A girl from a small village built a business in construction and a legacy. Her net worth is over $200M. She is a construction mogul, a global leader in construction and built some of the most fascinating projects in Philippines. 

Company Name: St. Elena’s Construction

Industry: Construction

Year she started: 1995

We often find excuses - we don’t live in a conducive place or the funding scene is not right, maybe the people don’t understand the tech there so and so.

But it’s just another shackle we hold in our minds and I’m going to break it today with Alice’s story.

If you have ever been to Manila, you cannot miss a walk along Roxas Boulevard.

On one side you can watch a beautiful sunset over the South China Sea and on the other side are the gleaming towers of Entertainment City built on the concrete pilings buried deep under reclaimed land. 

A significant portion of all of it was put there by a woman from a rice field in Nueva Ecija who was told 1000’s of times that construction was not a job for ladies.

Her name is Alice Galang Eduardo. The industry calls her the Woman of Steel.

She built the foundation of the SM Mall of Asia. She drove the piles under Solaire, City of Dreams, Belle Grande Casino, Okada Manila.

She built three combined-cycle natural gas power plants for the Lopez Group - 1,000 MW, 500 MW, 414 MW plants working alongside Siemens, Balfour Beatty, and Ballast Nedam.

She outbid international construction firms from Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. She did this as a woman, in the Philippines, in the 1990s, starting with four rented cranes and a truck she drove herself.

This is her story.

Alice was born on March 20, 1965, in Jaen, Nueva Ecija, a small conservative province of flatlands, rice paddies about three hours north of Manila. 

Her father, Andres Eduardo, was a dentist. Her mother, Elisa Galang, was a certified public accountant. The family was respectable, educated and traditional in every sense.

The family also had businesses: a garments export operation in Manila, rice milling in Bocaue, Bulacan, rice trading in Jaen, and a bowling center. (Note: I’m still trying to comprehend how they worked this out with their day jobs. :D)

They were not poor but they were not rich either.  They were the atypical middle class, the kind of family where everyone works before they are allowed to dream.

They had four kids. Alice was the eldest of four siblings. Below her were her sister Melba, sister Small laude (who would later marry Philip Laude and become a vlogger with millions of followers), and brother Joel.

From childhood, Alice was fascinated by things being built - Roads, bridges, foundations because she dreamt of becoming an engineer.

But her family said no.

This was the 1980s. Engineering was a man's field. Her mother, Elisa, had a different image in mind- doctor, nurse, something clean and feminine and appropriate.

As a compromise she enrolled in Management at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. She graduated in 1986 with a Bachelor of Science in Commerce.

She started working at 16. Alice woke at 4 a.m. every day to work in the family rice mill before going to school. 

While her classmates slept, she was up at dawn learning inventory, logistics, supplier negotiations, the rhythm of a business day. 

She took evening classes at UST. 

Between 4 a.m. and her evening classes, she was running production, managing delivery, overseeing accounts. She drove elf trucks loaded with rice sacks, navigating provincial roads before sunrise.

This is where she found her work ethic. 

After university, Alice went dutifully into the family businesses. She and her sister Small managed the garments export operation. They supplied infant and children's clothing to the United States to stores like Baby Dior and Disney. 

These were not small accounts. They were demanding clients with specific standards and zero patience for missed shipments.

She also handled the rice milling operations (buying, processing and distributing) for institutional clients who expected reliability and precision.

What she was doing was building the operational instincts that would define Sta. Elena Construction.

How to manage supply chains under pressure? How to maintain client relationships through difficulty? How to keep equipment running?How to negotiate? How to deliver? All of this at such a young age?

But she was restless. All of this was not her dream. She was managing, not building. And every day she passed a construction site she felt a pit in her stomach.

The day that changed everything was ordinary on its surface.

Alice was driving an elf truck, delivering rice to a client called Concrete Aggregates Corporation. 

They were handling a construction project in Malolos, Bulacan. 

Someone from Concrete Aggregates asked her whether she could also supply steel splices and structural components used in pile driving.

She could have said that she was just a rice supplier.

But she said yes.

She found the materials and delivered them personally- on time. 

And as she stood at that construction site for the first time, watching the equipment, watching the process, something locked into place that had always been there - “This is what I was supposed to be doing.”

That year in 1995 Alice Eduardo founded Sta. Elena Construction and Development Corporation.

She started with four sets of rented cranes. No engineering degree, no construction experience and no industry connections. 

What she had was operational discipline from years of managing family businesses. A track record of delivery that meant something to clients who had seen her honor her commitments, and a partnership she secured with a Japanese construction firm.

Her first major project: the Bacnotan Steel Plant in Batangas was foundation work, pile driving. Note: If you don’t know what Pile driving is (I didn’t know either) I googled and I’m sharing it here.

Then the Santa Rita Power Plant in Batangas. Then the San Lorenzo Power Plant, also in Batangas.

Instead of staring small and trying her luck, she went straight to industrial scale.

In 1997, two years after founding Sta. Elena, the Asian Financial Crisis hit the Philippines.

The peso collapsed from 26 to the dollar to more than 50. Suddenly major constructions froze. Companies that had financed their equipment through debt were destroyed. Even established firms were liquidating assets to survive.

Alice had heavy equipment she could no longer use. Her machinery was sitting idle, the cost of owning it was compounding.

The rational decision was to sell. But Alice didn't sell.

She held every piece of equipment she had. She believed the crisis would end. She believed that when construction restarted, whoever had equipment would win. 

Just like they say, it's not who has the most luck but who chooses to stay longer in the game wins.

Then Henry Sy, the founder of SM decided to build SM Mall of Asia. A massive complex on reclaimed land at Manila Bay. The problem was almost no one had the equipment to do the foundation work anymore. And Alice Eduardo was one of the very few who did.

Sta. Elena won the SM Mall of Asia contract.

With a commitment of only six months, she delivered on time.

And then, because quality compounds, she got every other SM project that followed: SM Pampanga, SM Bacolod, SM Seaside City Mall in Cebu, SM City Cabanatuan, SM Olongapo City, SM City Tarlac, One and Three E-com Center, Sea Residences, Shell Residences, Shore Residences, SM Bay Arena. 

The crisis that should have killed her company became the very reason for her success.

Entertainment City was where Alice became a legend.

The reclaimed land along Roxas Boulevard -  the stretch from Smokey Mountain to PICC to the PAGCOR Entertainment City in Parañaque is technically a challenging terrain. 

It's reclaimed land was sitting on soft marine sediment. You need massive pile-driving equipment, pre-casting capacity, and the technical competence to manage foundation work over water and soft earth.

Sta. Elena had already built that competence on SM.(Note: See how overdelivering works in your favor).

She built the foundation of Solaire Manila, Belle Grande Casino and Resort,  Manila Bay Resort. City of Dreams, Okada Manila, Resorts World Bayshore and many more.

Alice Eduardo has publicly stated that Sta. Elena built approximately 80 percent of the foundation of Entertainment City. Every casino in that area sits on piles her company drove into the Manila Bay reclamation.

"They probably said, 'This girl can deliver!' I had a track record of completing my projects ahead of schedule, without compromising quality," she said.

As everywhere, where delays are the norm, Alice's obsession with meeting and beating deadlines was a competitive advantage. (Note: In a B2B business, the most powerful marketing is the thing delivered on time.)

The project that Alice Eduardo speaks about with the most pride is not a casino or a mall. It's a power plant.

A 414-megawatt First Gen-Siemens San Gabriel Power Plant in Batangas City, a part of the Lopez Group's First Gas fleet. The total project cost was $600 million.

Germany's industrial engineering giant Siemens AG ran a competitive bid for the civil and construction works. International firms from Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK submitted proposals.

But Alice Eduardo, who started with rented cranes and a rice truck, outbid the international competition for a Siemens project.

It was the first time a Filipino contractor had ever built a power plant for Siemens. The project was inaugurated by the then Philippines President Benigno Aquino III. 

For the San Gabriel plant, they designed and built the world's second largest installation of GRP pipes spanning 1.1 KM under the sea and 1.4 KM buried on land. 

Sta. Elena built three combined-cycle power plants for First Gas: the 1,000-MW Sta. Rita, the 500-MW San Lorenzo, and the 450-MW San Gabriel with a combined project cost exceeding $1.5 billion. 

"Filipino talent and ingenuity are superlative, given the right environment to let us shine. Sta. Elena can deliver the same world-class performance and price more competitively because of our cost structure. We are a lean and mean operation, with my personal touch." - Alice

Alice was married for 22 years to Noberto Vitangcol, CEO of Structural Steel, also in the construction industry. 

She doesn't talk much about her marriage publicly. But she has said that the divorce was her choice, and it was a choice she made for her self-respect. 

They had three children -  Jacqueline, Jameson, and Jessica.

Jameson was diagnosed with autism when he was very young.She asked the doctor if he can be cured? The answer was no. And she broke when she heard that.

She found the best school she could for Jameson. She advocated for his needs. And she says now that he has been a source of strength. Her daughter Jessica, in interviews, describes her mother not primarily as a businesswoman but as a person of exceptional kindness.

In 2014, Alice visited Philippine General Hospital. She was there to see the sick child of one of her employees.

She was disheartened by what she saw. Children fighting for life in infection prone areas, no isolation facility, no family wards or places for the family to stay close by. She decided to fund the construction of a Hematology-Oncology Isolation Ward and a family dormitory within the hospital grounds.

PGH later reported that the isolation ward reduced the mortality rate of pediatric cancer patients by 70 percent. That number is the most important thing Alice Eduardo ever built.

In 2019, Alice was pulled into the public brawl between Gretchen Barretto and Kris Aquino in a tax liability case. 

Alice said nothing publicly. She stayed out of it entirely. She maintained both friendships through the controversy and has never addressed the tax allegations directly on record.

She is not what you'd expect when you picture a construction magnate.

Alice Eduardo is soft-spoken. When she visits construction sites unannounced, she puts on a vest and hard hat and she knows the technical business language inside out.

She has a Beverly Hills mansion. Her collection of Richard Mille watches is well documented. She built a three-storey Manila home from travertine stone and natural wood, designed to feel like a family sanctuary. Her social circle includes some of the Philippines' most prominent names.

She switches between these worlds without losing herself in either. The public version of Alice Eduardo is the one in designer gowns at Tatler events. The operational one is the person who calls project managers at midnight because something is off with the pile count.

She Started Anyway and stayed there…

Alice Eduardo is 61 years old and is still running her company. She is still building mega projects, she still visits sites unannounced and she is pushing her company into renewable energy. 

She still speaks at Go Negosyo summits and mentors Filipina entrepreneurs.

In a country that told her the work was not for ladies, she built the ground on which that country now stands.

And she’s not done yet.

Here’s what she is building as of 2024: a marina along Roxas Boulevard, a new power plant, and a land development project.

No matter how many times she was told she doesn’t belong, no matter how many times she failed, she started anyway and built an empire from where her heart belonged.

The question she leaves with every woman reading this:

What instincts are you not following? Because that is what actually helps you choose the right direction.

Next week: Another woman. Another story. Same stubborn fire.

xoxo,

Chakshu Vats