Video, mobile games boost Smart revenues

MANILA, Philippines — PLDT Inc.’s mobile business posted record high revenues  in the first quarter behind the increasing appetite of its customers for online video and mobile games.

Service revenues of its individual wireless business, which includes the consumer sales of Smart, Sun and TNT mobile brands, soared 18 percent year-on-year to P16.9 billion during the three-month period.

The record increase in revenues was driven by a robust growth in data and broadband revenues which accounted for 65 percent of the total. 

PLDT said its wireless brands added 3.4 million customers in the first quarter, with mobile data traffic rising by 127 percent year-on-year to 304 petabytes.

The company said about two-thirds of its subscribers are smartphone owners, of whom about 70 percent are data users.

“These data-savvy customers are watching more and more video on their smartphones. With the introduction of the Video Every Day data packages late last year, more customers have been accessing various video services like YouTube, NBA, iWant and iFlix,” Smart said.

“Mobile gaming has contributed to the continuing increase in data usage, following PLDT and Smart’s initiatives to organize their official professional eSports team, Omega.  They also sponsored the professional league in the Philippines of the popular mobile game Mobile Legends,” it added.

To support Filipinos’ increasing appetite for data, PLDT and Smart are continuously expanding and modernizing their fixed and mobile networks, backed by a historic-high capital expenditure of P78.4 billion this year.

The capex investments are to further expand coverage and to increase capacity to handle the exponential growth in data traffic, with the ultimate aim of delivering the best data customer experience.

Smart has added about 1,700 LTE base stations in the first quarter, raising the total to about 18,000.

It is also activating carrier aggregation across its sites, enabling the network to deliver even faster mobile internet services by combining the capacity of two or more frequency bands.

Smart has likewise also increased its 3G base station count to about 12,100.

Meanwhile, PLDT has further expanded its total fiber optic cable network footprint to 259,000 kilometers.

PLDT’s fiber-powered fixed line broadband network has now passed 6.7 million homes as of the  end of March while the  total number of fiber ports available has reached 2.96 million, of which 1.2 million are available for new customers.

“This transport transformation program is a crucial part of our ambition to strengthen the network leadership that PLDT and Smart nave won through consistent efforts over the past three years,” said Mario Tamayo, PLDT-Smart senior vice president for network planning and engineering.