SkyCable allots P700 million for shift to digital

MANILA, Philippines - Lopez-owned Sky Cable Corp. is investing around P700 million this year, slightly more than last year’s capital expenditure budget, largely for the cable television operator’s technology shift from analog to digital.

SkyCable chief operations officer Carlo Katigbak said out of this year’s total capex, around P300 million will be used to install more digital set-top boxes among cable TV subscribers.

The company, which earlier acquired the assets of PLDT subsidiary Home Cable Corp., has already spent around $2 million for the station headend and around $4.5 million for the acquisition of digital set-top boxes.

SkyCable earlier acquired Home Cable via a share-swap scheme, with the latter’s owners ending up with a 33.33 percent share and the Lopez-group, 66.67 percent. However, because of the conversion into equity of debts extended by another Lopez-owned company, ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp., to SkyCable, and PLDT’s failure to put in more money to preserve the ownership structure, the PLDT group’s stake in SkyCable has been reduced to nine percent.

Katigbak said in Metro Manila, SkyCable has already installed 90,000 digital boxes, with another 60,000 to 70,000 to be put into the homes of subscribers within the year. “We plan to cover around 80 percent of our subscriber base in two years’ time,” he disclosed.

SkyCable has around 500,000 CATV subscribers, of which 200,000 are in Metro Manila.

The company expects this year’s revenues reach about at P3.5 billion, slightly higher than last year. “In terms of the bottom line, we expect to be income positive this year,” Katigbak added.

SkyCable also expects its subscriber base to experience a single-digit growth this year amidst the difficult economic and business condition.

Because of the reduced consumer purchasing power, Katigbak said they expect their prepaid service to do very well this year. SkyCable Select was recently launched, offering prepaid service for as low as P280.

Aside from offering broadband connection and long distance voice connections, he added that SkyCable is looking at offering video-on-demand service over their cables.

The country’s biggest CATV company has also expressed its support to proposals that will put a stop to the issuance of licenses by the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to new CATV operators.

 “As we add more competition, we just divide the market and do not add any value. Everybody just makes less money and they cannot expand. The consumers suffer in the end,” Katigbak stressed.  – Mary Ann Reyes