Injap Sia-led DoubleDragon subsidiary begins trading on Nasdaq

Manila, Philippines – Philippine chicken BBQ king Edgar “Injap” Sia II is foraying into the global capital markets, with one of his property empire’s units being the first-ever Filipino-owned company to be listed and traded on the Nasdaq.

Hotel101 Global Holdings Corp., a subsidiary of DoubleDragon Corp., was scheduled to trade on the US Nasdaq Stock Exchange at 9:30 p.m. Manila time, July 1 (9:30 a.m., New York time), under the stock ticker symbol “HBNB.”

A bell ringing ceremony was earlier held at the Nasdaq trading floor.

Hotel101 has an equity value of $2.3 billion (roughly P129.5 billion). Its Nasdaq listing will allow it to raise capital to bankroll its global expansion.

Sia, whose ‘Mang Inasal’ grilled chicken chain was bought out by the owners of Jollibee Food Corporation for P5 billion in 2016, earlier announced his plan to build one million Hotel101 rooms in 100 countries worldwide, beginning in Madrid, Spain.

Hotel101’s parent company DoubleDragon is listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange and is a joint venture between Sia’s property firm and tycoon Tony Tan Caktiong’s Jollibee.

“DoubleDragon happens to be one of the very few companies that has not only positioned a diversified hard asset portfolio spread out across the Philippines, but it also happens to be one of the very few that has organically developed a novel asset-light concept and highly unique business model in Hotel101 (HBnB) that is portable and exportable to other continents globally,” DoubleDragon said in a filing with the PSE.

“The export of Hotel101 is expected to eventually become one of the major US dollar inflow generators to the Philippine economy,” it added.