Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Philippine Star

MANILA, Philippines - SM Prime Holdings, Inc. (SM Prime), the Philippines’ dominant mall developer and operator, won the Emerging Markets Highly Commended award from the Singapore-based Asia Pacific Real Estate Association (APREA) Best Practices Awards 2011.

In addition, the company has been given the following APREA merit awards: Emerging Markets – Valuation Category, Emerging Markets – Corporate Governance Category and Country Award – Best Submission from the Philippines.

SM Prime received the multiple awards last Oct. 11 during special ceremonies held in Singapore.

APREA is a non-profit industry association that represents the real estate sector in the Asia Pacific region. The association works to encourage greater investment in the real estate sector through the provision of better information to investors, improving the general operating environment, encouraging best practices, and generally unifying and strengthening the industry.

According to APREA’s chief executive officer, Peter Mitchell, the awards help highlight the importance of APREA’s best practices handbook recommendations and will go a long way in addressing the issues of fragmentation in the Asian real estate market, as well as influence a greater harmonization in standards and industry practices. He added that the entrants for the awards are all playing an important role in elevating the importance of best practices in the region and are actively enforcing them internally, and that their submissions were of the highest quality.

Currently, SM Prime owns and operates 41 SM shopping malls in the Philippines, with a combined gross floor area of approximately five million square meters and average daily foot traffic of three million.

In addition, the company has four SM malls in mainland China.

For the rest of 2011, SM Prime is scheduled to open three new malls in the Philippines.