EasyCall to close provincial sites

Paging company-turned Internet and contact center firm EasyCall Communication Philippines Inc. will be closing down the provincial sites of its paging business effective end of this month, a company official told the PSE.

ECPI corporate information officer Leon Dy said the company’s board has approved the shutdown, thus limiting their paging operations only in Metro Manila and Cebu.

"This closure decision was arrived at due to the fact that the provincial pager base has gone down to an insignificant level and after noting the continuing losses incurred by these sites," he said.

Last year, ECPI wrote-off P191 million worth of transmission network assets, a clear signal that it is slowly losing the foothold on its once dominant business and subscriber base to other telecommunication providers.

The write down of the remaining net book value of the paging transmission assets was intended to reflect the future non-recoverability of these assets, recognizing the fact that the huge investments made in 16 paging networks with a capacity of more than 300,000 subscribers cannot be fully recovered with the substantial decline in subscriber base.

ECPI enjoyed brisk business starting the early 1990s as it elevated paging into a popular mode of relaying communications by introducing faster access, customer-friendly service, compact pager units, and affordable rates.

However, the emergence of the short messaging system (SMS) or text messaging introduced as a value-added service by the mobile phone companies in the late 1990s resulted in a major migration of paging subscribers to cellphones, bringing down not only ECPI’s business with it but the entire paging industry as well.

Aside from the asset write down, the company also approved the sale of certain idle assets to generate funds to support the cash flow requirements for its planned transformation into the information technology field as an Internet data center and contact center outsourcing provider.