PLDT Inc. said Thursday it is focusing on “quality” subscribers this year, after rival Globe Telecom Inc. overtook the former’s wireless unit Smart Communications in the race to get more subscribers.
“We are paying a lot of attention to it. But the churn is also a deliberate action on our part to achieve a higher quality subscriber base,” PLDT and Smart chairman and chief executive Manuel Pangilinan told reporters.
PLDT’s average monthly churn rate went up to 7 percent for prepaid in the first nine months from 6.9 percent in 2015. For postpaid, the churn rate rose to 5.7 percent from 3.6 percent in 2015.
Churn is a measure of the average number of customers who leave/switch/change to another type of service or to another service provider.
“We have not released our official subscriber numbers. It is likely that they [Globe] will have more subscribers if their numbers are true. Because they must know their numbers, and we know our numbers. So it’s likely their subscriber numbers will be higher than ours by the year-end 2016,” Pangilinan said.
PLDT had 61.8 million subscribers as of end-September while Globe had 65.4 million subscribers.
Panglinan said PLDT had implemented a “cleanup” of its subscribers last year because some of them are inactive.
“The industry has changed, it has evolved to the point where our conviction is subscriber numbers are not”• does not”•now occupy the preeminent position that it had in the past, when subscribers numbers were very important in driving revenue and profit. Now it’s not important as before, in our view, in my view particularly,” Pangilinan said.
“Of course, you have to look at fixed-line subscribers, your broadband subscribers. But at the end of the day, what is important is the activity on your network, of everything, broadband, fixed line, wireless and the revenue that activity generates to you,” he said.
Pangilinan earlier said the telecom battleground had shifted from wireless to fixed lines.
PLDT service revenues from the fixed line business increased 7 percent to P46.8 billion in the first nine months from the previous year, amid the strong growth in home and enterprise businesses, while most telcos around the world were posting declines in their fixed line units.