ABS-CBN, the country’s largest and leading multimedia conglomerate, bagged a Grand Stevie Award at the prestigious Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards, making it the only Filipino company to receive the highest honor given to five companies in the region during its gala awards banquet in Seoul, South Korea recently.

The Grand Stevie Award not only brought honor to ABS-CBN, but also put the Philippines in the regional spotlight. It was presented to the highest-scoring entries from the five nations from which the award-giving body received the most entries this year. Other Grand Stevie Award winners are companies from Australia, Indonesia, South Korea, and Singapore.

The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards recognized ABS-CBN’s business achievements in the past year, most especially its efforts to provide public service to Filipinos by launching the “Tulong Na, Tabang Na, Tayo Na” campaign that included initiatives such as the selling of Tulong shirts and the star-studded Tulong fund-raising concerts to help the victims of typhoon Yolanda, and conducting relief and rehabilitation efforts for the victims of typhoon Pablo, Zamboanga crisis, and the Bohol quake.

“As a service-oriented company, ABS-CBN has been in the forefront of public service for over 60 years by bringing news and content that inspire, empower, and nurture our audiences in traditional and new platforms. That has always been and always will be our mission, our reason for being – to always be in the service of the Filipino wherever they are in the world,” said ABS-CBN president and CEO Charo Santos-Concio, who also shared the honor with “the men and women in ABS-CBN who heeded the call of public service.”

At the banquet, Santos-Concio also personally received the Gold Stevie Awards for ABS-CBN in the Services Company of the Year category for the Philippines and the Woman of the Year category for all Asia-Pacific nations (except Australia and South Korea).

“I am honored to be representing the hard-working and accomplished women in my country and to be in distinctive company with fellow women leaders and awardees. I am truly grateful that I get to do what I do, and even more proud to lead ABS-CBN, a 100 percent Filipino company that puts a premium on innovation, quality of content, and ease of access on products and services to connect better with our fellow Filipinos around the world, and provide help to those in need,” she said.

Santos-Concio was cited for leading ABS-CBN into supremacy in terms of TV ratings and box office sales for Star Cinema, revenue increase, groundbreaking business ventures such as ABS-CBNmobile, theme park Kidzania Manila, and TV home shopping channel O Shopping, and its public service initiatives.

The Asia-Pacific Stevie Awards are the first business awards program to recognize achievement in business in all 22 nations of the Asia-Pacific region. They are the newest of the Stevie Awards programs, which are widely considered to be the world’s premier business awards, conferring recognition for achievement in the workplace in programs such as The International Business Awards for more than a decade.