Telecommunications service provider Eastern Communications is targeting a bigger market share this year, driven by the company’s expansion plans in regions poised for growth in business-to-business connectivity.
The telco firm is set to spend ₱2.3 billion in capital expenditures (capex) this year, double last year’s ₱1.15 billion.
Eastern Communications, the country’s first telco company, is aiming to significantly expand its network and portfolio of services to sustain the steady growth of its market share.
Last year, the company had a six-percent market share, covering approximately 10,000 companies.
In 2025, it aims to secure a 6.3-percent market share, with the end-goal of reaching the top 16,000 companies of the Philippines.
Eastern Communications’ fiber network runs about 8,700 kilometers (km) with a total of 180 nodes in 42 cities nationwide.
Its expansion plan this year will primarily revolve around cities in Visayas and Mindanao with burgeoning central business districts.
In particular, the company is focusing on Cotabato City, Dipolog City, and General Santos City.
Eastern Communications said these areas were designated by the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) as cities primed for growth in the information technology and business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) sector.
“If we are able to develop these areas, we do not just improve those industries, we also improve the economy in the country as well,” Eastern Communications Co-Coordinator Aileen Regio told reporters.
The telco will be ramping up its services in areas covered by the Philippine Domestic Submarine Cable Network (PDSCN), which is essentially a transport network that provides connection across the archipelago.
Launched last year, PDSCN is the longest submarine cable in the country, covering 2,500 km and 32 point of interconnection sites.
For the year, Eastern Communications will scale up the distribution networks of PDSCN to improve its connectivity.
With these expansion plans, the company is gunning to reach ₱5.2 billion in revenues this year, up 10 percent from last year’s revenues of ₱4.7 billion.
To reach this target, Regio said Eastern Communications strive to be the “industry standard” in innovative ICT products and solutions.
The telco recently introduced distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection for its
new internet subscribers.
It is also sent to launch new features in its Eastern Cloud platform this May to help drive digital transformation to businesses by reducing IT infrastructure costs.
Regio said the company is also targeting to improve from its industry-high customer satisfaction score (CSAT) of 95.5 to 96.1 this year.
Eastern Communications is under the Vega Telecom group, a company jointly owned by telco giants PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom Inc.