In the first nine months of the year, PLDT Inc.’s Consolidated Service Revenues (net of interconnection costs) rose 7 percent to ₱135.9 billion, driven by record-high service revenues of ₱46 billion in the third quarter.
However, reported that its net income declined by 4 percent to ₱18.8 billion due to revaluation losses after the peso depreciated this year.
The telco's core income, excluding the impact of asset sales and Voyager Innovations, climbed 10 percent year-on-year to ₱23.1 billion due to lower tax rates.
Overall, PLDT remains on track to reach its full year core income guidance of ₱30.0 billion.
For the first nine months, EBITDA increased by 8 percent to an all-time high of ₱71.1 billion.
EBITDA Margin was at 51 percent.
“We are cautiously optimistic that as the economy reopens, we are best positioned to serve our customers through the new normal, as evidenced by our strong results for the first nine months of 2021," says Alfredo S Panlilio, President and CEOof PLDT and Smart.
"The digital transformation of our country is at the top of the PLDT Group’s agenda,” according to Manuel V Pangilinan, Chairman of PLDT, Voyager Innovations, and PayMaya.
To support its expanded digital ecosystem, PLDT and its mobile unit Smart spent ₱63.3 billion in capex for the first nine months.
PLDT and Smart are on track to meeting the 2021 full-year capex guidance of at least ₱88 billion. Network upgrades continue to represent the bulk of capital expenditures.
Significantly, with strong market demand, PLDT’s fiber-to-the-home business revenues hit ₱9.0 billion, up 83 percent for its fiber business.
Total Home revenue grew 25 percent to ₱35.3 billion in the first nine months of the year, boosted by the record revenue increase in the third quarter.
On the other hand, individual Wireless revenues grew 3 percent to ₱65.1 billion despite challenging market conditions due to limited mobility, economic difficulties and competition.
Data/broadband contributed 80 percent of the segment’s revenues, with mobile data users reaching 40 million and with Smart 5G growing its revenue contribution as Smart continues to expand its 5G network roll out.
Smart 5G subscribers posted a triple-digit year-on-year growth, while data traffic on Smart’s 5G network more than doubled in the third quarter, up 116 percent from the second quarter of 2021.
In the third quarter alone, average data traffic per month increased by nearly 20x versus the fourth quarter of 2020.
Mobile data revenues in the first nine months grew 9 percent to ₱52.6 billion, as third quarter promos drove increase in usage.
Total data traffic in the first nine months grew 16 percent year-on-year to 2,458 petabytes.
In the third quarter, monthly average data usage per subscriber was 7.7 GB, up 8 percent versus the second quarter.
As limited mobility confined customers to their homes, revenues from Smart’s fixed wireless solutions grew 88 percentto ₱2.5 billion.
Fixed wireless subscribers breached the one million mark, increasing 24 percent versus end-2020. Key to Smart’s sustained year-on-year growth has been the massive adoption of the GigaLife App, which has over 10 million users currently.
The GigaLife App, envisioned as the “operating system” for a Smart subscriber, allows linking of different accounts, offers an integrated rewards program and, throughGigaPay, links users' PayMaya wallet for in-app transactions such as buying load, subscribing to promos, and paying bills.
On the other hand, the telco's enterprise segment’s revenues grew by 2 percent to ₱31.1 billion.
The PLDT Group, through ePLDT, will build the first hyperscaler data center in the Philippines, designed to serve the power and IT requirements of global tech giants.
The new hyperscaler data center, to ground break next year and completed by the first quarter of 2024, will have more power capacity than PLDT’s network of 10 globally certified VITRO data centers combined.
It will be telco neutral and will incorporate sustainability in its design and operations.
Supporting this bid to become a hyperscaler hub is PLDT’s current international cable network of 15 global subsea cable systems with total capacity of 19 Tbps.
The completion of the Jupiter Cable system slated in Q2 2022 would further increase PLDT’s international capacity to 60 Tbps.
“In many ways, we have to adopt revolutionary aspects of leadership, adapting to abrupt changes where really needed, while maintaining the values that are important to the company,” noted , PLDT Chairman Pangilinan.
“At the center of it all is the customer experience," he stressed.
"In the old days, the value of companies was defined mainly by traditional metrics. Nowadays, companies are measured on two additional metrics which define their market value: Sustainability and Digitalization. These are no longer options but imperatives.”