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THE
Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) Group said
the phone giant will report better numbers next year
compared to this year’s expected P35-billion core net
income and 30 million wireless subscribers.
The
country’s biggest player in the telco industry said it
is also preparing a “cunning plan” for 2009 that may
include new products and services for the wireless and
wireline sectors.
“Two
thousand and eight will be a good year. It will be
better than 2007. But 2009 will be an excellent year. We
have a cunning plan for 2009,” chairman Manuel
Pangilinan in an interview said.
He
refused to discuss further details on the Group’s 2009
plans other than saying “It will be a little bit of
both.”
Pangilinan maintained the group’s earlier estimate for
the year. Core-net income would hit P35 billion, while
cellular subscriber base will likely hit 30 million. “We
will probably report a net income in the north of P35
billion. It is harder to predict what our reported net
income will be given the fluctuating foreign exchange
rate. For our subscriber base, hopefully we will be
close to 30 million this year,” Pangilinan said.
PLDT
reported a 13-percent increase in its third quarter core
profit to P9.1 billion compared to a year earlier.
Growth was brought about by gains in the cell-phone
business, which offset a drop in dollar-denominated
revenue from its fixed-line telephone business. Net
profit, which takes into account the impact of
foreign-exchange movements and derivatives transactions,
fell 9 percent to P9.5 billion.
Pangilinan said the sustained strength in the company’s
core numbers point to another year of record-high core
profitability. PLDT is partly owned by
Hong Kong’s First Pacific Co. Ltd. and
Japan’s
NTT DoCoMo group.
It has
earmarked P25 billion in capital expenditure (capex)
next year. Of the amount, P15 billion will fund the
group’s wireless business; P8 billion to P9 billion will
go to the landline sector; and the remaining P1.5
billion will be spent by ePLDT, the PLDT Group’s
information and communications technology arm.
“Our
capex for next year will be the same as this year,”
Pangilinan added.
In an
effort to ensure seamless and widest coverage of its
growing subscriber base the Group will expand its
wireless network to accommodate an increase in
subscribers.
“The
cellular penetration rate would likely hit 60 percent
next year. We are… at 55 percent today. The growth in
the number of subscribers in 2008 will not be as much as
this year so the growth next year will come from the
broadband subscribers,” said Pangilinan. A penetration
rate of 55 percent would mean more than half of the
population has a mobile phone. |
