ANGELES CITY, Pampanga, Philippines — Homegrown businesses in this Pampanga city are growing despite the expansion here of large Metro Manila-based companies.

AC Beautiful Island Realty Development Corp. of the Jenra Group of Companies launched early this month its retail and leisure strip here called The Shoppes.

The local developer has leased 90 percent of its 7,000-square-meter center, with tenants, including local investors, scheduled to open in January 2020.

The Shoppes is located within Phase 2 of The Infinity, a 40-hectare property beside the Angeles City Hall and Ayala’s Marquee Mall that is being developed as a business district by Jenra’s realty arm.

Complete town

“We are complementing Marquee,” – Byron John Siy, grandson of the 93-year-old patriarch, Ricardo Tan (also known as Tan Song Bok), said. “Competition is a strong word for us.”

He said his grandfather had envisioned a complete town to rise on the property.

Tan and his son, Eddie, had put up a chain of malls, supermarkets and fast-food centers. Helping in the fight against cancer in Central Luzon, they set up the Sacred Heart Medical Center, also in Angeles City.

The city is also home to fiber internet and cable television company, Dennis Anthony Uy’s Converge ICT Solutions Inc.

American private equity firm, Warburg Pincus, recently invested $250 million in Converge, helping Uy bring fiber internet to the Visayas via submarine cables.