Let's Talk Business

Over lunch, six business leaders talk about how they weathered Covid’s challenges and how they are bracing up for a brighter future. Tatler talks to Zalora’s Paulo Campos III, Wildflour’s Ana de Ocampo, HSBC’s Peter Faulhaber, Shangri-La’s Amit Oberoi, Santos Knight Frank’s Rick Santos and SM’s Steven Tan

- Irene Martel Francisco and Chit L Lijauco

TATLER PHILIPPINES: Thank you all for being here. Basically, we wanted to start with the challenges you faced in the past two years, how did you address them and where are you now?

STEVEN TAN: It was the first time in 62 years that SM closed shop! We opened our first shoe store in 1958 and only in 2020 did we close our malls. For two months. But of course, it depends on you if you’re just going to wait or if you’re going to do something about it.

For us in SM, we accelerated our own e-commerce. We went into omni channels. We had personal shoppers in all our malls, in Metro Manila and in the provinces. Grab was not there yet, particularly in our malls in the provinces. So, we contacted the displaced jeepney and tricycle drivers to help us with the deliveries. They acted as our third-party delivery. This gave them livelihood and at the same time helped our business. In times of crisis, you tend to help each other more; and this is very Filipino. This is the beauty the pandemic brought out.

PAULO CAMPOS: Online was the only way you could shop for some time so there was really a tremendous acceleration of e-commerce adoption. Our estimate is about five years’ worth of new customer adoption of e-commerce in just the first year of the pandemic. Of course, it presented challenges too. Like, ensuring that we could keep up with the supply chain, logistics, sourcing…and increasing customer expectation.

The biggest trend we saw was that consumers are now buying a wider range of categories. And the amazing growth in online grocery. This behaviour did not exist pre-pandemic. My wife and I alone depend on aggregators for our supply of food. And we think all these trends are here to stay.