Every Industry Pulse story and Business Wisdom reflection we've published, in one browsable archive — filter by stream or by year to find what you're looking for.
Showing all 22 articles.
Meralco increased generation-driven rates by about ₱0.15/kWh for June, after the Luzon grid was placed on red alert for three consecutive days in May and WESM spot prices climbed to roughly ₱7.03/kWh under tight supply. The secondary price cap was triggered nearly 4% of the period.
This is the captive customer's reality in one bill: when the spot market tightens, the cost flows straight through to you, and you have no seat at the table. That is precisely the exposure RCOA was built to manage. A well-structured Retail Supply Contract lets you lock in fixed pricing and insulate your budget from WESM volatility. The businesses that became contestable on June 26 now get to choose how much of this risk they carry. The ones who wait don't.
The Energy Regulatory Commission approved Resolution No. 22, Series of 2025, lowering the contestability threshold to 100 kW average monthly peak demand. The change opens retail competition to roughly 12,000+ medium-sized enterprises previously locked into their distribution utility's default rate.
This is the single biggest structural shift in Philippine retail electricity since EPIRA. If your business is in the 100–499 kW band, you have now become contestable for the first time. You can switch on a 90-day rolling basis from June 26 onward. Don't wait for your neighbors to figure it out first.
Meralco PowerGen's Terra Solar Philippines began generating its first 250 MW of solar capacity and energized the first tranche of its battery energy storage system, capable of discharging 450 MWh during off-peak hours and evening peaks. Once fully built out, the project will deliver 3.5 GW of solar and 4.5 GWh of BESS.
Grid-scale storage in the Philippines is no longer theoretical. The math behind time-of-use pricing, peak shaving, and behind-the-meter BESS economics fundamentally changes when 450 MWh of nighttime discharge is feeding Luzon. Ask your RES candidate explicitly how they plan to pass through these storage-enabled price structures.
Meralco PowerGen's 25 MW / 56.44 MWh battery storage facility in Toledo, Cebu is now operational, with Phase 2 of equal capacity coming online next. It is the first two-hour BESS in the Visayas, capable of delivering continuous rated output for two hours before recharging.
Storage maturity is moving from Luzon outward. For clients with Visayas or Mindanao operations, this should reset what you consider "grid reliable" — and reset your expectations on how aggressive your RES partner can be with peak-cost mitigation. Talk to us before your next supply agreement.
The National Intelligence Coordinating Agency reported 234 data breaches across high-level government agencies in 2025, with credentials from 32 organizations surfacing on dark web marketplaces. DICT documented more than 20,000 vulnerabilities exploited by organized threat groups across multiple departments.
If government agencies with national budgets are being penetrated at this scale, the "we're too small to be a target" defense has officially expired for private enterprises. Most breaches we see in mid-sized PH businesses are credential stuffing, phishing, and unpatched perimeter devices. Our free baseline cybersecurity assessment exists for exactly this reason.
As of late 2025, more than 2,300 contestable customers had switched to the retail market under RCOA, and 37 Retail Aggregated Groups represented a combined demand of 31 MW. ERC indicated a Comprehensive Roadmap to outline phased implementation of RCOA, RAP, and the Green Energy Option Program.
2,300 customers is the early-adopter cohort. Now that the threshold has dropped to 100 kW, that number will swell by an order of magnitude. RES providers have finite capacity to onboard new accounts — early movers get better terms. Retail Aggregated Groups let businesses below the threshold pool demand and qualify together. We help build them.
Check Point's Philippine Threat Landscape Report documents a 423% rise in phishing sites, a 37% jump in fake executive and brand profiles, and a doubling of third-party breach incidents from 8 to 29 cases. The Qilin ransomware group is deploying AI chatbots to automate ransom negotiations and scale financial deception across finance, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.
The attack profile has changed. This is automated, industrialized, and indiscriminate — a business with 50 employees is as exposed as one with 5,000 if both lack a 24/7 monitoring layer. A Security Operations Center that only watches during business hours is a liability, not a safeguard. Start with a baseline assessment — ours is free and takes 48 hours.
While individual online scam cases fell 48%, organized AI-assisted attacks surged — ransomware incidents in H1 2025 already matched all of 2024 combined, per Viettel Threat Intelligence. Criminals are deploying cloned executive voices, AI-generated videos, and automated phishing campaigns to execute business email compromise at industrial scale.
The 48% drop in petty scams is being misread as good news. It isn't — the attack surface moved upmarket. The defense is not a better spam filter. It is identity verification protocols, multi-person approval thresholds for outbound payments, and a team trained to pause before acting on urgency.
BlueVoyant's 6th annual global supply chain defense report found every surveyed Philippine organization was negatively impacted by a supply-chain breach in the past year — the highest rate in the study. 55% report zero autonomous visibility into their supply chain's security posture, against a global average of 39%.
Your security is only as strong as the weakest vendor connected to your systems. The question to put to your current IT setup today: which of our vendors has direct access to our systems, and when did we last validate their security posture? If you can't answer that in five minutes, the exposure is real.
AboitizPower has broken ground on a 60 MW battery energy storage system in Naga City, Cebu, designed to bid directly into the national reserves market for fast-acting frequency regulation. The project lands as part of a broader industry pattern — developers pairing new storage capacity with coal-fired retirements — as more commercial solar comes online across Luzon and the Visayas.
Watch what generators are building, not just what they're announcing. When a major player like AboitizPower puts steel in the ground on storage while stepping back from coal, that's a read on where grid economics — and pricing — are headed over the next few years. More flexible, storage-backed capacity coming online gives RES providers more room to offer competitive terms to contestable customers now.
President Marcos, First Lady Liza Marcos, and Energy Secretary Sharon Garin formally inaugurated Phase 1 of MTerra Solar in Gapan City, Nueva Ecija — now delivering 1,373 MW of energized solar PV alongside 825 MW (3,300 MWh) of battery storage. At full build-out the project will reach 3,500 MW of solar and 4,500 MWh of storage.
This is presidential-level validation of the solar-plus-storage model, not just another plant opening. The scale of BESS attached to MTerra directly addresses the "duck curve" problem that has made solar unreliable for evening peak pricing. If your RES conversation hasn't touched on how your supplier sources storage-backed capacity, it should now.
Meralco announced a further ₱0.3428/kWh increase for July, pushing the typical residential rate to ₱14.8261/kWh. In the same release, Meralco urged qualified customers to participate in the competitive retail market — pointing to the June 26 threshold cut and RAP as ways smaller consumers can access supplier choice.
When the distribution utility itself is telling customers to go shop for a better rate, that's about as strong a market signal as you'll get. Two consecutive monthly rate increases isn't a blip — it's a pattern. Every month spent on the sidelines is a rate hike you no longer have to absorb, once you're eligible to switch.
A new Philippines DMARC & MTA-STS Adoption Report finds most Philippine domains still lack enforced email-authentication policies, even as average ASEAN corporate data-breach costs climb to $3.23 million. Publishing a DMARC record without an enforced reject policy does little to stop the domain spoofing used in business email compromise scams.
Email spoofing is one of the cheapest attacks to run — and one of the cheapest to close off. Properly enforced DMARC, MTA-STS, and DNSSEC stop a large share of the fake-invoice and fake-executive scams we see hitting Philippine SMEs. If you don't know your own domain's DMARC enforcement status, that's a five-minute check worth doing this week.
Most Philippine mid-market firms manage between 12 and 18 separate vendors for functions that could be handled by a single integrated partner — HR here, IT there, energy somewhere else, compliance on the side. Each relationship demands its own meetings, its own paperwork, its own context-switching tax.
The bridge mindset is the conviction that better outcomes come from fewer, deeper relationships — partners who understand each other's businesses, who carry the context forward. The question isn't "who's the cheapest vendor for this task?" The question is "who already understands enough about my business to do this right the first time?"
In every market and every season, somebody is offering a shortcut: a faster close, an under-the-table accommodation, a number that gets bent to make the deal work today. The math always looks good at the start. It almost never does at the end.
What you build on shortcuts you spend the rest of your career defending. What you build on integrity compounds — clients refer you, partners trust you, regulators leave you alone, your own team sleeps well.
Most growth plans we see in Philippine SMEs assume that scale will solve the problem. More revenue. More headcount. More locations. It almost never works that way — scale doesn't fix broken processes, it multiplies them.
The operating order should be: fix it, then scale it. Boring? Yes. Effective? Always.
It's tempting to treat service as something the front-line team handles after the work is done. That's hospitality, not service. Service is what shapes the work before it begins.
Trust isn't a marketing claim — it's the cumulative outcome of a thousand small disciplines: returning the call when we said we would, flagging a risk the client hasn't asked about, recommending the cheaper option when it's the right one.
Every business owner watches the line items — rent, payroll, power, materials. The dangerous risks are the ones with no line item: the supplier concentration you never diversified, the unpatched system nobody owns, the single key person whose departure would stall everything.
The discipline of stewardship is the habit of going looking for the costs that haven't happened yet, and spending a little now so you don't spend a fortune later.
Every June 12, we mark the day a people decided they would no longer be governed by anyone but themselves. For most of our history, a Filipino business owner had no say over some of the largest costs on the books — you paid what you were told, to the only supplier you were allowed to use.
We are in the business of helping Filipino enterprises stand on their own terms — to choose their suppliers, to control their costs, to grow without surrendering their judgment to anyone.
Mabuhay ang Pilipinas.
The most consequential business decisions in the Philippines are rarely made in boardrooms. They're made in the silence before anyone books the room — or in the failure to set the criteria before the conversation begins.
The discipline is not saying no. It is agreeing — before the meeting starts — on what "no" looks like. That decision, made in quiet, is worth more than any amount of due diligence done under deadline pressure.
Every structural market shift opens a window that closes. Not dramatically — it narrows quietly, as the early movers lock in the relationships, the pricing, and the terms that later entrants will spend years trying to renegotiate from a weaker position.
Most of the value in any structural reform accrues to whoever showed up before the crowd decided it was safe. That is not a market insight. It is just how time works.
Every growing business hits the same wall: the founder who could once touch every decision personally no longer can. Some leaders respond by delegating the work while keeping a death-grip on every decision — which isn't delegation at all, just supervision with extra steps. Others swing the other way: they hand off the task and the accountability together, then act surprised when standards slip somewhere they stopped looking.
Real delegation keeps the accountability where it belongs — with you — while genuinely transferring the authority to act. It's the operating principle behind how BridgePoint's alliance network functions: every partner is licensed, vetted, and given real authority to execute in their domain. We don't shadow their work line by line. But we never stop owning the outcome the client experiences.