Globe reports P16B net profits in 2016

Globe Telecom closed 2016 with all-time high service revenues of close to P120 billion, outpacing the previous record level of P113.7 billion in 2015 by six percent.

This also pushed core net profit to reach a record high of P16 billion, up six percent from P15.1 billion in the year before, it said in a press statement.

It traced the increase to solid growth in data-related products across all segments, and robust subscriber growth for both mobile and broadband.

“Notwithstanding the heightened market competition in 2016, we ended the year on a high note, marked by all-time high quarterly and full year revenues, and record-level EBITDA,” Globe President and CEO Ernest L. Cu said.

Mobile revenues slightly grew year-on-year, at P91.9 billion in 2016 from the P91.2 billion reported a year ago, driven by the continued shift from core voice and SMS in favor of data.

TM, the company’s mass-mar- ket brand, registered three percent revenue growth from 2015, while Globe Postpaid revenues posted a slight one percent improvement, partly offset by Globe Prepaid revenues, which posted a year-on-year decline of one percent.

At the end of December 2016, Globe Telecom’s mobile subscriber base reached 62.8 million, up 12 percent from the 56.2 million subscribers reported in 2015, driven by prepaid gross acquisitions during the year.

Mobile data, it said, is now the biggest contributor to total mobile revenues (38 percent), outpacing voice (37 percent), despite the industry war in data pricing in the second half of the year. Mobile data service revenues reached P34.6 billion in 2016, 25 percent higher than a year ago.

Mobile data traffic grew 44 percent from 252 petabytes (PB) to 361 PB in 2016, as smartphone penetration hit 61 percent.

What is a petabyte? It’s the equivalent of about 1 million gigabytes. (About 1,024 gigabytes add up to one terabyte.) It will take about 50 petabytes to store “the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history in all languages” as of 2009. Jesus Diaz in a July 2009 post on gizmodo. com