The Philippines has no choice. The only way to recover from the pandemic is to go digital.

So says Ayala Corp. Chairman and CEO Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, popularly known as JAZA.

“We realized tremendous number of products and services will have to ride on a digital infrastructure,” he maintained during the recent, Stratbase Albert del Rosario Institute-organized, virtual Pilipinas Conference.

"If you’re customer-focused, people think about keeping themselves safe, accessing services and

products in completely different ways. That transformation just moved up to a whole other degree,” he stressed.

The digital life was unheard of before in business transactions, Zobel de Ayala conceded.

But nowadays, in the real estate sector, companies could close a sale without customers visiting the lot

or signing any physical paper.

"We close a transaction on a piece of property, looking at it visually, exchanging notes virtually, and then signing documents electronically, " he explained.

"This whole cycle can be done without someone visiting a site and has been an extraordinary transformation in what was a brick-and-mortar company,” says Zobel de Ayala.

However, in education, "It’s a tough thing, students can’t go back to school and we have to do what we can to alleviate that pain point."

Hopefully, telcos can facilitate distance learning.

Already, Globe Telecom has built 700 new cell sites and upgraded 8,036 as of October 2020, with 600 more cell sites finished by the end of the year, according to president Ernest L. Cu.

Telecom subscribers in the Philippines saw significant improvements from the fourth quarter of 2018 and third quarter of 2020, in the latest Mobile Network Experience Report by independent mobile analytics firm Opensignal.

Globe Telecom’s mobile data average download speeds reportedly improved by 80.9% from 4.7 Mbps to 8.5 Mbps. 2.

Mobile 4G availability rose by 19.5 percentage points from 63.7% to 83.3%, recording improvements for at least 10 consecutive quarters.

The findings concluded that both Globe and Smart have made excellent progress since fourth quarter of 2018 in Mindanao, National Capital Region, North and Central Luzon, South Luzon and Visayas in terms of video experience, download speed experience, latency experience, and 4G availability already at 80% nearing global average of 86.3%.