THE home digital-services arm of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) claimed on Monday that it remains as the preferred wired-broadband provider in the country, citing a milestone in its subscriber base as of end-June.
The subscriber base of PLDT HOME exceeded the 1 million mark during the first half of the year, more than double that of its competitor. The firm added nearly 100,000 new wired-broadband customers, posting double-digit growth in the first six months compared to the same period last year. The biggest contributors to wired revenues were PLDT Home Fibr and PLDT Home DSL with a combined 20-percent revenue increase.
“In this highly competitive business, it is heartening to know that the majority of the broadband market appreciates our products and services,” PLDT President and CEO Napoleon L. Nazareno said. “We attribute this to the PLDT Group’s integrated approach through which we deploy various fixed line and wireless services that provide a range of high-quality voice, data and multimedia services to our customers.”
“Our growing broadband-subscriber base will continue to increase as we move rapidly to the digital age, where people are connected 24/7. We are enriching our communications services with a growing portfolio of digital multimedia content and life solutions that address our customers’ various needs,” he said.
PLDT’s fixed broadband services are PLDT Home DSL and PLDT Home Fibr, which serve as a foundation for value-added services, such as Pay TV, video on demand and live streaming.
“Compelling content plays an important part in the growth equation. PLDT enables customers to experience the most engaging and compelling content in their favorite music, movies, games, sports and TV,” PLDT Vice President and Head of Home Marketing Gary Dujali said.
“These can be accessed through various applications, such as Deezer, Spinnr and GameX.
Television content is offered by CignalTV, also from the PLDT Group, whose current number of subscribers has reached almost 755,000,” he said. “PLDT is doubling our efforts to provide the communication tools required by customers nationwide. We are, for example, expanding the reach of our broadband internet services to families in far-flung provinces of the country through advance wireless technologies, like the Time Division-Long Term Evolution [TD-LTE], to complement our fixed network,” Nazareno said.
He said PLDT’s extensive fiber-optics network, which runs the length of the entire country, is now 88,000 kilometers long, four times more than that of competition.
“This unrivaled integrated network advantage will facilitate our efforts to deliver the most reliable service and the best experience for our customers,” he said.
PLDT reported earlier that the significant growth in its fixed-line business for the first half of the year bucked the global downward trend in the fixed-line services of telecommunications companies, on the back of double-digit gains in data and broadband revenues.
The firm’s net income stood at P20 billion in the first semester this year, a 2-percent increase from the P19.7 billion it booked in the same period in 2013.
In the same comparative periods, consolidated service revenues grew 3 percent to P85.43 billion, while expenses rose by a faster 6 percent to P62.52 billion from P59.11 billion. Shares of PLDT shed 0.06 percent to close at P3,300 apiece on Friday.