Cezar Consing had hoped to enjoy retirement. He had stepped down from running BPI, Southeast Asia’s oldest bank, and spent a year and a half playing golf and traveling.
That changed when Ayala Corporation’s chair, Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, called him in a panic. The company’s then-CEO and the chair’s younger brother, Fernando Zobel de Ayala, was resigning for health reasons, and the company needed a replacement.
“It was a bit of an emergency,” Consing says. “We had this conversation that was completely surreal. I ran into my bedroom and asked my wife, ‘I’m being asked to do this. What do you think?’ And she says, ‘Good to get you out of the house.’ So I went back to the phone and said, ‘Done, I’ll take it!’ and I was at work the next day.”
Consing, the first non-family member to serve as Ayala’s CEO, is now running a strategy that most of the global corporate world has ditched. Diversified conglomerates are out of fashion: General Electric, which split into three companies in 2024, and Johnson & Johnson, which spun off its consumer health business as Kenvue, have made corporate break-ups in vogue. Investors have rewarded the strategy with a surge in share prices, and activists are pressuring boards to spin off anything that’s not “core.”
Analysts, too, often talk about the “conglomerate discount”, a trend where the stock market values diversified firms at less than the combined worth of its separate business units.
Instead, Consing wants to keep the sprawling Ayala group together–even if that does mean demanding more from the conglomerate’s portfolio, which spans banking, real estate, telecoms, energy, and more.
Following record profits last year, Ayala has had a tough start to 2026. The conglomerate earned 22.1 billion Philippine pesos ($359 million) in net income over the first six months of the year, , a 7% drop. Profits at Ayala Land, one of the conglomerate’s most important divisions, fell by 19%.
“The group did an excellent job of seeding capital to companies, but I thought it was almost too selfless,” Consing told Fortune. “As the parent, we ought to be more demanding of our business units and grow more shareholder value at the center.”
Despite their declining popularity in the West, conglomerates remain dominant forces across Asia. In Southeast Asia, in particular, conglomerates served as the foundational pillars of emerging economies like Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, where they help to plug “institutional voids”, or gaps in business infrastructure.
Consing drew on his early years as a JPMorgan investment banker in Singapore and Hong Kong to lay down new rules for fiscal discipline. “Instead of just saying that we’ve allocated capital and companies are free to do the most they can with it, we now tell them what we require in return: better dividends,” Consing explains.
“If we don’t extract value from them, how can we remain relevant?”
The argument for a corporate break-up is straightforward: Conglomerates use bumper profits from one part of the business to subsidize less profitable parts of the business, dragging down the whole company. Nor are individual divisions free to act in their best interests, as they are forced to follow the conglomerate’s overall strategy.
GE, once the poster child for a large diversified conglomerate, is now a symbol of why corporate divorces work. In 2018, GE was worth just $89 billion; now, the combined market capitalization of its three successor companies is $689 billion. “GE was pursuing the benefits of synergies… and it was expensive and not working,” Larry Culp, the former CEO of GE and now the head of GE Aerospace, told Fortune in an earlier interview. “The best route was the opposite, allowing each business to operate on its own so it can best serve different sets of customers. Focus beats synergies every time.”
Consing takes a different stance. “Someone told me that synergy works better when companies are more similar to each other, and that’s probably true,” he says. “But if you can make a diverse portfolio work together, that’s truly valuable.” For example, AC Logistics now draws a “fair share” of its business from sister companies like Globe Telecom and ACEN, its renewables arm.
When Ayala decided to push EVs, Consing created a board composed of the CEOs of nearly every major group company, each with a role: Ayala Land to install chargers in its condominiums and malls, ACEN to supply clean power, Globe to connect the charging stations, and BPI to finance the car purchases. “We wanted all our major companies to contribute to the success or failure of our push into EVs,” he says.
That push made ACMobility, the group’s automotive arm, the third-largest car distributor in the country, with 10.9% of the market—even as it posted a 57-million-peso loss ($925,000) in the first half of the year, after spending on marketing and charging infrastructure.
Synergy, Consing concedes, is not automatic. “The temptation is always to do what’s in front of you. Why should you look sideways if there’s so much to do in front of you?” he says. “What we’re asking our people to do is occasionally look sideways.”
Age-old conglomerate
Domingo Roxas and Antonio de Ayala founded Ayala in 1834, when the Philippines was still under Spanish colonial rule. It started as the Ayala Distillery, before expanding into infrastructure with the Ayala Bridge over Manila’s Pasig River in 1872, and the country’s first tramcar service in 1888.
“I look at Ayala more as an idea,” Consing says. “We’ve remained relevant because we have been able to go in and out of businesses that matter for the times.”
Still, since the 1950s, Ayala’s portfolio has maintained two constant pillars: real estate (Ayala Land) and banking (The Bank of the Philippine Islands, or BPI).
Ayala Land posted a net income of 11.5 billion pesos ($186 million) in the first half of 2026, down 19% year-on-year amid a broader housing slowdown in the Philippines. This month, MSCI demoted it from the Philippines Standard Index to the Small Cap Index after a steep slide in its market value. BPI earned net income of 32.8 billion pesos ($532 million), roughly flat year-on-year.
Consing’s first job was at BPI, where he handled corporate banking from 1981 to 1985. He also collected independent directorships along the way at Jollibee, CIMB, and Filipino clean energy firm First Gen. After spending decades abroad, he returned to the Philippines to lead BPI as its president and CEO. “I was out of the country for 28 years, and this was my excuse to come home,” Consing says. “I’ve come full circle.”
At BPI, Southeast Asia’s oldest bank, Consing focused on democratizing its services. “BPI has traditionally been a bank that focuses on the upper tier of the market,” he says. “We made a conscious decision to make it more accessible to the middle and lower classes, and to do that we had to digitalize the bank, since it’s too expensive to try to service everyone over the counter at our branches.”
The country’s pain points
Since Consing took the helm, Ayala has deepened its push into three newer businesses—AC Health, AC Education and ACEN—which he argues matches the “pain points” the Philippines is facing.
“For a country that needs education and healthcare, it makes no sense for their value pools to be as small as they are,” Consing explains. “People should be spending more on them. We, too, want to be in the industries that matter most for our country.” (In 2025, total healthcare spending accounted for 6.7% of the Philippines’ GDP, while government spending on education contributed 4%.)
Energy, too, has proved to be a serendipitous investment. The Philippines, which imports 98% of its oil from the Middle East, was hit hard by the outbreak of the Iran war in February. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. declared a nationwide state of emergency on March 24.
“The recent energy crisis made us realize we’re thankful to have ACEN,” Consing says. “The Philippines imports so much energy that we basically import inflation…and how you address that is by investing in renewable energy.”
ACEN generates 100% of its power from renewable sources, including solar, wind and geothermal energy. It’s also the group’s most international business, with over 7 gigawatts of attributable capacity across the Philippines, Australia, India, Vietnam and Lao PDR—and a first-half net income of 3.9 billion pesos ($63 million), up 411% year-on-year.
Finally, there’s education. Consing complains that the COVID pandemic left “educational gaps” across the Philippines. In an attempt to plug them, Ayala and Yuchengco, another local conglomerate, partnered with Arizona State University in 2023 to “bring experiential global education to Filipinos on a cost-effective basis”.
“What’s the point of having a demographic dividend if you don’t have an educated population?” Consing grumbles, referring to the idea that countries get an economic boost from young and growing populations.
Still, one gap in the portfolio is consumer retail, where Ayala is “almost absent,” in Consing’s words. On Aug. 12, Ayala launched ACX Retail, a platform designed to bring international fashion, lifestyle and specialty brands to the Philippine market. Thus far, the platform has announced strategic joint ventures with various international retail brands, including South Korea’s Musinsa Standard, Australia’s Anko and Thailand’s Makro.
“I would like our portfolio to mirror the large value pools in the country,” Consing says. “We are already in four or five, so it would be great to be in five of five.”
‘Keeps the country churning’
The Philippines has struggled in recent years. The economy grew by 4.4% in 2025, the slowest pace since the COVID pandemic and a rate Consing calls “unusually low.” The economy has slowed even more this year, growing by just 2.3% in the second quarter. High inflation, averaging 5.0% for the year so far, is dragging down consumer confidence; a corruption scandal is also hurting public spending.
Still, Consing is bullish on the Philippine economy. “The Philippines is particularly good at managing its fiscal and monetary affairs, and that’s given the country some guardrails,” Consing concludes. “You combine that with good demographics and two very unique industries—business process outsourcing and inward remittances—and that’s what keeps the country churning.” (As of 2026, the BPO sector accounts for 8% of the Philippines’ GDP, while inward remittances contribute around 10%.)
Ayala turns 200 in 2034, making it older than most companies on Fortune’s corporate rankings. (Just a dozen Fortune 500 companies are more than two centuries old.) Yet Consing isn’t willing to rest on Ayala’s laurels.
“Nothing is preordained. This almost 200 years of work can go poof if we aren’t good stewards—if we behave badly, if we’re misinformed, if we don’t work hard,” he says. “It’s always: let’s begin again.”
In Fortune’s “Asia Agenda” column, released at least twice a month, we speak with Asia’s top business leaders about how they are building for the future and the lessons they’ve drawn from leading companies in one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic regions. Explore all of our profiles here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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