Lower mobile phone revenues pull down PLDT first quarter income

May 12, 2017

PLDT Inc. announced on Friday lower net profit in the first quarter mostly due to weak revenues from its mobile phone business. PLDT, partly owned by Hong Kong’s First Pacific Co. Ltd. and Japan’s NTT group, said net income declined by 20 percent to P4.95 billion from P6.21 billon in the same period last year. Core profit, which excludes foreign exchange gains or losses and other non-recurring income,  dropped by 26 percent to P5.3 billon year-on-year. The company is sticking to its profit  guidance of P21.5 billion this year. PLDT’s wireless consumer group posted service revenues went down by 18 percent to P14.7 billion, largely due to declines in texts and voice revenues. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, rate of decline of wireless consumer revenues slowed down to two percent. The combined subscriber base of Smart, TNT and Sun rose by about 400,000 to 63.1 million in the first quarter of 2017. "As we indicated earlier, our focus since the latter part of 2016 has been to stabilize the overall business, which involves stemming the decline of revenues and profitability in the wireless consumer segment, sustaining the upward momentum in the Home and Enterprise businesses and laying the ground for recovery through the digital transformation of our businesses," Manuel Pangilinan, chairman and president of PLDT said. "We’ve produced encouraging results in the first quarter this year, thanks to the continued strong growth posted by our Home and Enterprise businesses, whilst our Wireless Consumer Group re-doubled efforts to break the negative momentum and hold the line,” he added. DMS