Crocodile farming: how Philippine home improvement entrepreneur got into it, and became an LVMH supplier
- An egg farm started as a hobby for Wilcon Depot founder William Belo, but he had a problem: how to dispose of old chickens?
- He bought some crocodiles. One thing led to another, and he now has 23,000 of them. Their skins are used for handbags and meat for sausages and delicacy sisig
Why own one crocodile when you can have thousands of them?
William Belo, whose Wilcon Depot dominates the Philippines home-improvement market with 57 stores nationwide, was already on the path to business success when he decided to try his hand at something different, and started an egg farm in 1989 as a weekend activity.
Then, he needed to figure out what to do with the chickens that were no longer able to lay. In the mid-1990s, he thought about feeding them to tigers before settling on crocodiles.
He bought about 1,200 of them over three years after learning that a crocodile conservation farm in the province of Palawan was looking to sell some of its stock.
“My plan was just to have a farm with a small number of animals and fresh eggs for personal consumption,” Belo says in an interview in Manila. “One thing led to another. We brought in crocodiles to feed the chickens [to that] we didn’t need.”
Belo now has two crocodile farms, one for breeding that’s on 10 hectares (24.7 acres), and another that’s seven times larger, for culling and managing animal waste. The venture has about 800,000 chickens and 5,000 hogs, and he sells about 2,000 to 3,000 crocodile skins a year for US$200 to US$250 apiece.
“It’s hard to turn this into a larger scale [industry] because food can be very expensive and there are issues of inbreeding which affect the quality of the skin,” Belo says. “You aren’t allowed to bring in crocodiles from other countries to fix inbreeding and there are few left in the wild.”
The price of crocodile skin has dropped because of oversupply prompted by weaker demand for luxury products by Chinese consumers, who he estimates easily account for half of global demand for high-end bags.
“It’s hard to grow this into a bigger industry because we don’t have breeders and there is a limit to the market now,” Belo says.
The value of construction projects rose 22 per cent in the second quarter from a year earlier to 123 billion pesos (US$2.4 billion), with residential developments accounting for more than half of that total, according to official statistics.
Wilcon targets middle- to high-income homeowners, selling everything from plumbing fixtures to tiles and taps.
After graduating from high school, Belo studied engineering at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila while working evenings at a construction-supply company partially owned by his father. In 1977, he finally opened his own store in a space no bigger than one-bedroom flat and worked for decades to build a company that is now the leading retailer in the Philippines’ home-improvement market.
In an interview last year, he said he was undaunted by Ikea’s plan to open its first store in the country in 2020.
“When you want to build a house, you don’t go to Ikea, you go to Wilcon,” he said.
While Belo still goes to the office five days a week, he now oversees the business as chairman emeritus while leaving day-to-day operations to his three children.
That’s given him “more time to relax”, he says, and perhaps devote more time to other pursuits – like raising crocodiles.
