PLDT H1 core earnings jump 5% despite pandemic, economic fallout

Pangilinan-led PLDT Inc. saw its bottom line grow in the first six months of 2020 despite the economic fallout resulting from months-long lockdown to contain the spread of COVID-19 pandemic.

In a regulatory filing on Thursday, the telco said its core income in the January to June period stood at P13.9 billion, up 5% year-on-year due to an 8% growth in service revenues to P82.8 billion.

“COVID-19 has set our agenda for the foreseeable future. At the outset, our task was clearly to keep people connected as the country went into lockdown. Moving forward, we will grow our business by helping our customers – and the country – rebuild their lives and livelihoods with powerful connectivity like fiber, 4G and now 5G, combined with innovative digital solutions,” PLDT chairman, president and CEO Manuel V. Pangilinan said.

The telco giant attributed the net profit to its core business —wireless, home broadband and enterprise.

Data and broadband revenues reached P59 billion, up 18%, accounting for 71% of service revenues.

The consumer wireless group grew 16% to P39.8 billion on the back of continued strong growth of wireless data usage.

Home broadband revenues grew 7% to P19.6 billion despite the operational constraints on our ability to install new connections by quarantine restrictions.

Enterprise group grew service revenues to P20.3 billion, up 5%.

“Our strong performance will allow us to further boost our already significant investments. These investments, which total some P260 billion over the past five years, enabled our networks to carry all the additional traffic during these past few months and also to bring new technologies such as 5G which we launched just last week. Given that our network rollout efforts have regained momentum, we are levelling up our target capital expenditures for 2020 back up to about P70 billion. The balance of our original P83 billion capital expenditure budget will be spent next year,” Pangilinan said.

The PLDTC chief said the company expects that its core income for the year will be at par to what was posted last year, which was at P27.1 billion. — RSJ, GMA News