Globe Telecom has announced that its subscriber take-up continued to gather momentum, as the company’s net subscriber additions in the January to September period surged 70% to 3.4 million from a year earlier.
The company’s sharp increase in net subscriber additions pushed the company’s total subscribers at the end of the period to a fresh record of 36.5 million, an increment of 14% from a year earlier. This, in turn, generated robust gains in its postpaid and mobile browsing businesses despite intense competition and supported a 10% revenue growth of P67.3 billion, leading to a core net income rise of 9% to P9.5 billion.
Globe president and CEO Ernest Cu attributes the company’s encouraging growth in the first nine months of the year to the strong performance of its mobile business, which generated total revenues of P54.1 billion in the first nine months of the year, an 8% increase from a year earlier.
Postpaid revenues alone, reached almost P20 billion, a 20% jump from a year earlier, courtesy of a 19% growth in postpaid subscribers. “On a subscriber base of almost 2 million subscribers, which comprises only 5% of the total subscriber base, our postpaid segment now contributes 37% of total mobile revenues, up from 33% in the same period last year and from 29% in the first nine months of 2010,” noted Cu.
Cu said absolute increase in postpaid revenues of approximately P3.3 billion is almost twice that of the increase in subsidies and recontracting cost over the 9-month period. Still, such costs are recoverable within the two-year contract period of each subscriber, he emphasized.
The company’s prepaid business also continued to perform well, with revenues improving 3% year on year to P34.1 billion pesos, despite the market’s continued preference for value-based offers, said Cu. TM continued to lead the way for prepaid, on the back of strong subscriber acquisition efforts, leading the brand to have total subscribers of 17.6 million, a 23% rise from a year earlier.
On the other hand, the company’s broadband subscribers, at the end of the nine-month period, reached 1.9 million, a 15% rise from a year earlier and 4% improvement from a previous quarter. According to Cu, the growth in subscribers came from both wired and wireless solutions as fixed broadband subscribers grew 17% on year nomadic subscribers grew 14% over the same period last year.
Continuing expansion of the company’s broadband subscribers pushed revenues for the January to September period to P7.8 billion, a 22% rise from a year earlier and contributing 12% of total revenues, improving from its 10% contribution a year earlier.
“The company continues to contribute innovative broadband products, providing differentiated data speeds and enhanced services to cater to varying market preferences,” noted Cu.
Cu added that the company’s modernized network infrastructure is expected to lift capacity and boost network performance and thus further enhance Globe branding moving forward.
