Globe Telecom Inc. signed a $40-million loan facility with Bank of the Philippine Islands to fund expansion and refinance debts.
“The loan shall be used to partially finance the company’s maturing obligations, capital expenditures and general corporate requirements,” the company said.
Globe, a unit of Ayala Corp., earlier raised its full-year capital spending budget to $950 million this year from the original $850 million.
The company allocated P32.5 billion or $618 million for capital expenditures in the first nine months to support the growing subscriber base and address the rapidly changing and rising demand for data.
The massive investment accounted for nearly 32 percent of top line revenues, among the highest in the region, as the company continued to reinvest in its network to improve the quality and experience of its subscribers.
About 78 percent of the total expenditures in the period was for data-related services.
Globe said it was on course to fulfill its commitment to deploy LTE services to 95 percent of cities and municipalities nationwide by the end of 2018 and upgrade its network to support the pilot 5G deployment in 2019.
Globe has a total of 40,522 base stations, with close to 27,000 for 4G to support the service requirements of its customers.
Globe’s mobile subscriber base reached 65.4 million as of end-September 2018, up 10 percent from the 59.3 million subscribers reported in the same period last year.
The increase led to mobile data traffic growing by 49 percent from 430 petabytes last year to 641 petabytes in the nine-month period.
Total home broadband subscriber base increased around 23 percent to more than 1.5 million, of which around 48 percent were home wireless subscribers.
The company plans to roll out ultra-fast internet service to two million homes by 2020.