PLDT eyes P70-B revenue this year

Double-digit growth in home, enterprise businesses

DAVAO, Philippines – Revenue of PLDT Inc. from its home and enterprise businesses may reach P70 billion this year amid growing demand for digital offerings and solutions by households and firms.

PLDT chief revenue officer Eric Alberto told reporters during the launch of the new VITRO data center in Davao yesterday the telco is “targeting double-digit growth...for the home and enterprise business.”

He said the double-digit growth in revenue from the two business segments would translate to an increase of about P7 to P10 billion from the over P60 billion in revenue generated last year, with the home and enterprise segments contributing more than P30 billion each.

The two business segments are expected to continue to drive the revenue growth of PLDT this year as well as in the coming years, amid increasing use of digital content by households as well as of solutions by firms.

“The drivers for the growth in 2017 and even perhaps the next couple of years would be the enterprise and the home considering the wireless business has suffered to a large extent from massive competition and price erosion, not only on the mainstream talk and text, but it actually spilled over to the data bundle pricing,” Alberto said.

To promote growth in the home business segment, PLDT is encouraging consumers to consume more digital content offerings.

On the enterprise segment, PLDT continues to offer digital solutions relevant to the needs of businesses.

The launch of the new VITRO data center in Davao supports the aim of PLDT to grow its enterprise business.

VITRO Davao is PLDT’s first data facility in Mindanao, which is intended to cater to the data needs of businesses in the area.

In particular, the facility is designed to meet global data center standards by hosting data, as well as providing collocation and business continuity services for enterprises in Mindanao.

It could also serve as a secondary backup location for businesses with data already housed in other data centers across the country.

With the opening of VITRO Davao, PLDT now has a total of eight data centers in the country with total rack capacity of almost 7,000.

Alberto said PLDT expects to open the VITRO Clark data center on Friday, as well as the VITRO Cebu facility within the year, to bring the group’s total number of data facilities to 10 with a capa-city of over 9,000 racks this year.

Aside from the new data center, PLDT also completed the Davao cable landing station project that links Mindanao to the telco’s three existing international gateways located in Nasugbu, Batangas; Bauang, La Union, and Daet, Camarines Norte, to further improve the network resiliency in
Mindanao through PLDT’s international managed network which provides bandwidth global connectivity with automatic re-routing and switching capability through different international cable routes in the event of cable faults.

PLDT has also opened the upgraded Innovations Laboratory housed in PLDT Davao, which serves as the venue to learn about new products and digital services for enterprises, as well as to collaborate with the local information and communications technology community and educational institutions to promote technopreneurship.

“As part of our commitment to help the government achieve broad-based, nationwide growth, we are working to strengthen and nurture that digital hub in the southern Philippines to further enable businesses and serve the need for a stronger and more robust digital infrastructure,” Alberto said.