Globe Telecom Inc. said Tuesday net income rose 13 percent in the first nine months, led by strong broadband revenues.
The telecom unit of Ayala Corp. earned P14.6 billion in January to September, up from P13 billion in the same period last year.
“Overall, I am pleased with our third-quarter results, and we are optimistic that we can sustain this momentum moving forward,” Globe president and chief executive Ernest Cu said.
Globe’s operating revenues increased 10 percent in the nine-month period to P110.78 billion from last year’s P100.45 billion.
Mobile revenues improved 8 percent to P79.13 billion, while home broadband revenues rose 15 percent to P13.5 billion.
Globe said the sustained double-digit growth of home broadband resulted from the combined effects of subscribers expansion and continued high demand for fast and reliable home internet.
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 its 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.
“We are happy that more and more Filipinos will enjoy faster and reliable internet connection as we draw clover to achieving 95 percent LT nationwide coverage. We will remain aggressive wit our next work investments, which is now nearly 32 percent of our revenues to be able to support the growing demand for bandwidth-intensive applications and content,” Cu said.
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.
This 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 grew around 23 percent to more than 1.5 million, of which around 48 percent were home wireless subscribers.
The company bids to roll out ultra-fast internet service to two million homes by 2020.