PLDT core earnings up 3% to P18B

Telecommunications giant PLDT Inc. posted flat earnings in the first half at P18.4 billion as its core businesses registered modest growth.

Its financial filing on Tuesday showed that this was slightly down from P18.45 billion last year.

PLDT chair and CEO Manuel Pangilinan told reporters during a press briefing that they expected a middle single-digit full-year earnings growth this year, coming from P26.61 billion in 2023.

The company’s total revenues inched up by 3 percent to P107.58 billion. Service revenues, meanwhile, went up by 4 percent to P103.44 billion.

Telco core income, which excludes the sale of assets and losses from Maya Innovations Holdings, reached P18 billion, up by 3 percent.

“Even as we continue to face challenges—among these geopolitical uncertainties, significant gravity in the telco space and an increasingly competitive telco landscape—we remain determined to do our best to grow the business,” PLDT chair and CEO Pangilinan said.

The company’s individual wireless segment under Smart Communications saw revenues increase by 4 percent to P41.9 billion, driven by the mobile data business.

Mobile data revenues, which accounted for 89 percent of total individual wireless revenues, grew by 8 percent to P37.1 billion.

Average data usage per subscriber grew to 11.6 gigabytes (GB) from 10.5 GB in the same period last year, with mobile data traffic increasing by 11 percent to 2,641 Petabytes.

As of end-June, Smart had 60.8 million mobile subscribers.

Meanwhile, PLDT Home’s revenues in the first semester ended stable at P30 billion. Its fiber-only service revenues climbed by 7 percent to P27.6 billion, accounting for 92 percent of the segment’s total revenues.

According to the company, its fiber footprint reached 18.13 million homes in 71 percent of the country’s towns and 91 percent of total provinces.

PLDT chief finance officer Danny Yu said capital outlays in the first half had totaled P35.1 billion versus P40.8 billion last year.

“With the all-time highs delivered in recent periods behind us, we turn to the future that we are tasked to build for PLDT with careful optimism,” Pangilinan said.