Acom Co. is opening its first outlet in the Philippines as part of an overseas business strategy that has already taken the major consumer finance company to Thailand and Indonesia.
Acom Consumer Finance Corp., a local joint venture established a year ago with trading house Itochu Corp., has started providing unsecured personal loans at an outlet in the Ortigas Center in Pasig, a city in the metropolitan Manila area.
The Filipino unit says it mainly targets middle-class consumers with a monthly income of over 10,000 pesos (about ¥21,000) and at least three months of employment for loans of up to 500,000 pesos per deal, depending on income levels.
Borrowers are required to visit the shop only once to apply for loans and can get cash at outlets of money remittance service providers in shopping malls, office buildings and other locations in the city.
Loan interest rates per month range from 3.315 percent to 4.563 percent, Acom says.
Masaomi Gido, head of the joint venture, said at a recent opening ceremony that the Pasig City outlet is capable of handling about 1,000 consumers a month and aims to lend to 80 percent of them.
Capitalized at 500 million pesos, the local unit is owned 80 percent by Acom and the remaining 20 percent by Itochu. It plans to open its second outlet in Ali Mall in Quezon City in February next year.
Gido added that his joint venture wants to forge a network of 30 outlets in the Manila area within five years. The Tokyo-based lender entered Thailand in 1996 and Indonesia in 2007.
It plans to start operations in Vietnam as soon as it gets approval from authorities there.
