider, with sales and marketing offices well as production facilities all over the world.

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Socially Responsible Entrepreneur 2003

Doris Magsaysay Ho
Magsaysay Maritime Corporation

In 1979, Doris Magsaysay Ho joined Magsaysay Maritime Corporation, a company that owned and managed ships. Three short years later, she took the Company’s reins and assumed the position of Chief Executive Officer. Magsaysay Ho invested heavily in training and worked closely with government to establish a regulatory framework. At present, Magsaysay Maritime is the largest manning company in the country with 18,000 men and women trained to work in its own vessels and those of other shipping lines.

When domestic shipping was deregulated in 1986, Magsaysay Maritime diversified further, acquiring the National Maritime Corporation  to engage in inter-island and near-sea trades for both dry and liquid cargoes. The company also set up Batangas Bay Carriers, Inc. to operate a fleet of tanker barges on a long-term charter to Shell. In the 1990s, Magsaysay Maritime also ventured into domestic tourism and further expanded its training capabilities. The Magsaysay Institute of Shipping was established in Dasmariñas, Cavite to offer free skills training and upgrading. Other projects were also implemented, such as the Seafarer’s Savings Program, Educational Assistance Program, and the Oasis Guest House that provides temporary lodging in Manila for seafarers returning to their home provinces.

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Woman Entrepreneur 2003

Myla Villanueva
MDI Group of Companies

Myla Villanueva was first exposed to information technology as a working student in Santa Clara University in California, USA. Santa Clara Valley was then rapidly being touted as “Silicon Valley” – the center of the high-tech boom in the mid 1980’s. Villanueva settles in the Philippines after graduating in 1988. She soon discovered that only multinational companies offered data network services in the Philippines. She quickly incorporated MDI to be first local network systems integrator in the country.

MDI first focused on connecting computers into a network, but Villanueva was convinced that IP, now known as the language of the Internet, was the technology to bet on. Without a year of its founding, MDI clinched the first major IP infrastructure project in the country – the Social Security System (SSS) data network. Other clients followed such as ABS-CBN and Meralco. In 1995, Villanueva co-founded Microwarehouse; three years later, she transformed Wolfpac, a network security company, into the largest independent mobile applications and content developer. Wolfpac pioneered in cellphone ringtones, logos, picture messages and text gaming. The GSM Association, a worldwide group of 600 cellular operators, has twice commended Wolfpac as world-class.

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