ONCE again defying seers’ forecast, MediaQuest Holdings Inc., an investee company of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) Beneficial Trust Fund, is pushing through with its investment in the company that publishes The Philippine Star. Company officials, however, no longer want to state a timetable for the acquisition following the lapse of the July target closing date for the transaction.

MediaQuest director Ray Espinosa, in a text message, said the acquisition will be “concluded as early as practicable,” adding that “print investment is part of multimedia strategy of MediaQuest.”

The PLDT unit has pending discussion to purchase 87.5 percent of the broadsheet for P4 billion. Negotiations were supposed to be finalized in July, but the target date for the acquisition was not achieved. “I keep on saying the timetable, but it does not happen. Probably, I’ll be quiet and just announce it when it’s done,” said PLDT chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan.

The telecom executive himself has about 10-percent interest in the newspaper. For this transaction, it will be MediaQuest that will acquire the Philippine Star and not PLDT, as Philippine law prohibits foreign ownership in Philippine media. PLDT is owned by Hong Kong-based conglomerate First Pacific Co. Ltd. and Japan’s NTT Communications and NTT DoCoMo.

LISTED broadcast company GMA Network Inc. remains confident it will hit its full-year profit target amid the general drop in industry advertising spending, although it said it may raise ad rates by more than 10 percent.

GMA chairman, president and chief executive officer Felipe Gozon said the company may raise advertising rates next year.

During yesterday’s quarterly income briefing, GMA chief finance officer Felipe S. Yalong said: “We will be able to hit the full-year commitment of P2.8 billion, it will be around 20 percent over what we did last year.”

For the July to September period, the company said its profits slipped 4.25 percent to P788 million from the same period last year as expenses rose 18 percent, mostly through its personnel costs.

The company credited this to a labor contract which tempered its net income for this period.

DIVERSIFYING conglomerate San Miguel Corp. (SMC) is reporting higher profits for the first nine months of the year driven by its liquor and beer units.

Consolidated profits from the January-to-September period rose 173 percent to P57 billion. Operating income ended the period 12 percent higher at P13.1 billion.

The consolidated income includes one-time gains, such as SMC’s sale of a 43.25-percent stake in domestic beer to Japan’s Kirin Holdings Co. for P50.7 billion earlier this year. SMC said without one-time gains, it net income during the period rose 6 percent to P7.61 billion from last year.