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THE
Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. board on Tuesday
approved a new $100-million investment in the wireless
market involving a “combination of new and existing”
technology.
Chairman
Manuel Pangilinan said, “The board just approved a new
investment which we can’t disclose yet. It’s a telephony
and it’s under PLDT. It’s been discussed with partners.
It’s going to be a wireless venture.”
This new
venture is apart from an earlier announcement of
Pangilinan on acquiring small phone firms under the
Philippine Association of Private Telephone Companies (Paptelco).
“Yes, that will still push through. We are about to sign
that.”
Pangilinan said the budget for the planned acquisitions
is not included in the P20 billion-P22 billion capital
expenditure (capex) allotted by the PLDT group for this
year. “The budget for this will be under our investment
budget.”
Rather,
Pangilinan said, this could be part of the $100-million
investment set aside to increase the PLDT Group’s
international submarine cable capacity from 20 gigabits
per second today to about 100 gigabits by the end of
2008.
He added
his group will also be bidding this year for the 25-year
concession of the National Transmission Corp. “We are
going to bid for it. We need a technical partner. We
have a few more months to finalize.”
It is
likely, though, that a new vehicle will be formed when
Pangilinan’s group has chosen its technical partner.
“Our foreign partner is required to have at least 5
percent equity. . . We are looking at 60 percent of
equity or maybe more, depending on the foreign partner.”
Metro
Pacific Investment Corp. was not among the three
prequalified bidders that participated in the failed
February 5 auction. Only one group, the consortium of
Citadel Holdings Inc. and Terna SPA, was prequalified.
The PLDT
group, said Pangilinan, will likely exceed a cellular
subscriber base of 27 million this year. “The budgeted
number is about 3 million additional subscribers this
year so we will probably exceed that. We ended last year
with about 24 million and the budget this year is around
27 million. We would probably exceed that.” |
