SM Prime Brand Guidelines: Henry Sy’s Shoemart, SM North EDSA in 1985 & a 1994 Listing

From a Quiapo shoe store to a holding company for malls.

SM Prime’s story starts with shoes. Henry Sy, who moved from Fujian to the Philippines as a boy, opened his first shoe store in Quiapo, Manila, in 1948, and in 1958 opened the first store under the Shoemart name on Carriedo Street, according to English Wikipedia. His reasoning, the encyclopedia says, was that after the Second World War almost everyone would need shoes. Shoemart became a full department store in November 1972, and the shop soon became known simply as SM; English Wikipedia notes that the two letters no longer stand for anything in the company’s name.

Expansion outside Metro Manila began with SM Iloilo in 1979, according to the same source. The decisive move came on 8 November 1985, when SM opened its first “Supermall,” SM City North EDSA in Quezon City. The same year SM moved into supermarkets and home appliances. SM Centerpoint followed in 1990, and in the early 1990s SM added two more malls in Metro Manila and one in Cebu City.

SM Prime Holdings was incorporated on 6 January 1994 to develop, operate and maintain the SM shopping centres and to lease space in them, and its shares went public on 5 July 1994, English Wikipedia says. It is a listed subsidiary of SM Investments Corporation, the group Henry Sy built out of Shoemart. Rental income from malls and food courts, cinema tickets and amusements make up its main lines of business, according to the same source.

Supermalls, cinemas and a chain in China.

The SM Supermalls chain is the part of SM Prime most people know. English Wikipedia counted 99 malls as of November 2026 — 90 in the Philippines and nine in China — with eight more under construction. The first mall in China was SM City Xiamen in Fujian, opened in 2001; the most recent there, SM City Haicang, opened on 24 October 2025, and SM City Zamboanga opened on 20 March 2026, the same source says. SM Aura Premier opened on 17 May 2013.

Inside, the malls run their own chains, the encyclopedia says. SM Cinema, which began as West Avenue Theatres Corporation, opened the first IMAX theatre in the Philippines at SM Mall of Asia in 2006, and has had a policy since 2002 of not showing films rated R-18. The SM Store, the department-store anchor, descends from the 1972 Quiapo shop, which was renamed SM Department Store in 1975. An ice-rink chain opened at SM Megamall in 1992, and SM Bowling began at SM North EDSA in 1989. Newer cinema formats followed: the Director’s Club, with recliner seating, from 2006; the first drive-in theatre in the Philippines, opened under the SM Cinema name at SM City Pampanga in July 2020; and a ScreenX theatre at SM Mall of Asia in November 2025, according to English Wikipedia.

The chain has also put its operations on record. In June 2026 SM Supermalls published its first sustainability digest, organised around energy, water and waste, The Philippine Star reported. The paper said the chain’s environmental work dates back to the 1990s, when Hans Sy, whom it described as chairman of SM Prime’s executive committee, led the installation of sewage treatment plants that recycle water for irrigation, sanitation and air-conditioning. An SM Supermalls executive told the paper that the chain was relying more on renewable energy to support its long-term goals.

Developers and their districts.

Property developers in Asia and the Gulf sell places more than products, and their identities are built to be read at the scale of a city. The material to compare is public: corporate websites, project microsites, investor pages and the annual and sustainability reports that listed developers publish each year. In those pages, look at how much work the photography does — towers at dusk, harbour and skyline views, architects’ renderings labelled “artist’s impression”, as on Henderson Land’s brand site — and at how the corporate wordmark, in navy, green, gold or black, is placed against it.

Names are part of the design. Hong Kong developers present themselves in English and Chinese, with short forms that differ between the two languages; Henderson Land, for example, is 恒基兆業地產 in full and 恒地 for short, according to Chinese Wikipedia. In the Gulf the pairing to watch is English and Arabic; in the Philippines, English and Filipino. Hotels, malls and residential estates usually carry names of their own, so a group such as CK Asset sits behind a family of hotel names rather than putting its own name on every door.

The structure of a developer’s website is a portrait of the business. Pages are commonly divided by residential, office, retail and hotel portfolios, by city or country, and by projects for sale, for lease, under construction and completed. Landmark malls and mixed-use districts get their own sites and campaigns, and the newest schemes, such as Henderson Land’s Central Yards on the Hong Kong harbourfront, are introduced with long lists of named architects and landscape designers.

Sustainability is now a standard chapter. Developers name their programmes, publish environmental, social and governance reports beside their annual results, and use shorthand such as Henderson Land’s G.I.V.E. to make a strategy memorable. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who controls it and what it builds — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Malls, homes, offices and public partners.

SM Prime is now more than a mall company. In 2013 it announced a merger with SM Land, which owned SM Development and the Commercial Properties Group; English Wikipedia says that once the Securities and Exchange Commission approved it, SM Prime became one of the largest property companies in South-east Asia. Its arms include SM Development Corporation (SMDC), the wholly owned residential developer, with projects in the business districts of Metro Manila and in Cavite, Bulacan, Pampanga, Iloilo, Cebu City and Bacolod, and SM Offices, whose towers include the E-Com Center buildings at the SM Mall of Asia Complex and Mega Tower beside SM Megamall, according to the same source.

The company also works with public bodies. On 3 September 2026 the Philippine Sports Commission, the City of Manila and SM Prime signed a memorandum of agreement at the Mall of Asia to redevelop the historic Rizal Memorial Sports Complex ahead of the 2027 Southeast Asian Plus Youth Games, the Daily Tribune reported. The plans include a PSC Plaza across two lanes of Adriatico Street and an elevated walkway linking the sports complex with the redeveloped SM Harrison Plaza; SM Prime president Jeffrey C. Lim signed for the company, the paper said. The plans also propose moving the P. Ocampo statue to make way for a new fencing monument to José Rizal, subject to approval by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines.

For a design guide, SM Prime shows how two letters from a 1958 shoe shop became the name over a nationwide chain of malls, cinemas, offices and homes. Compare Megaworld, the Manila developer built around townships, and CapitaLand in Singapore. For this guide we use a strong blue, a teal and a concourse white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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