The Home Development Mutual Fund (Pag-IBIG Fund) is optimistic that its net profit this year could still reach as high as P28 billion despite the negative impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic on its operations.
In a briefing on Friday, Pag-IBIG Fund Chief Executive Officer Acmad Rizaldy Moti said the global health crisis and its effects on various sectors of the economy had dragged the number of active members of the state-owned firm by more than 2 million.
Pag-IBIG Fund’s active members declined to 12.69 million as of September from 14.6 million at the end of 2019.
Despite this, Moti said Pag-IBIG Fund was still looking at posting P25 billion to P28 billion in net income this year.
Although the projected figure was P6 billion to P9 billion smaller than Pag-IBIG Fund’s all-time-high income of P34.37 billion last year, the official said it was still better than the earlier estimate his firm made.
“Based on stress tests that we’ve conducted in September, the P25-28-billion net income will be much better than originally projected. Based on stress tests [in] April-May, the numbers that we worked on was around a net income of only P20 billion,” he said.
The Pag-IBIG Fund chief also said emerging numbers were “encouraging” as net earnings in the first nine months of the year already hit P21.65 billion.
“This is good news despite the effects of the pandemic on our lending business. It’s very encouraging. It looks like lending has stabilized and started to recover, and has gone back to the pre-pandemic levels,” he said.
For instance, Moti said, housing loan releases already reached P44 billion in January to October while short-term loan releases settled at P26.02 billion in the nine months to September.
The firm attributed its upbeat outlook to those members who continued pay their obligations to the fund. Pag-IBIG Fund also believes that the country has managed to come up with measures to live with the coronavirus, which could lead to more economic activities.
“I am hopeful that we will soon see much stronger or much bigger economic activity happening all around us. So we hope that the momentum will carry over to next year,” Moti said.
Meanwhile, he said another positive development was the expected record-high collections of the firm from the Modified Pag-IBIG 2 Savings Program (MP2) this year.
MP2 is a voluntary savings program that provides active members and retirees who are former Pag-IBIG members with another savings option that has a term of only five years.
“We are happy to share with everyone that, for the first nine months of the year, our MP2 savings have been already above the level during the same period in 2019. So we are looking at around P12 billion or even higher. It looks like this year we will set the highest ever MP2 collections from our members,” Moti said.
In 2019, collections from MP2 Savings surged by 169 percent to P12.01 billion from P4.47 billion in 2018.
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Article and Photo originally posted by Manila Times last November 29, 2020 and written by Mayvelin U. Caraballo.
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