Globe reports a record-breaking year!

I’m back from my three-week sojourn in the United States. Let me say that the reason why I hate coming home is that I’m leaving a country that is run like heaven by Americans and I’m returning to a country that is run like hell by Filipinos! I can only wish that someday, the Philippines would be run like heaven by Filipinos. But this is only wishful thinking!

If there is anything going for the Americans, they are a people who make sure that whenever they find something wrong with anything, they would make a valiant effort to fix these problems. This is why America is the richest, most powerful nation on earth because Americans have mastered the art of finding better ways to run their country from getting the cheapest products to be sold in stores to making their military machine more productive and efficient even in killing the enemy.

When I got to the New World Hotel last Wednesday and turned on the TV to watch CNN, I got a breaking news about a hostage-taking situation unfolding outside Manila City Hall. At first I thought it was another terrorist attack, but thankfully, it was not. It turned out that a certain Jun Ducat, owner of the Musmos Day-care Center, took four teachers and 26 children hostage to dramatize his problem, asking Filipinos to vote for the right candidates and airing his views about corruption in this country. Hey, Mr. Ducat, we also share the same sentiments, but we do not go around holding innocent children as hostages! That fellow must have flipped!

Indeed, what a great welcome for me, who has been out of the country since March 10, where I never even cared to check the Internet just to look for news back home. As the news unfurled, it turned out that Sen. Alfredo Lim and even Sen. Bong Revilla knew that Jun Ducat had a past history of hostage-taking.

Again, this is another case of someone committing a serious crime and getting away with it so he could once again commit the same crime. This is what justice is about in the Philippines, aggravated by the reality that Filipinos never learn from their stupid mistakes. Our laws on recidivism border on the ridiculous. Just look at the violators of our traffic laws and you’ll know what I mean.

Then there’s the question of the role of media, especially our broadcasters on radio and TV, whether they ought to be used by criminals to propagate their cause? I heard Ducat on television explaining why he took the children as hostages using the cellphone of Sen. Revilla. Perhaps it is time to enact a law against this so that criminals cannot use the facilities of the media to promote their own criminality or terrorism. But then Filipinos are a forgetful lot when all this is over, we’d go to the next breaking news!

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I arrived in Manila just in time to meet my Cebuano and Mindanao media colleagues who came to Manila upon the invitation of Globe Telecom to cover the company’s annual stockholders’ meeting last Wednesday. We’ve been attending this meeting in the last five years and for this year’s report, we were expecting what Globe Telecom officials told the media a year before that they were experiencing difficulty and expected not so encouraging results.

But as Globe Telecom Chairman Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala II proudly reported, his company’s performance for 2006 was record-breaking, bagging a net income of P11.8 billion as compared to P10.315 billion in 2005. My good friend, Globe’s legal beagle Atty. Rodolfo Salalima, told me that they, too, expected 2006 to be a bad year, but because Globe’s top management was quick to innovate and responded faster to the needs of their subscribers, they were not just able to pull through, they came up with a record-breaking net income! Proof of the pudding is in the eating. This was one stockholders’ meeting where not a single shareholder questioned the top management.

In his speech, Globe president Gerry Ablaza said, "2006 was a defining year for Globe as we exceeded our expectations, answering to the needs of the market. Globe invested more than P45 billion in infrastructure in the last three years, reaching 98 percent of the Filipino population with 5,884 cellsites." As a Globe subscriber since the mid-90s, I have come to know this personally especially when we travel around on our big bikes, going to many far-flung areas. Ten years ago, there would be places we would visit where our Globe cellphones would be useless.

Today things have changed a lot, thanks to Globe for pioneering texting and international roaming. I have not come across a place in this country where my Globe phone goes blink. More so with Globe’s partners in the US, T-Mobile and Cingular, which always allows me to stay in touch with my family back home and text our friends in the US.

During the Globe presscon at the InterCon Hotel, I asked Ablaza what Globe Telecom was doing in order to prevent a repetition of the Taiwan earthquake where all Internet connections were disrupted and slowed down to a crawl. Ablaza pointed out that Globe will be investing in new facilities to assure its subscribers that there will be no repeat of that incident last December. What people really do not know is that even a wireless system needs to be linked to an underwater cable so they could text or communicate with someone abroad. With Globe, even its wireline business is experiencing growth.

I also asked Atty. Rudy Salalima whether the war waged by the New People’s Army (NPA) on Globe cellsites was increasing. Apparently such incidents are on a decline… as Globe has strengthened security in all its cellsites and the military, upon the directive of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA), has stepped up its campaign to stop the NPA’s extortion activities.

I heard that recently Salalima accepted a recognition award from the military for helping fight the armed insurgency. I was just wondering what that award was really about. Was it perhaps the military’s way of thanking Globe for not giving in or paying what the NPAs call "revolutionary taxes"? Does this also mean that the others are paying up?

In summary, Gerry Ablaza said, "All economic indicators are up and inflation is down throughout the country which is good for the telecoms industry." I can vouch for that. When the economy is doing well, people have more money to spend to communicate with their friends and the more they do so, the more business for Globe Telecom. The only remaining question is, can Globe Telecom once again break its own record this year?

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For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.