Oscar M. LopezA Happy New Year to everyone in the Lopez Group. I hope you all had a wonderful time off from the concerns of everyday life and all had the opportunity to create good memories with the people you love. Recharging our batteries, so to speak, is essential for each of us not to just be more productive. Clearing the cobwebs of the past year see thing more clearly and thus providing us a better opportunity to meet the challenges that the new year brings.

In retrospect, the year 2014, gave us many reasons to be thankful. Despite many natural disasters our nation continues to face specially in this era of climate change, the country's economy was among the fastest growing in our region. Perhaps surprising to the skeptics among us, we have become a favorite destination for foreign investors. We don't have to go far. Just go and ask our kapamilyas running the First Philippine Industrial Park in Batangas and they will tell you how Japanese companies are coming in to set up job creating manufacturing facilities there.

Other good things that happened last year will bring us good news this new year. The Burgos Wind Power Farm in Ilocos has been cited internationally as the Asia Pacific Renewables Deal of the Year by Project Finance International. More significant to us, this 150 megawatt project met the requirements to be first in the allocation of feed-in tariff for having completed the commissioning ahead of everyone else.

The largest wind farm in the Philippines, the Burgos project will provide 370 gigawatt-hours of electricity to power around two million households and  will displace about 200,000 tons of carbon emissions annually. It totally supports our identity as the producer of clean energy.

For ABS-CBN, the challenge of providing the best coverage for the forthcoming visit of Pope Francis is at the top of their agenda this January. This historic visit is important to most Filipinos and we have the awesome responsibility of seeing to it that the Pope's message is heard loud and clear throughout the archipelago.

In my case, I decided to spend several weeks of the holiday season together with part of the extended members of my large family away from this country, in San Francisco, California,  where the weather was pleasantly cold but no snow, only some rain.

And so we are all back to work, back to being what we do best in providing the best service to all Filipinos wherever in the world they may be. Again, a Happy New Year to all.

OSCAR M. LOPEZ