The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
BJ Mercantile Inc. celebrated its 50th year of doing business with a big celebration recently entitled “The Making of a Gold” that traced the company’s journey from 1974 as an importer of used engines to its transformation into a diversified conglomerate with interests in automotive, transport, logistics, property, petroleum and power generation.
BJM also celebrated the 10th year anniversary of Scania, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of trucks and buses for heavy transport applications that appointed BJM as its exclusive dealer in 2014, in the Philippines.
Enterprising young couple Jimmy and Belen Lim, who used their initials to name the company, started a small business of importing used vehicles and trucks in the 1970’s. The year 1980 saw them enter property development with BJ Land whose main business is the leasing of warehouses and other commercial and residential spaces. In 1995 they put up another real estate company, Meiling Development Corporation, to embark on the development of a 27-storey residential building in Manila and the Meiling Village in Quezon City.
In 2000, it put up Microvan Inc. headquartered in Subic Bay Freeport Zone that led to a spin-off company in 2011, Microvan Leasing, that is focused on the rental of cranes to construction projects all over the country. BJM also went into the importation of fuel in 2008 under Micro Dragon Petroleum Inc. and it sailed the oceans with Royal Dragon Ocean Transport thru 10 LCT vessels that cater to the mining and construction industries. The San Simon Cold Storage, housed in San Simon, Pampanga, came into being in 2018.
“It has been quite a remarkable run for BJM during these past 5 decades and we would like to thank all our employees, partners and customers for their continued trust and support. But we are not yet done growing, we look forward to expanding our inventory and to entering other high growth businesses in the coming years,” said Leilani Lim Tan, the vice president of BJ Mercantile Inc.