Lousy service, but very profitable?
THE picture that reality paints about water supply in Muntinlupa inside the concession area of Maynilad is one of stark contrast.
On one hand, residents agonize over the often utter absence of water in their taps, grappling for answers that jargon dished out by Maynilad intentionally fails to provide.
On the other, profit numbers are glowing in the dark for the company that revels in praise releases claiming good service on paper.
These realities offer the best angle to view the picture that Maynilad wants the public to see — lousy service is profitable.
With profit data surging to at least 19 percent, you would wonder if that was the result of households enjoying the best of water supply under Maynilad. A closer look would show that the people are simply a captive market that has no choice.
Daily outages. Total dryness in the taps. Plenty of explanations with no solutions in sight. Hundreds of thousands of consumers left grappling for answers. And amid all these, a concessionaire is reporting rising profits.
The city of Muntinlupa serves as a poster boy for how bad service can even be profitable for a utility company.
To call the situation bad is an understatement. That it is worsening is a fact. Maynilad’s service in Muntinlupa has reached a point of anger on the part of residents and the city government itself. Muntinlupa Mayor Ruffy Biazon last month was besieged with complaints from his constituents that he called for a virtual town hall meeting for Maynilad officials to explain why the taps keep drying up. The online meeting was viewed by a remarkable 25,000 netizens.
But how to explain lousy service? Blame it on nature.
At the town hall meeting, Maynilad officials did not run out of words to try to extricate the company from the mess it created in the first place. But in the end, the conclusion is obviously what they planned to foist on us all along. The problem is nature and there’s nothing anyone can do but wait.
Maynilad officials admitted before Muntinlupa leaders and residents that they were unable to supply clean water to the city as its mandate required — 24/7 without interruption — because of what the weather had done to Laguna Lake, the concessionaire’s main source of water for the city and elsewhere.
One official narrated the obvious. There is ongoing rationing of water both in the taps and on the street. Households get water only eight hours a day at most. Some await deliveries of water in Maynilad tankers.
Inconvenience is too tame a word to describe the situation of thousands of residents. Imagine their ordeal. You need to go to work early in the morning but water is unavailable to clean yourself up or your clothes. Work schedules of residents don’t match with schedules of water availability so it is the people who needed to adjust, not the concessionaire that was supposed to deliver water round-the-clock.
One official, Greg Antonio, the head of Maynilad’s Water Production South, told the meeting what thousands are witnessing from day-to-day. But with one caveat — there are too many customers.
Water rationing, supposedly a common occurrence only in areas where there’s no modern water supply facility, is happening in Muntinlupa, which borders other highly urbanized cities of Metro Manila and is itself highly developed with sprawling malls and posh gated villages.
Antonio continued to tell the story of Maynilad’s efforts, like bringing water in tankers to communities that suffer no water at all. As if it was a sacrifice that customers should be extremely grateful for.
Another Maynilad official, Alfred John Gallego, head of Maynilad’s Muntinlupa-Las Piñas Business Area, tried to complete the narrative by laying the blame on Laguna Lake and the weather.
“We can see that wind conditions have not been favorable to us though we know it’s seasonal,” Gallego said at the same meeting.
He admitted that the Maynilad treatment plant that it uses to convert lake water into potable supply cannot meet the challenge. In other words, it was not designed to withstand the strong pressure brought about by weather conditions.
“We need to protect our plant to prevent a surge of water that is not according to design,” he said.
Since the plant was not designed for this, he admitted that Maynilad had to reduce the volume of water being processed at the plant. In layman’s terms, let the consumers suffer while we search for a fix.
While squarely blaming nature for the problem, Maynilad officials somehow also admitted company shortcomings. Like existing pipes are insufficient to carry additional water volume. Angat Dam, the main water source for Maynilad, is also prone to the effects of El Niño, or prolonged dry spell.
There’s an attempt to seek forgiveness in words couched in jargon but never an admission of guilt, much like a convicted murderer awaiting execution in the electric chair. No crime was committed.
There’s also an attempt to explain why Laguna Lake, already suffering from a variety of environmental challenges, is Maynilad’s choice of source of water.
Experts had projected the lake would be able to supply water for at least four years. But four years is fast approaching and no mention of what’s next was ever made.
Previously, Maynilad highlighted an award for wastewater recovery while posting P15.2 billion in profits in 2025. Yet developments in Muntinlupa raise questions about where this West Zone concessionaire is taking consumers with its empty narratives.
Most likely to dry taps, if their record in Muntinlupa is basis.
Be careful with Temu
If you haven’t heard of the online store Temu, you aren’t as much of a netizen (“net shopper”) as I am. It’s a far third-largest online store globally, after Shopee (owned mainly by Singaporeans) and Lazada (by Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group). Like Lazada, Temu is owned by a Chinese-linked e-commerce group, mainly by Chinese tech entrepreneur Colin Huang. It’s been very aggressive in its marketing, to the extent of becoming a nuisance as its ads intrude into your Facebook browsing. It has also been offering a lot of discounts, through coupons for regular customers.
What differentiates Temu from the other two e-commerce outfits is that it mostly sells cheap small products, the result of its direct factory-to-consumer model, with the company also taking advantage, in the case of its United States market, of US Customs’ “de minimis” rule, which exempts imports valued below $800 from import duties and other inspections.
I had been fond of Temu as it’s been selling rather unique items I never would have thought of buying, but which I did after they were advertised on Facebook: P200 small vacuum cleaner for my keyboard, a P200 shaver, six garden solar lights for P300.
I’m no longer a fan though, as I found it so insulting its merchants’ scams. I bought an analog wall clock which was depicted as having a small digital clock. It turned out to be a mere “picture” of a digital clock. Similarly, I bought a doorbell, which turned out to be a metal sign.
It’s certainly true that all technological inventions throughout have a dark side to them. “Caveat emptor.”
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Lousy service, but very profitable?
Source: Breaking News PH
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