PLDT Inc. said that consolidated service revenues (net of interconnection costs) rose by 3% to an ‘all-time high’ of PHP46.4 billion (USD884.4 million) in the first quarter of 2022, compared to PHP44.8 billion in the year-ago quarter, led by its Home and Enterprise business segments. Specifically, Filipino carrier noted that Data and Broadband revenue grew by 8% year-on-year to PHP36.6 billion – contributing 79% to consolidated service revenues. Total revenues, meanwhile, rose 5% to PHP50.1 billion from PHP47.9 billion and consolidated EBITDA also grew 10% to a record PHP25.5 billion, marking seven consecutive quarters of growth. Further, PLDT’s EBITDA margin improved by two percentage points to 53% and core income increased by 9% to PHP8.2 billion. Finally, reported net income surged by PHP3.3 billion, or 56%, to PHP9.1 billion, and first-quarter CAPEX was reported at PHP15.8 billion with PLDT now having revised upwards its full year guidance to PHP85 billion from PHP76 billion-PHP80 billion previously.
In terms of key performance drives in the first three months of this year, PLDT reported 213,000 net fibre additions allowing Home Fiber to end the quarter with more than 3.1 million subscriptions, as well as adding 480,000 new fibre ports (increasing the total to 6.25 million). Meanwhile, average monthly mobile data usage per subscription reached 8.5GB in the three-month period under review, up 17% y-o-y, and active data users reached over 41.6 million. Furthermore, first quarter data traffic on Smart’s 5G network grew by 65% quarter-on-quarter as the number of unique 5G devices on the network grew 35% from end-2021 to more than 1.58 million. It also noted that 5G average daily latched devices soared 337% y-o-y to 1.3 million, from 376,000 at end-March 2021.