Globe Telecom Inc. said Tuesday net income grew 22 percent in 2018 from a year ago, boosted by higher mobile data and broadband revenues.
The telecom unit of the Ayala Group said it earned P18.4 billion last year, up from P15.08 billion it booked in 2017.
Core net income surged 37 percent to P18.5 billion in 2018 from P13.5 billion in 2017.
“We are proud of what we have achieved in 2018 both in terms of financials and network expansion. With our unwavering commitment to bring the Philippines closer to first-world internet connectivity, we are happy to announce that we have successfully met our minimum broadband coverage commitment,” Globe president and chief executive Ernest Cu said in a statement.
“We will continue to build our network capacities to improve the internet experience as we re-invest our gains back to our network, which is now close to 33 percent of our revenues, to be able to deliver a differentiated level of customer service,” Cu said.
Consolidated revenues reached P140.2 billion last year, up 10 percent from P127.9 billion in 2017.
Mobile revenues grew 9 percent to P99.5 billion last year. Mobile data continued to be the top contributor to the company’s mobile business and accounted for 51 percent of gross mobile service revenues in 2018, up from 44 percent in 2017.
This was propelled by the sustained higher prepaid top-ups, with more consumer spending on mobile data, driving the mobile data traffic growth from 600 petabytes in 2017 to 956 petabytes in 2018.
Mobile voice and mobile SMS revenues accounted for P28.5 billion and P20.2 billion, respectively.
Globe’s home broadband business ended the year with total revenues of P18.6 billion, on the back of the continued subscriber expansion in fixed wireless solutions and the growing popularity of the Home prepaid Wifi product.
Corporate data business grossed P11.8 billion in revenues in 2018, largely attributed to a higher circuit base.
Mobile subscriber base totaled 74.1 million as of end-December 2018 which will now become the new baseline given the impact of the regulatory requirement which extends prepaid load validity to one year.
Total home broadband subscriber base grew 24 percent to more than 1.6 million, of which around 61 percent are home wireless subscribers.
Globe spent P43.3 billion or about $821 million capital expenditures in 2018 to address the robust data traffic growth and support the increasing customer base with the ramped-up LTE rollout.