Data-savvy Pinoys lift PLDT profit to P16.9B

CEBU, Philippines —  Young, data-savvy Filipinos who have strong appetite for online games and data consumption in this social media age helped boost PLDT’s revenue growth in the first quarter of 2019.

The country’s telecom giant noted that today’s customers are watching more and more video on their smartphones, pushing the firm’s service revenue to P16.9 billion, an 18 percent jump based on year-on-year comparison on net interconnection cost.

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

“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,” PLDT statement said.

The monthly users of YouTube, already boosted by last year’s Free YouTube promo, further increased by 35 percent in the first quarter.

Viewers of other popular video apps also increased sharply: users of the NBA video service nearly doubled; those of iWant soared 153 percent and iflix, 170 percent.

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.

  The number of monthly unique users of Mobile Legends increased by five times from June 2018 to end-March 2019.

PLDT’s wireless brands also added 3.4 million customers in the first quarter of 2019, adding to a subscriber base that is increasingly becoming more active in using data.

About two-thirds of these subscribers are smartphone owners, 70 percent of whom are data users. Mobile data traffic rose by 127 percent year-on-year to 304 petabytes.