Ayala, one of Asia’s oldest conglomerates, wants to keep itself together. Its CEO explains why

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........

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