Waiting for 3rd telecom service provider
FOR the 13th day today, our broadband-land line service provider, which is Globe Telecom Inc., (market symbol: GLO), has yet to send its service personnel to check our line. Something must be wrong somewhere, we don’t know what it is, because we don’t tinker with things that we don’t know anything about.
Of course, Ayala Corp. ( AC) and Singapore Telecom Pte. Limited, which own Globe Telecom, wouldn’t know how it feels to be deprived of their company’s services. So, how can we expect the government of Singapore, which owns Singtel, and the Zobel de Ayalas, who are AC’s majority stockholders, to care about our predicament? What could be more important to the owners of this business than the revenues that Globe Telecom earns from subscribers?
Globe Telecom charges us almost P1,600 every month. The bill comes on time, and as a subscriber, we can’t afford to be late in paying that bill, or else penalties would be added to that amount or we could get cut off from the rest of the world.
Of course, a little less than P1,600 is nothing for SingTel and the Zobels. The numbers would be too long for any calculator to come up with the result. As a matter of fact, the value is too small that dividing it by P95.139 billion in revenues that Globe Telecom registered as of Sept. 30, 2017 yielded 1.6817498…. I hope the Zobels would educate me on the resulting dividend.
Foreigners’ control
The general information sheet ( GIS) filed by Globe Telecom shows the company’s ownership - poreans with 62,648,491 GLO common shares, of which only two are the “number of shares in the hands of the public;” 25 and “others,” referring to foreigners other than Singaporeans. All in all, foreigners, led by Singaporeans, own 78,808,562 GLO common shares, or, 25 percent, as Globe Telecom shows in its GIS,
On the other hand, 3,768 Filipinos own 53,950,026 GLO common shares, or 17 percent, according to Globe Telecom’s GIS.
When the common shares
owned by Singaporeans and Filipinos are added together, they total 132,758,588 common shares, representing Globe Telecom’s outstanding common shares.
Here is another computation that should show the correct ownership percentages: Dividing the foreignowned 78,808,562 GLO common shares by 132,758,588 outstanding GLO common shares equals 59.362 percent. Filipino-owned 53,950,026 GLO common shares equals 40.638 percent.
Of the foreign-owned 78,808,562 GLO common shares, or 59.362 percent, Singaporeans’ 62,646,491 equals 47.188 percent of 132,758,588 outstanding GLO common shares, topping by 6.55 percent the Filipinoowned GLO common shares, which represent only 40.638 percent.
Third telecom?
Shall we wait for a third telecom company to come to our aid? Waiting be our option when a third telecom service provider is present. A third telecom would just have to take the risk of finding a Filipino business partner who, as mandated by the Constitution, should own at least 60 percent of the joint venture’s outstand- ing capital stock.
I am using “capital stock” because the Securities and Exchange Com its composition should be. Should preferred shares be included in computing the ownership ratio when these are, strictly speaking, liabilities?
composition of the board of listed companies? If they would do as suggested, through their nominees. The problem with our regulatory authorities is that they fail the public investors who are attributed so much ownership, which, ironically does not translate to directorship.
Going back to Globe Telecom, as a necessity, I now rely on Smartbro in sending my Due Diligencer pieces via email to my editors at
Although Smart Telecom belongs to the PLDT group, which, my emails via Smartbro.
On Dec. 11 when I went to report our agony to Globe Telecom’s outlet at SM Sta. Rosa City, the company scheduled the repair of our broadband-cum-landline for Dec. 12, 2017. No one came on Dec. 12, so I followed up my request for repair.
Then sometime last week, Globe Telecom woke me up in the middle of the night – sending me via my mobile phone our December bill with a reminder to pay it on time. Say what?