Digital Telecommunications Phils. Inc. (Digitel) on Friday said it posted a net loss in the third quarter of the year because of higher operating expenses.
In a disclosure to the Philippine Stock Exchange, Digitel posted a net loss of P131.34 million in July to September from a net profit of P705.43 million in the same period last year.
In the first nine months, Digitel posted a net income of P15.68 million, lower than the P850.83 million in the same period last year.
Digitel blamed the losses during the period to the higher operating expenses, which grew by 12 percent as against the same period of last year owing to extensive network rollouts that Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) earlier secured an approval from the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) to acquire 51.55 percent of Digitel for P69.2 billion from JG Summit Holdings Inc.
The company’s consolidated service revenues amounted to P4.69 billion in the third quarter of the year, up 14.6 percent in the same period last year.
“This was driven mainly by the 22.2 percent increase in the wireless business brought about by an aggressive drive to increase market share through subscribers acquisition efforts and regionalized product offerings,” Digitel said.
Digitel’s wireless communication services posted a 22.2 percent growth in operating revenues to P11.65 billion million in the first nine months from P9.53 billion during the same period last year.
The company attributed the the growth to the continued success of the unlimited service portfolio particularly the Text Unlimited products which increased by 41.4 percent.
Voice usage and SMS usage revenues likewise increased by 23.2 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively, due to the increase in subscriber count and introduction of new products and services.
At end-September, Digitel’s net cumulative subscribers stood at 16 million. Postpaid subscribers account for 1.5 million, an improvement of 23 from 1.2 million subscribers last year.
Likewise, prepaid subscribers grew to 14.5 million at end-September from 12.8 million at end-December.
The wireline voice communication services registered service revenues of P2 billion for the nine months ended September, 10.1 percent lower than last year‟s P2.23 billion mainly due to lower revenues from international and domestic tolls.
Digitel, however, said the dropped in wireline voice revenues were partially offset by the growth of Suntel products which registered an increase of 114 percent over last year.
Revenues for wireline data communication services for the nine months slightly increased to P365.2 million compared to last year‟s P358.9 million.
This was due to the increase in domestic data and internet services through its IP VPN services new subscriptions. [PNA]
