PLDT’s ‘butcher’ COO publicly slices telco rivals

Notes on the beat

MANILA, Philippines — What do butchers do best? They sharpen their knives to slice meat into specific cuts, breaking down carcasses to show buyers what is lean and what is fat.

And that is what Menardo Jimenez Jr., called by his industry peers as Butch, is doing right now in his capacity as chief operating officer of telco giant PLDT Inc.

Butch is slicing and dicing PLDT’s rivals in financial briefings and press releases, attacking them for new products and business health.

Last week, for instance, Jimenez doused broadband provider Converge ICT Solutions with sarcasm as he flipped the results of a third-party analysis against the company.

Based on SPEEDGEO’s study, Converge posted the fastest download speed at 129.7 Mbps, beating PLDT’s 120.7 Mbps.

However, Jimenez highlighted PLDT’s lowest ping at 24 milliseconds. Latency, also called ping, is the amount of time it takes for data to go from one source to another. The higher the latency, the longer the wait for calls to transmit, videos to buffer and websites to load.

“In our experience, speed has become a marketing slant, (but) low latency that results in network reliability is what actually wins over customers,” Jimenez said.

Sarcastically, Jimenez tipped his hat to Converge for promoting the SPEEDGEO study, saying it only advertised PLDT’s reliability in broadband performance.

“In the end, we are happy to continue competing to offer connectivity to Filipinos that’s fast and more reliable than ever before, (but) we are thankful that they admitted through the SPEEDGEO report that we have been the most reliable this past year,” Jimenez said.

Before this, Butch’s sharp scimitar was aimed at competitors’ efforts to introduce direct-to-cell (DTC) technology to Filipinos. Notably, telco giant Globe Telecom is working with satellite leader Starlink to achieve 100-percent coverage by activating a DTC service.

The technology will beam internet on isolated areas to connect capable phones to low earth orbit satellites operated by Starlink. Globe plans to use the pioneering DTC to reach towns where building terrestrial assets like cellular towers is difficult.

Jimenez is unimpressed, pointing out that DTC experience in other countries showed that sending and receiving texts can take as long as four minutes.

As such, Jimenez said the DTC option is impractical in the digital era, where consumers demand stronger bandwidth for data-heavy tasks like online gaming and video streaming.

“Satellite services can be useful, especially as redundancy in the hardest-to-reach areas, [but] for everyday connectivity, customers expect fast, reliable and seamless service,” Jimenez said.

Globe president and CEO Carl Raymond Cruz defended the telco from the offensive. He said the telco has partnered with Starlink – owned by one of the world’s richest men Elon Musk – which manages around 10,000 satellites close to earth.

“Using Starlink mobile in remote areas demonstrated that SMS messages were sent and received almost instantaneously. Users were also able to access app-based calls, messaging platforms such as Viber and WhatsApp, navigation apps, eGovPH, GlobeOne and GCash even in areas beyond Globe’s traditional mobile coverage,” Cruz said.

Still, the worst recipient of Butch’s hack and slash is youngest telco Dito Telecommunity Corp., owned by Davao-based businessman Dennis Uy and his Chinese partners.

In February, Jimenez called out Dito for forcing PLDT and Globe into a price war at the beginning of its operations, only to pile up more debts and yearly losses in its five-year existence.

The executive said Dito’s shareholders may start doubting the telco’s viability, as its parent unit Dito CME Holdings Corp. is way behind its committed profit by 2028.

“Revenue may increase, but losses are significant. Aside from the losses, debts are huge and they have not even rolled out in the whole Philippines on the same level we have,” Jimenez said.

These words are ringing truer for Dito, as its first-quarter finances showed signs of struggle rather than hope. Dito’s net loss quadrupled to P6.76 billion, as it is still spending more at P8.67 billion than it is earning at P5.81 billion.

Moreover, Dito’s capital deficiency went up to a record P117.73 billion, blaming worsening finances dragged by bloating operating expenses and payment of expiring loans.

Jimenez seems to be bringing PLDT back to the late-2000s to mid-2010s era of telco war, a period marked by product spinoffs, marketing hype and boardroom braggadocio.

That era developed new forms of connectivity packages like tiered promos that bundled data, call and text services into one, and fiber-to-the-home solutions that replaced the older DSL family.

Butch may be paying tribute to that era of intense competition, begging PLDT’s rivals to engage, or he is simply showing them where they could improve. After all, butchers know best where to cut.