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Manila Bulletin devider Business devider PLDT's mobile business logs 18% growth in Q1

PLDT's mobile business logs 18% growth in Q1

Published May 17, 2019 12:00 am
By Emmie V. Abadilla Riding on the growing appetite of customers for online video and mobile games, PLDT, Inc.’s mobile business posted a record 18 percent service revenue growth to P16.9 billion in the first quarter of 2019. The surge in revenues was due to a robust increase in data and broadband revenues which accounted for 65% of the total. PLDT’s wireless brands also added 3.4 million customers in the first quarter of 2019, adding to a subscriber base that is increasingly becoming more active in using data. About two-thirds of these subscribers are smartphone owners, of whom about 70% are data users. Mobile data traffic rose by 127% year-on-year to 304 petabytes. Data-savvy customers are watching more and more video on their smartphones. With the introduction of the Video Every Day data packages late last year, more customers have been accessing various video services like YouTube, NBA, iWant and iFlix. The monthly users of YouTube, already boosted by last year’s Free YouTube promo, went up 35% in the first quarter. Viewers of other popular video apps also increased sharply: Users of the NBA video service nearly doubled; those of iWant soared 153%; and iFlix, 170%. Mobile gaming has contributed to the continuing increase in data usage, following PLDT and Smart’s initiatives to organize their official professional eSports team, “Omega”. They also sponsored the professional league in the Philippines of the popular mobile game Mobile Legends. The upshot: The number of monthly unique users of Mobile Legends increased five times from June 2018 to end-March 2019. To support Filipinos’ increasing appetite for data, PLDT and Smart Communications, Inc. are continuously expanding and modernizing their fixed and mobile networks, with a capital expenditure of P78.4 billion this year. The capex investments will expand coverage and to increase capacity to handle growth in data traffic. Smart has added about 1,700 LTE base stations in the first quarter, raising the total to about 18,000. Smart is also activating carrier aggregation across its sites, enabling the network to deliver even faster mobile Internet services by combining the capacity of two or more frequency bands. Smart has likewise also increased its 3G base station count to about 12,100. Meanwhile, PLDT has further expanded its total fiber optic cable network footprint to 259,000 kilometers. PLDT’s fiber-powered fixed line broadband network has now passed 6.7 million homes as of end-March, while total number of fiber ports available has reached 2.96 million, of which 1.2 million are available for new customers.
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