Manila Water Brand Guidelines: The 1997 East Zone Concession and the Razon Takeover

Half of a city’s water system, handed over in 1997.

Manila Water is the private company that runs water and used-water services in the East Zone of Metro Manila under a concession from the state-owned Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS). English Wikipedia says it was incorporated on 6 January 1997 and took over operations in August 1997, when the MWSS handed its service area to two private operators: Manila Water in the east and Maynilad Water Services in the west. The Philippine Star, writing in May 2024, said the concession followed a “historic water privatization bidding” by the Philippine government. English Wikipedia gives the company’s headquarters as Quezon City.

The company did not start from nothing. Its concession covers plant that the public system had built over decades: English Wikipedia dates the Balara Filter 1 treatment plant in Quezon City to 1935 and Balara Filter 2 to 1958. Raw water comes mostly from the Angat Dam in Bulacan, passing the Ipo Dam and the La Mesa reservoir in Novaliches before treatment, the same source says. Under the agreement, Manila Water uses the land and operating assets and holds the exclusive right to treat, distribute and sell water, and to collect and treat used water, in its zone.

The original concession ran for 25 years, to 2022. English Wikipedia says the MWSS extended it by 15 years in 2009, to 2037, and that the company listed its shares on the Philippine Stock Exchange on 18 March 2005. On the used-water side, the same source counts more than 300 kilometres of sewer lines feeding 38 sewage treatment plants, and a septage service that empties household septic tanks in the many parts of the zone without sewers.

From the Ayala group to the Razon group.

For its first two decades Manila Water was part of the Ayala group, the Philippine conglomerate that led it when the concession began. That changed in stages from 2020. On 3 February 2020, Rappler reported, Manila Water told the Philippine Stock Exchange that Prime Metroline Holdings, controlled by the ports and gaming businessman Enrique Razon Jr, had signed an agreement to subscribe for 820 million new common shares, a 25% stake. Ayala’s chairman said at the time that both groups shared “a deep commitment to contributing to the country’s water infrastructure development.”

The Razon holding became Trident Water Holdings, a subsidiary of Razon’s Prime Infrastructure Holdings. By the end of 2023 Trident held 58.32% of the voting stake, The Philippine Star reported. In May 2024 Ayala sold its remaining common shares, and its preferred shares, to Trident. After that sale, the paper said, Ayala no longer held a single common share and lost its vote, though it kept an economic interest through the preferred shares, which are paid for in stages until 2029. Two Ayala appointees resigned from the board.

The concession terms changed in the same years. Manila Water signed a revised concession agreement with the MWSS in March 2021, and an amendment on 10 May 2023 that took effect retroactively from 1 July 2022, BusinessWorld reported. A separate law, Republic Act 11601, gave Manila Water a 25-year legislative franchise from 25 January 2022, the paper said in July 2024. In the same report, Manila Water and Maynilad said they were seeking a ten-year extension of their revised agreements, to 2047, to line them up with those franchises; the MWSS board had approved it in 2023 and endorsed it to the Department of Finance in June 2024, and it was still pending at the time of that report.

The service area covers parts of Quezon City, Makati and Manila, together with Marikina, Pasig, Taguig, Pateros, Mandaluyong, San Juan and several towns in Rizal province, BusinessWorld reported. The Philippine Star put the number of people served at more than seven million, in 24 cities and municipalities, in 2024.

New sources sit alongside Angat. The Cardona treatment plant on Laguna de Bay began operating in March 2019, English Wikipedia says. In Rizal, Manila Water now runs the Wawa bulk-water project: in August 2026 it bought the last minority interest in WawaJVCo, making it a wholly owned subsidiary, BusinessWorld reported. The paper described the Upper Wawa Dam, commissioned late in 2025, as the country’s largest water-supply dam built in more than 50 years, and said the project adds supply for about 3.5 million people.

Water utilities and their names.

Water utilities sell something nobody sees being made. Their identities therefore lean on a small set of images: blue and green palettes, droplet and wave marks, and reservoirs, treatment works and pipelines photographed from the air. The look is meant to read as calm and dependable, closer to a public service than to a consumer brand, even when the company is investor-owned and listed on a stock exchange.

Much of a utility’s visible design work is practical. Bill explainers, tariff tables, payment-help schemes and outage maps make up a large share of its website, and the tone is plain and procedural. Many companies run several regional or state brands under one parent, so a naming system and a shared set of colours often matter more than any single logo.

Messaging changes with the weather and the regulator. Leak-repair campaigns, drought appeals and hosepipe or watering restrictions appear in dry years; investment programmes, pipe-replacement work and rate cases appear in filings and press releases. Environmental performance reports and sustainability reports set out targets and results in charts and tables, usually in the same restrained palette as the rest of the brand.

The last strand is education. Utilities run school visits, careers programmes, treatment-plant tours and community grants, and they publish material on how water is treated and why pipes need replacing. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when it began, who owns it and how it describes itself — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A city name on a wider map.

Manila Water also works outside its home concession. English Wikipedia describes a subsidiary, Manila Water Philippine Ventures, with operations in places including Cebu, Laguna, Clark in Pampanga and Zamboanga City, and an international arm, Manila Water Asia Pacific, whose Vietnamese affiliates supply treated water to Ho Chi Minh City under bulk arrangements. A third unit, Manila Water Total Solutions, handles products and services after the meter, according to the same source.

At home, the key dates are contractual: a concession signed in 1997, extended in 2009, revised in 2021 and amended in 2023, and a franchise law in force from January 2022. Ownership moved through stock exchange disclosures rather than a single sale, from the Razon group’s first 25% in February 2020 to Ayala’s exit from the common shares in May 2024.

For a design guide, Manila Water shows how a utility created by a 1997 concession carries its city’s name through a stock listing, a change of control and a widening map of projects. Compare Aguas Andinas, another big-city water operator, and Veolia. For this guide we use a deep river blue, a clear aqua and a warm sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Manila Water’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.