When the world was still hung up on cable television, he was already foraying into video-on-demand. Where construction conglomerates take years and billions of pesos to put up office towers, he is breathing new life into older ones in a sliver of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Sherwin dela Cruz has not been known as one to go with the grain, whether in his previous post as Philippine country head of Malaysia-based streaming platform iflix or now in his role as founder and managing director of construction firm Axon Group.
Ever the disruptor, dela Cruz is betting that office spaces need not cost a fortune or take years to build, even in Metro Manila.
‘It can be better. It should be better,’ he says in an interview with Sunday Biz. ‘We are competing with efficiency, with pricing.’
Axon was dela Cruz’s brainchild some years after he exited iflix at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the platform-once poised to challenge Netflix’s dominance in Southeast Asia-was acquired by Chinese tech titan Tencent.
At its core, Axon is a construction company built around what dela Cruz calls ‘capital-light’ workspaces, a model that allows companies to move into offices tailored to their needs without spending millions of pesos upfront.
Apart from designing and building offices, Axon operates managed workspaces where it shoulders the capital expenditure and fits out spaces for tenants.
Much of the work is kept in-house, giving Axon greater control over costs and timelines, both of which can easily balloon in conventional construction. That covers almost everything from engineering and sourcing to fabrication and construction.
Axon’s footprint has since grown beyond the maiden 2,400-square-meter Quad managed workspace it unveiled in Bonifacio Global City (BGC) earlier this year.
It has also secured a long-term lease for the old Teleperformance Center Ayala in Makati as it takes on bigger, dedicated spaces for individual clients rather than simply filling floors with multiple tenants.
Less than a year after launching its first integrated workspace in BGC, Axon is now handling six times the square meterage it did last year. Dela Cruz says about 38,000 square meters of signed projects were lined up through year-end.
For all the moving parts and the seemingly far leap from streaming shows to building offices, dela Cruz says the transition was ‘not jarring at all.’ Real estate, it turns out, had long been running in parallel with dela Cruz’s tech career.
Much of the money he made in his ‘previous life,’ he says, went into property. His frustrations as an executive who had to look for offices also gave him firsthand experience of the inefficiencies he would later try to address through Axon.
There were fit-outs that dragged beyond promised deadlines, companies forced into temporary offices and millions of pesos lost for every month a space sat unfinished.
‘I was that guy,’ dela Cruz says when asked what drove him to set up Axon. ‘There’s so much pain points. There’s so much money that these people are spending.’
Now, dela Cruz is taking that idea beyond individual offices and into entire buildings.
‘Regentrification’
His endgame for Axon is what he calls ‘regentrification’: taking older buildings in prime business districts, particularly Makati, that may have lost their shine but not their biggest advantage, which is their location.
Rather than tear them down and start from scratch, Axon wants to rehabilitate them, redoing facades, elevators and building systems before fitting out the offices inside.
Dela Cruz estimates that an older 12- to 13-story building could cost about P500 million to P600 million to rehabilitate, compared with roughly P4 billion to construct a new high-rise.
It is an economics play, but also a calculated gamble on where Metro Manila’s office market is headed.
With little undeveloped land left in BGC, dela Cruz expects attention to swing back to Makati, where new multibillion-peso towers are rising alongside buildings that have stood since the 1970s and 1980s.
‘It’s coming back to Makati,’ he says. ‘You will see.’
As Axon grows, dela Cruz says the plan is to ‘double down’ on the Philippines. A stock market listing could eventually make sense, too, although the company remains firmly in its ‘grow, grow, grow’ phase.
So for now, dela Cruz is keeping his head down and focusing on a far more immediate task, which is delivering the office spaces already promised to clients.
Because for all his instinct to do things differently, there remains one stubbornly old-fashioned measure of success in construction.