On August 11, this year, taipan John Gokongwei Jr. turns 80. Next year, his conglomerate, JG Summit Holdings, Inc., marks its half a century of existence.

Gokongwei is one of the most savvy and wiliest of the tycoons who began to build their businesses just after the war.

With an MBA training from Harvard and La Salle, Gokongwei runs his companies like a tight ship, demanding to be informed of major developments, daily. He makes it a point to read his group's annual reports and financial statements. And the other reports of other companies to see how his group compares with its peers and rivals.

In 2005, JG Summit Holdings became the largest publicly listed holding company with revenues of P70.67 billion, up 16.67 percent from P60.57 billion in 2004.

Profits amounted to P3.74 billion, down 28 percent. Still, it made JG the country's third most profitable holding company in absolute profits, behind the P10.4 billion of SM Investments and the P10 billion of Ayala Corp., but above the P3.3 billion of Alliance Global and P3.2 billion of Aboitiz Equity Ventures, Inc.

JG is No. 1 in textiles and branded snack food, No. 2 in retailing, airline and landline phone, No. 3 in property and wireless phone. Airline and cellular service still have to make money though revenues are rising. Textile sales are down. Property is booming. The best business is finance, the forte of Gokongwei and his son, the heir Lance Gokongwei, who has a double summa in engineering and finance at UPenn.

Finance was the No. 1 moneymaker for JG Summit in 2005, P2.16 billion, followed by food manufacturing P2.07 billion, and property, P1.1 billion.

In sales, JG Summit is bigger than SM Investments Corp., the holding company of retailing taipan and banker Henry Sy Sr. SMIC had revenues in 2005 of P53.98 billion in 2005, about P17 billion less than those of Gokongwei's.

Though JG Summit has 31 percent more revenues than SMIC, the latter has 2.78 times market capitalization—P113 billion vs. P40.78 billion. It's a question of who is more profitable.

SMIC's return on equity is 11.61 percent, more than twice the 5.22 percent of JG Summit in 2005.

In the first quarter, JG Summit did exceedingly well. Revenues rose 46 percent to P23.53 billion (from P16 billion) while profits surged 7.7 times to P4.28 billion from P559 million in the same period last year, thanks to a one-time gain of P3.21 billion from the offering of URC shares in February 2006.

In 2005, the biggest revenue makers for JG were: food P32.68 billion, telecom P10.44 billion, finance P5.89 billion, property P5.4 billion, petrochemical P5.04 billion, and textiles P2.97 billion.

To generate those revenues, Gokongwei invested P213 billion, the amount of his assets.

Based on net income attributed to equity holders of the parent company, profits amounted to P3.88 billion, up from P750 million in March 2005. First-quarter revenues were driven by growth in core revenues from food, real estate, and petrochemical.

The business of JG Summit started in 1957 when Universal Corn Products, Inc. (now Universal Robina Corp.) was established to operate a cornstarch plant in Manila.

JG describes Gokongwei as—the entrepreneur, who invested in agribusiness and the manufacture of feeds and prime food commodities; the visionary, who channeled resources and expanded into financial services, textile and property, all backbones of a growing economy; the captain of industry, who invested in power, telecommunications, petrochemicals, cement, and air transportation, all requisites for industrialization; the innovator, who continually provides value and fun in snacking; and the new regional multinational, who has embraced the challenge of global competitiveness with zeal.