The Complete History of Megaworld & the Story of Billionaire Andrew Tan

Andrew Tan started out selling cheap liquor door to door. Today he sits on top of one of the largest business empires in the Philippines, spanning condos, malls, casinos, McDonald's, and the world's best-selling brandy.

This is the story of how a poor immigrant kid from Fujian built Megaworld, and the sprawling group of companies that sits above it.

I first told this story on the channel a few years ago, and that video is below. A lot has moved since: a new CEO runs Megaworld, McDonald's was restructured out of the accounts, and the whole group got repriced. So everything under the video is the written version, brought up to date, with the parts I got wrong the first time corrected.

Who Is Andrew Tan?

Andrew Tan was born in Fujian, China, moved with his family to Hong Kong, and then to the Philippines while he was still young. The family lived modestly in Manila. His father worked in a factory and his mother earned what she could through small-scale vending.

He worked his way through the University of the East, taking part-time jobs to support himself. His first real business was trading, and famously that included selling liquor, going business to business hawking cheap spirits. That early grind gave him two things that shaped everything after: a hard-nosed understanding of how ordinary Filipinos spend money, and the discipline to keep reinvesting.

The two obsessions that came out of that period, liquor and property, are still the twin pillars of his empire today.

The History of Megaworld

Tan incorporated Megaworld on August 24, 1989, with five employees. He was one of them. The group employs more than 5,500 people now.

The timing was deliberate. Metro Manila was starting to urbanize fast, and Tan's insight was simple but early: there was a huge, underserved middle-income market that wanted quality condominium living, not just the wealthy few.

He started with residential condo projects aimed at that middle segment. The real breakthrough came in 1996, when Megaworld shifted to the township model, the "Live-Work-Play" concept. Instead of building a standalone tower, it would develop an entire self-contained community with residences, offices, malls, and hotels in one master-planned zone.

Eastwood City in Quezon City was the first, and it became the template. Then came McKinley Hill, Uptown Bonifacio in BGC, Iloilo Business Park, and dozens more across the country. This is why Megaworld keeps outperforming rivals: when you own the whole township, the offices fill the malls, the malls serve the condos, and the hotels catch the overflow. Every part reinforces the others.

Today Megaworld is the country's leading township developer and one of its biggest office landlords, with more than 725 residential developments, 20 lifestyle malls, about 1.4 million square meters of leasable office space across more than 70 towers, and close to 4,000 hotel rooms.

How Big Is Alliance Global Group?

Here's the part most people miss. Megaworld is famous, but it is not the top of the pyramid. Sitting above it is Alliance Global Group, Inc. (AGI), the holding company Andrew Tan uses to control everything. Megaworld is one arm of it.

So how does it stack up against the other Philippine conglomerates? Here is 2025, side by side.

AGI is comfortably third. It earns more than Filinvest but sits at about half of Ayala's revenue and a little over a quarter of SM's.

The reason for the gap is structural, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about Andrew Tan's empire: the other two own banks, and he does not. Banking alone made up 49 percent of SM's consolidated net income in 2025. BPI, Ayala's bank, earned P66.6 billion on its own, which is more than three times AGI's entire attributable profit of P20.7 billion. SM and Ayala are financial institutions with property attached. AGI is property, liquor and tourism, with no deposit base underneath it.

That shapes everything. A bank throws off capital in every part of the cycle. Condos, malls, casinos and brandy do not. It is why Tan's growth has come from acquisitions and townships rather than compounding a loan book, and why the group leans so hard on recurring rental income now.

Then there is the strangest number in Philippine business. Through mid-2026, the market valued the whole of Alliance Global at roughly P70 to 77 billion. The group's balance sheet carries about P877 billion in total assets. Its shares have traded at a price-to-earnings ratio near 2.5, against a market that generally prices its big conglomerates in the low teens.

There are real reasons for that discount rather than a conspiracy. Megaworld, Emperador and MREIT are all separately listed, so an investor who wants exposure can buy them directly and skip the parent entirely, and a large share of the group's book value belongs to the minority shareholders of those listed units rather than to AGI's own holders. Holding companies are discounted everywhere in the world for exactly this reason.

Still, the size of it is unusual. The empire is large by output, mid-sized by profit, and priced like neither.

Real Estate: Megaworld and Its Family

This is the flagship segment. Megaworld Corporation is the anchor, handling the townships, condos, offices, lifestyle malls, and hotels. Around it sits a family of related property companies.

Global-Estate Resorts, Inc. (GERI) handles tourism estates and leisure-oriented developments. Empire East Land Holdings targets the mass and affordable residential market. MREIT, Inc. is Megaworld's real estate investment trust, which holds its income-generating office and retail properties. Megaworld Lifestyle Malls runs the retail side, including Eastwood Mall, Uptown Mall, Lucky Chinatown, and Venice Grand Canal Mall.

How Filipino Brand Emperador Conquered Spain's Fundador

This is where the cheap liquor origin story comes full circle, and it has become far bigger than most Filipinos realize.

Tan launched Emperador brandy in 1990, when gin and rum ruled the Philippine market, and positioned it as an aspirational drink for younger drinkers. By 2013 it was the best-selling brandy on the planet. Then, in fourteen months across 2014 and 2015, Emperador bought its way into Scotland and Spain. What is interesting is not that it happened, but how.

Scotland came from a regulator, not a bidding war. In 2014 Emperador paid £430 million for Whyte & Mackay, the world's fifth-largest Scotch producer, with five distilleries and 175 years of history. It was on the market only because the UK competition authority forced the sale: Diageo had taken control of Whyte & Mackay's Indian owner, and letting it keep the brand would have pushed Diageo to roughly 40 percent of UK blended whisky. Emperador beat Campari, KKR and Lion Capital to an asset that would otherwise never have been for sale. A Philippine brandy maker ended up owning The Dalmore, a single malt that trades against Macallan at auction, because a regulator in London created a seller.

Spain came from a portfolio cull. A year later Emperador paid €275 million for Beam Suntory's Jerez brandy and sherry business. Beam Suntory said plainly that a review had concluded the business was worth more to someone else. Emperador got Fundador, the first brand ever marketed as Brandy de Jerez, along with the Harveys sherry name and Bodegas Fundador, Spain's oldest brandy cellars.

The Fundador deal is the one worth pausing on. Emperador brandy was modeled on Fundador in the first place. Fundador had led the Philippine market for more than a century, and the Philippines remains its single biggest export market at roughly 40 percent of annual production. So Tan did not buy his way into Spain. He bought the Spanish brand his own brand had imitated, whose largest customer base was already his home market. He also bought something a brandy company cannot manufacture on demand: decades of aged stock, sitting in cellars, already finished waiting.

There is a longer arc underneath the deal, and it is the part Emperador's own press releases will never put in writing. Spain ruled the Philippines for 333 years. Brandy is part of what it left behind, which is why a country with no brandy tradition of its own became one of the biggest brandy markets on earth. Fundador was created in Jerez in 1874, the first product ever sold as Brandy de Jerez, at a time when Manila was still governed from Madrid. The cellars it came from date to 1730.

So the Spanish house that Filipinos grew up treating as the real thing, the imported benchmark the local bottle was always measured against, is older than Philippine independence from Spain by twenty-four years. In 2015 a Filipino company bought it outright: the brand, the bodega, the vineyards, the name. The copy bought the original. And the man who signed for it was an immigrant kid from Fujian who had started out carrying cheap spirits door to door in Manila.

The pattern across both deals is not the one the company tells about itself. Emperador did not outbid the giants for trophies. It bought what the giants were forced to release or no longer wanted, in categories where the asset was already the anchor. The man who sold cheap spirits door to door built a luxury spirits house out of other people's problems.

What Hotels Does Megaworld Own?

Megaworld runs its own hotel arm, Megaworld Hotels & Resorts, and unusually for this market the brands are homegrown rather than licensed from abroad. There are six of them, spread across the townships and the tourism destinations.

Richmonde Hotels covers the business traveler, with properties in Ortigas, Eastwood and Iloilo. Belmont Hotels is the mid-market line, in Manila, Mactan, Boracay and now Iloilo, where the 405-room Belmont is the largest hotel in the city. Savoy Hotels sits alongside it in Manila, Mactan and Boracay. Then there is Kingsford Hotel in Parañaque, Twin Lakes Hotel near Tagaytay, and Hotel Lucky Chinatown in Binondo, with the 1,530-room Grand Westside still to come.

The logic is the same township logic as everything else. A Megaworld hotel usually sits inside a Megaworld development, next to Megaworld offices and a Megaworld mall, catching the business travelers and visitors that the rest of the estate generates.

One thing that is not Megaworld's, despite what almost everyone assumes. Newport World Resorts, the integrated casino-resort across from NAIA that used to be called Resorts World Manila, does not belong to Megaworld. It belongs to Travellers International Hotel Group, a separate company sitting under Alliance Global. Same empire, different arm. Travellers runs the casino, the Newport mall, the cinemas, the Newport Performing Arts Theater and the hotels around it, and it is the group's gaming and tourism play rather than its property one.

Is McDonald's Philippines Owned by Megaworld?

No, and this is the part of the empire people get most wrong, including the version I told in the original video.

Two things are tangled up here. Megaworld itself owns none of McDonald's Philippines. The stake sits with Alliance Global, the parent company, which makes Megaworld a sibling of the investment rather than its owner. And that stake is 49 percent, a large minority rather than control. The story of how it happened also runs the opposite direction to what most people assume.

McDonald's Philippines was not built by Andrew Tan. It was built by George Yang, who opened the first branch in Morayta, Manila in 1981. McDonald's International had to partner with a Filipino in the first place because foreign companies were barred from majority ownership of local businesses. Yang's company and the separate Golden Arches Development Corporation merged in 2002, with GADC surviving.

Then in 2005 came the move that matters. McDonald's Corporation sold out of its own Philippine business. The Yang family, together with Andrew Tan's Alliance Global, bought the American parent's remaining stake, and McDonald's Philippines became one hundred percent Filipino-owned: 51 percent to the Yangs, 49 percent to Alliance Global.

So nobody "agreed to be under" Alliance Global. McDonald's Corporation chose to stop being an owner and remain a franchisor, which is the model it has moved toward in market after market. Owning restaurants ties up capital; licensing them to well-capitalized local operators does not, and the brand still collects its royalties either way. What it needed was a Filipino partner with deep pockets and somewhere to put restaurants. A man who was building entire townships, malls and office districts had both.

That relationship was renewed in April 2025 with a fresh twenty-year franchise agreement. The new terms are what triggered the accounting change: AGI stopped consolidating GADC line by line in March 2025, booked a one-time P3.4 billion revaluation gain, and now carries its 49 percent as an associate rather than a subsidiary. The business itself kept growing through all of it, ending 2024 with 792 stores after a record 65 openings in a single year.

Infrastructure, Digital and Delivery

Infracorp Development, Inc. is the group's infrastructure arm, its bet on the long-term buildout of Philippine roads, utilities and large-scale projects, extending the empire beyond buildings into the systems that connect them.

The group has also made newer technology plays, including AGILE Digital Ventures and the delivery app Pickaroo, its attempt to build a modern digital and logistics layer across its retail and real estate footprint.

What Kevin Tan Changed

An empire this size eventually raises the question of who takes over. That was settled a while ago. Kevin Andrew Tan, Andrew's eldest son, became CEO of Alliance Global in 2018 at the age of 38, which made him the youngest person running a major Philippine conglomerate at the time. He added the president title six years later, and also serves as Megaworld's chief strategy officer. He came up through the commercial side running the lifestyle malls.

What is more interesting than the succession is what he actually did with it, because his moves have a clear and consistent shape. Andrew Tan built things. Kevin Tan restructured how they are owned and funded.

He turned finished buildings back into cash. In October 2021 he took MREIT public, raising P15.29 billion, with himself as its president. The logic is that a township developer sinks enormous capital into offices and malls that then sit on the balance sheet earning rent for decades. Spinning them into a listed REIT sells those finished assets to income investors and recycles the proceeds into building the next township. The P27 billion infusion still working through the SEC in 2026 is the fifth round of the same machine.

He took Emperador out of the country's stock market. In July 2022 Emperador took a secondary listing on the Singapore Exchange, the first company primarily listed in Manila ever to do it. The reasoning is sound: Emperador stopped being a Philippine brandy company somewhere around the Whyte & Mackay purchase, and a global spirits business with Scottish distilleries and Spanish bodegas was being priced by an investor base that could only see it as a Philippine stock.

He converted an operating business into an investment. The 2025 McDonald's restructuring, where AGI dropped to a 49 percent associate stake and booked a P3.4 billion gain, is the same instinct applied in reverse.

Put those together and a pattern shows up that connects to the valuation problem above. Nearly every major Kevin Tan decision is an attempt to get the market to price the pieces properly, by listing them somewhere the right buyers can see them. Judged on the AGI share price, it has not worked yet. Judged on capital recycled back into the business, it plainly has.

Where the Empire Stands in 2026

A lot has shifted since this story was first told, so here is the current state of play.

Megaworld is no longer run by its founder. In June 2024, after more than three decades as chair and president, Andrew Tan handed the top operating role to Lourdes Gutierrez-Alfonso, the company's former COO and its second-ever employee, who joined as its accountant in 1990. Tan stayed on as chairman. Combined with Kevin Tan running AGI, the empire is now led by a mix of family and professional management.

It is still growing in a tough market. In the first half of 2026, net income rose 5 percent to P12.7 billion on revenues of P44.2 billion. The fastest-growing segment was hotels and resorts, up 11 percent to P3.1 billion, boosted by the June opening of the 405-room Belmont Hotel Iloilo, the city's largest, which took Iloilo Business Park to 880 room keys, about a quarter of Iloilo City's entire room inventory. Lifestyle malls grew 8 percent to P3.6 billion with occupancy at 95 percent, and office rentals grew 5 percent to P7.8 billion.

Provincial townships are carrying the residential side. While Metro Manila's condo market slumped hard, with net unit pre-sales falling 47 percent according to Colliers, Megaworld's residential pre-sales rose 15 percent to P63 billion, driven by provincial projects like Ilocandia Coastown and Paragua Coastown.

The leasing target is 2030. Megaworld is building toward three million square meters of leasable space by the end of the decade, roughly two million in offices and one million in retail. On the hotel side it plans to go from 13 operating properties and about 6,000 rooms to 22 properties and around 9,000 rooms by 2029.

The biggest REIT deal of the year. In July 2026 Megaworld and MREIT approved a P27 billion property-for-share swap, the fifth and largest such infusion, with the deed signed in September and still pending SEC approval. It moves Festive Walk Iloilo, Lucky Chinatown, Venice Grand Canal, Eastwood Mall and Southwoods Mall plus the 737-room Holiday Inn Express Manila Newport City into the REIT, adding 303,900 square meters of leasable space and taking MREIT's assets under management to about P122 billion.

On the liquor side, Emperador is riding what analysts call premiumization, with the whisky business expected to rebound as global demand for premium and luxury spirits recovers, led by The Dalmore and the Whyte & Mackay malts.

The Takeaway

Andrew Tan's story is the same move repeated at larger and larger scale: spot an underserved market, build the aspirational product, then own the entire value chain around it. He did it with brandy for the everyday Filipino, then with condos for the middle class, then with whole townships, then with a global luxury whisky house. The kid selling cheap liquor door to door never stopped selling. He just kept moving upmarket, and building the empire underneath it.