Megaworld launching new mall, shopping centers

March 18, 2025 | 12:00am

MANILA, Philippines — Real estate giant Megaworld Corp. looks to jack up its position in the country’s mall segment as it plans to bolster its retail leasing portfolio in the coming years and put up shopping centers across all of its township developments nationwide.

Graham Coates, first vice president and head of Megaworld Lifestyle Malls, told The STAR that the company is set to launch a new mall this year to add to its current portfolio 22 lifestyle malls.

“Our focus is to populate all the remaining spaces in our malls, but we’re planning ahead,” he said.

Coates said the township growth of Megaworld serves as forerunner for the group’s mall growth.

“Last year, we celebrated our 35th anniversary and we hit 35 townships. As I mentioned, we already have 22 malls. So we still have a catch-up plan to make sure that we are participating in all of those 35 townships,” he said.

Coates said that Megaworld is embarking on a plan to expand the gross leasable area for its malls to one million square meters by 2030.

“So we have a 2030 plan. We’re currently at 500,000, so we’re going to double that by 2030,” he said.

Coates said that unlike some of its competitors, all of Megaworld’s 22 malls are very distinct from each other.

“So when you go to one Megaworld mall, it would look completely different from another. And what drives that is the destination and the location. So Uptown Mall is completely different to Lucky Chinatown Mall, which is completely different to Southwoods, which is completely different from Twin Lakes,” Coates said.

“We don’t necessarily decide what mall to build. We basically look at the location where we’re operated in. We will make sure that the mall fits the location that we operate in,” he said.

Coates also said that while malls are a brick-and-mortar business, Megaworld Lifestyle Malls embraces digitalization as well.

“Innovation is an integral part of everything we do in Megaworld. We want to be the first. We want to be the best. We want to innovate. So digitalization is one of the key aspects that we as a company is always looking at,” Coates said.

“We’re the property. We’re the base, but we’re only as good as the retailers. So we’re constantly monitoring the retailers that we have within our property to see and make sure that they are doing a lot of big innovation. We have a lot of integration with all the retailers and making sure that they are innovating as much as we do,” he said.

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