Dennis Gaviola

Article (news)

Arthur Fuentes

ABS-CBN News

The PJ Lhuillier Group&#x27;s quiet march toward &quot;financial independence for every Filipino&quot; is picking up a new pillar: housing. CFO Cliff Cabungcal tells us, exclusively, that a pilot development is in the works under the Cebuana Homes banner — house-and-lots priced between two and five million pesos, squarely in NCR&#x27;s middle-market bracket. The company wants monthly amortization comes in at an affordable P12,000 to P15,000, gentle enough on ordinary families&#x27; cash flow that it starts to look less like a mortgage and more like a slightly bigger rent payment.This fits a thesis the group has been running for years, and running well.Exhibit A: Xpress Go, its ride-hailing arm, which landed on Forbes Asia&#x27;s 100 Companies to Watch after only a few years on the road. The pitch to drivers was never just lower commissions — the vision is &quot;own CEO&quot; status, cash-flow coaching so a driver stops living hand to mouth, all backed by Cebuana Lhuillier&#x27;s Kanegosyo Center. Naturally, drivers also get microinsurance, cheap CTPL, and financing for BYD electric vehicles. The group already runs a bank, a remittance arm, an insurance broker, and a lending company alongside the pawnshops — Xpress Go is just the version with a steering wheel.Exhibit B: the group&#x27;s gold play with the BSP. PJ Lhuillier Inc. got accredited in 2024 to buy gold straight from small-scale miners, turning Cebuana&#x27;s 3,500 branches into a nationwide collection network bigger than BDO Unibank&#x27;s. Hmm, remember the online criticism hurled at the BSP when it sold gold a year ago, when prices were rising? It looks like it has a steady supply that it can buy in pesos. As of 2022, only 1 percent of small-scale gold was reaching the BSP legally — the rest bled out through the black market. Consolidate enough of those small, informal sales, and suddenly you&#x27;re moving the needle on gross international reserves.The numbers already back it up. From these small purchases from small-scale miners, total transactions have crossed P6 billion. PJ Lhuillier is currently present in the seven largest Minahang Bayan areas (Sagada, Itogon, Lobo, Paracale, Placer, Nabunturan, and T&#x27;boli), and Cabungcal isn&#x27;t stopping there: &quot;We are planning to cover all the 59 declared minahang bayan nationwide in the next years, and will prepare for the 200 pending declarations.&quot;That&#x27;s the quiet genius of it: illegal small-scale miners now have an actual incentive to go legal, since going legal means selling to Cebuana at market price instead of to a middleman shaving off his cut. The macro upside follows naturally — the BSP buys the gold in pesos, adding to the GIR the organic way, no market intervention required.Housing, then, isn&#x27;t a side quest. It&#x27;s the same playbook.<div>IT-BPM&#x27;s Next Frontier</div>IBPAP president and CEO Jack Madrid has spent this year resetting expectations on the sector&#x27;s revenue and employment targets to the lower end of the range — not exactly a victory lap. But in the same breath, he points to a subsector that could bring in 50% to 60% more revenue per employee if the country tapped it properly.Enter Global Capability Centers. These aren&#x27;t subsidiaries or outsourced back-office cousins — they&#x27;re strategic units of the headquarters itself, for some of the world&#x27;s biggest companies. Madrid says IBPAP&#x27;s GCC roadmap hasn&#x27;t even launched yet, and this early, it&#x27;s already shaping up to be one of the country&#x27;s bigger dollar earners.<div>Boardroom Tea comes out every Wednesday.</div>

The PJ Lhuillier Group's quiet march toward "financial independence for every Filipino" is picking up a new pillar: housing.

The PJ Lhuillier Group's quiet march toward "financial independence for every Filipino" is picking up a new pillar: housing.

Boardroom Tea: Lhuillier empire goes into housing

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Boardroom Tea: Lhuillier empire goes into housing

Arthur Fuentes,

ABS-CBN News

Published July 22, 2026 10:00 PM PHT

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Updated July 22, 2026 10:02 PM PHT

Read More:

Lhuillier Group

pawnshop

housing

gold

IT-BPM

call center

Jack Madrid

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