their entrepreneurial and investment pursuits. The implementation of a free trade policy between the Philippines and the United States allowed the Chinese to capitalize on a burgeoning Filipino consumer market. As a result, Filipino entrepreneurs and investors of Chinese ancestry were able to capture a significant market share by expanding their business activities in which they were the major players and ventured into then newly flourishing industries such as industrial manufacturing and financial services. Filipinos of Chinese ancestry are estimated to control 60 to 70 percent of the Philippine economy. The Chinese Filipino community, amounting to 1 percent of the overall population of the Philippines, control the nation's largest and most lucrative department store chains, supermarkets, hotels, shopping malls, airlines, and fast-food outlets in addition to all the major financial services institutions, banks and stock brokerage firms, as well as dominating the nation's wholesale distribution networks, shipping, banking, construction, textiles, real estate, personal computer, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, mass media, and industrial manufacturing industries. Filipinos of Chinese ancestry are also involved in the processing and distribution of pharmaceutical products. More than 1000 firms are involved in this industry, with most being small and medium-sized companies amounting to an aggregate capitalization of 1.2 billion pesos. Filipinos of Chinese ancestry are prominent players in the Philippines mass media industry, as they also control six out of the ten English-language newspapers in Manila, including the one with the largest daily circulation. Many retail stores and restaurants around the Philippines are owned by Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, who are regularly featured in Manila newspapers, often attracted great public interest as they were used to illustrate the community's strong economic influence. The Chinese also dominate the Filipino telecommunications industry, where one of the current significant players in the Filipino telecom sector was the business taipan John Gokongwei, whose conglomerate JG Summit Holdings controlled 28 wholly-owned subsidiaries with interests ranging from food and agro-industrial products, hotels, insurance agencies, financial services, electronic components, textiles and garments, real estate, petrochemicals, power generation, printing, newspaper publishing, packaging materials, detergents, and cement mixing. Gokongwei began his business career by starting out in food processing during the 1950s, venturing into textile manufacturing in the early 1970s, and then cornered the Filipino real estate development and hotel management industries by the end of the decade. In 1976, Gokongwei established Manila Midtown Hotels and has since then assumed the control of two other hotel chains,