Dito claims to have over 2 million subscribers now
DITO CME subsidiary Dito Telecommunity [DITO 7.35 5.00%], our nation’s third telco, said on a Facebook post to its page that it had “just reached 2 million subscribers”, and that it was proud to have hit this milestone “less than 5 months after [DITO’s] official launch”.
The post also said that DITO’s network “covers about 200 cities nationwide”. For context, DITO’s commercial launch in March was more of a soft-launch, focused in Mindanao and lacking in interoperability with subscribers on other networks like Globe [GLO 1880.00 0.27%] or PLDT [TEL 1249.00 unch].
DITO started selling to customers in the NCR region in May, two months after launch, and claimed to have reached 1 million subscribers in June. Now, DITO’s sights are set on the number portability launch which will occur on September 30th, where over 1 million subscribers are expected to change networks.
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DITO took 3 months to bag its first million, then 2 months to bag its second million. At this pace, we would expect it to hit the 3 million milestone by mid-September, the 4 million milestone by mid-October, and to have around 7 million subscribers by the end of 2021. That’s if we just take the subscriber uptake rate as linear and project it into the future.
Of course, there are huge limitations to this method (namely, that the rate of new subscribers will eventually slow in a curve as low hanging fruit is exhausted in current markets), but we need to do our own guesswork because DITO has been conspicuously silent about its own projections. The company didn’t even mention Dito Telecommunity subscribers even once in its Q1 Quarterly Report. The Philippines has a total subscription market of 150 million, and if DITO wants to grab 30% of that (or is it 33%?) before March 2026, it’s going to have to sign over 43 million more subscribers over the remaining 4.5 years.
How will DITO get there? Great question, but I don’t know. What is DITO’s 2021 year-end goal of subscribers to know that it is on track with its efforts? Another great question, but I don’t know. Do we have any other means of determining how well the DITO executive team is doing at fulfilling its representations to investors? Wow, yet another great question, and yet another thing that we simply don’t have any answers for. Is this the DITO Experience™?
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