Converge Information Communications and Technology Solutions Inc. said Thursday it raised its 2022 capital expenditures to P28 billion after posting a sharp increase in net income last year.
“We expect to spend approximately P26 billion to P28 billion in capital expenditures in 2022, which will include deepening of our network infrastructure throughout the country, as well as deployment of additional FTTH [fiber to the home] ports nationwide,” Converge chief executive and co-founder Dennis Anthony Uy said.
“Other key capital expenditure initiatives this year will include selected investments into international subsea cables and enhancement of our IT systems,” he said.
The company spent P25 billion in 2021 to expand its network nationwide.
Converge ICT reported a net income of P7.15 billion last year, or more than double the P3.38 billion it earned in 2020. Consolidated revenues grew by 69.2 percent from P15.65 billion in 2020 to P26.47 billion in 2021.
Revenues from its residential business jumped 83.2 percent to P23.13 billion last year from P12.6 billion in 2020. Earnings from enterprise business also grew by 10.7 percent year-on-year.
“We expect that strong demand for reliable high-speed broadband will result in continuous growth of our residential subscriber base to approximately 2.4 million by the end of 2022,” Uy said.
“We also project demand from enterprise customers, including small-medium enterprises, to accelerate during the year, with the lowering of mobility restrictions to Alert Level 1,” he said.
The company ended 2021 with 1,691,550 residential subscribers, up by 63 percent from December 2020. It also reached the high-end of its goal of 1.6 million to 1.7 million subscribers last year.
The company deployed about 647,000 new fiber-to-the-home ports in the fourth quarter of 2021, resulting in 2.4 million newly deployed FTTH ports last year.
Converge’s nationwide network reached more than 10.9 million homes, representing a 42.7 percent household coverage as of end-December.
Almost 13,500 kilometers of fiber optic cable were added to its backbone in the fourth quarter—the longest quarterly expansion so far.
The company’s backbone now extends more than 103,000 kilometers, almost double of its backbone length of 55,000 kilometers in 2020.