The Story of Ever Gotesco Malls

 

Ever Emporium.

Established, 1972.

Orginally known as Ever Emporium, Ever Gotesco Malls is a shopping mall and retail operator in Metro Manila. It was incorporated in 1972 by Filipino-Chinese entrepreneur Jose Go, whose main vision was to develop, conduct, operate and maintain affordable and accessible commercial shopping malls for the Filipino masses.

Jose Go, aged 24, opened the five-story Ever Emporium on C.M. Recto Ave. in Downtown Manila, the first of his Ever stores. By then, he had just graduated with a commerce degree from the University of Santo Tomas.

Go was no stranger to retail when he began forming the Ever Gotesco malls. He was exposed at an early age to the operations of their family business – the Go Tong Electrical Supplies company – which made and sold electrical parts and electrical equipment.

Their family electrical supplies business is where he derived the word GOTESCO; GO Tong Electrical Supplies COmpany.

During the martial law, Go took advantage of the low-priced merchandise and was one of the pioneers of one-stop shopping. His store sold low-priced goods to thousands of low-income students who survived on small allowances. The huge volumes sold made up for the goods' thin margins.

By 1975, Go had made Ever Emporium a popular retail name. From Recto, he expanded to Caloocan City, where he built the $6-million, 40,000-square meter Ever Gotesco mall facing the Bonifacio Monument rotunda that lured the low- to middle-income residents of the populous city to shop in droves, and also housed the first Gotesco Cinemas. At present, it is now occupied by SM Supermarket.

With two major shopping malls in the capital and two more elsewhere, Go formed Ever Gotesco Resources and Holdings (EGRH) in 1996. An initial public offering (IPO) that year gave him enough ammunition to expand into uncharted territory.

EGRH acquired a struggling, publicly listed mining company called Suricon that was later renamed Gotesco Land. He also invested in a housing project in Bulacan, North Caloocan, and a hot springs resort in Laguna. He bought a small bank (that later became his biggest headache), a golf course in Tagaytay, and purchase 20 percent worth of stocks in a paging company.

His goal then was ambitious: to build a $2-billion retail-and-property conglomerate that churns out $350 million a year. Unfortunately, the 1997 Asian financial crisis caught him aggressively expanding into other businesses using borrowed dollars. The crisis doubled his debts and forced him to tap into the deposits of his wholly owned Orient Commercial Banking Corp.

The bank went down in history as the first victim of the Asian economic crisis when it closed on Valentine's Day, 1998. Until now, Go is still fighting the foreclosure of his assets by the central bank, which lent over P8 billion to Orient Bank. He is also facing multi-billion peso lawsuits and all his properties have been garnished by the courts. Some of his former properties either ended up being closed, acquired by competitors or shut down entirely.

On March 17, 2012, Ever Gotesco Grand Central Mall in Caloocan burned down in a devastating fire which raged for more than 20 hours. The mall closed down after fire brought under control, and was subsequently demolished and its property title foreclosed and sold. Gotesco Grand Central was built in 1988.

With the Grand Central burnt down, the other Ever stores alao closed down one by one - Ever Ortigas Complex closed down 2016, Ever Center Las Piñas closed in 1997, and recently, Ever Manila Plaza in 2020. Only Ever Commonwealth Center in Quezon City remains open to this day, opened in 1994.

Ever Gotesco currently survives through its community supermarket chains operating in Metro Manila called Ever Supermarket, aside from its remaining mall.

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source:google