Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala: We are part of an ecosystem, that ecosystem must stay alive. First we keep our employees safe, and then we work on helping the ecosystem around us.

Enrique Razon: I think 2020 is absolutely written off.
the situation it won’t stabilize until end of 2021. I think 2022 is the year everything will recover. I've done a lot of research on past pandemics, they all seem to last 2 years.

Tessie Sy-Coson: I think in 2021 we will be better prepared to stabilize everything. It is going to be better than this year. In 2022, I hope there is no new virus, otherwise by 2022 I think we will be ok.

Tony Fernandes: After 2020 I think I’m back to an SME. I think the main focus is survival. Let’s focus on the positive. If we sit on the negative and cry and blame everything, we lose. We have to be positive.

Fernandes: 2 years is about right (for recovery). We are seeing a recovery in demand coming up. We believe regional and domestic will improve.

Sy-Coson: Even with digital, people still want to have fun, and we believe we (brick and mortar) can provide that.

Fernandes believes the airline recovery will be driven by logistics. He sees airlines providing transport of goods for massive digital platforms like Grab. "I’ve got to reskill, retrain, rehire. That is what is driving me."

Fernandes on possible buyers of AirAsia (as a joke): "I’m waiting for Jaime to buy it, or maybe Tessie, they can buy it with their credit cards right now."

Zobel de Ayala: We have about 250k MSMEs that surround the Ayala group in one way or another. We put them into a community, the Ayala Enterprise center. They have three pain points: financing, health, and digital.

Zobel de Ayala: Our monetary authorities have created a lot of liquidity which has been great. We are working on financing (for MSMEs) with our banking group.

Zobel de Ayala: There may be two worlds after this, digital and brick & mortar. We will have to know how to survive in both.

Sy-Coson: We are both (BPI,BDO) very active in the lending side. We have BanKo and BDO Network Bank. Both are very active. I think there is some communication gap (on increased lending to MSMEs)

Sy-Coson on how much of BDO's loan portfolio goes to MSMEs: About 20%. It is growing, I think 20% is about 20,000 lenders or more.

Zobel de Ayala: You’ve got to understand. Business is down. Everything has come down. There was no demand for many months. Loans do not grow at a time with no growth. When growth slows down, loans slow down.

Zobel de Ayala: We’ve given a moratorium on payments, credit cards, consumer loans and the like. I would think that is a massive help. When you don’t have growth, you are not going to have loan growth. It is very important we get growth going. That is going to take a while.

Zobel de Ayala: In a scenario where there has been no growth, we have tried as much as we can to slow down any part of the banking system which puts pain on MSMEs.

Razon: I had no doubt we would be hit hard by COVID because we are one of the largest consumer economies. COVID attacked consumption. But we will also benefit from pent up demand. If you survive 2020, 2021, you will do very well.

Razon: PH Government will have to spend in stimulus at least 20% of GDP. That is my opinion. Support MSMEs, provide liquidity. Whether PH Central Bank has to follow the foot points of Fed and ECB and start printing a bit...

Razon: I believe, I have been telling Sec. Dominguez and he agrees with me. 20 to 25% of GDP is what is necessary for a consumption based economy.

Razon: Whether it is infrastructure, loans, liquidity. We need a bazooka, not a pistol.

Fernandes: Better testing. There is one in the works, where we just breathe into a device and find out if we have COVID. That is a bazooka moment.

Fernandes: I think testing is very important, and I think there will be some big steps in testing. Governments will have to be a little bit braver in opening up the economy.

Fernandes: In Hong Kong, there was a little spike, and all of a sudden that bubble was closed. To me that was an overreaction.

Zobel de Ayala: Public and Private sector have to work together. We are depleting our resources deliberately in order to survive this. I am on Ricky’s side on this. All of us have to use our balance sheets to kick start the economy.

Zobel de Ayala: We all have to use our balance sheets to kick start the economy. There is no way around it. Ricky says the balance sheet of the country needs to be used to stimulate, I agree with that. The number will always be a point of discussion.

Zobel de Ayala: The economy is like an engine. All of us have to add gasoline, add oil to start the engine again. And demand has to kick in.

Sy-Coson: We look up to Ricky to tell the government what our sentiments are. He knows what we need, and I just hope the government understands the things that we are hoping for in the private sector.

Sy-Coson: We are all doing what we can in our ecosystems. But we also need government to help. Open up areas such as logistics so there is freedom of movement. We also look into testing, safety, face masks.

Razon on shifting to manufacturing considering how badly COVID hit consumption: That ship has pretty much sailed already. We can have our day on that (manufacturing) We are hit harder now because of that (consumption dependence), but in the previous crises we were hit less.

Razon: Let’s not just use one crisis to say we should be this, be that. What we should do is make sure we survive first.

Zobel de Ayala: We should be encouraged to do whatever we can to generate any kind of employment.

This morning's Go Negosyo anniversary panel of business leaders.