PLDT extends free mobile Internet to February 5

INQUIRER.net PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines – Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. is extending a free mobile Internet promotion by one month to February even as the special offer likely hurt revenues in late 2014.

The offer, which allows a free 30 megabytes of data per day for all 69 million Smart, Talk ‘N Text and Sun Cellular subscribers, will now end on Feb 5, 2015, according to a PLDT statement released Monday (Jan. 5). The offer was introduced in late September 2014.

“The positive response to the Smart Free Internet promo — a real game-changer in the industry in that it introduced mobile Internet to more people than ever before — gave us a very strong indication of Filipinos’ propensity for mobile data use,” Charles Lim, head of wireless consumer business at Smart Communications and Sun Cellular, said in the statement.

The company did not elaborate further on the reason for the extension of the promo, which was expected to have “tempered” earnings in the fourth quarter of 2014, PLDT president Napoleon Nazareno said last month.

Challenges facing the fast-changing telco landscape were highlighted anew in 2014, when PLDT announced that it was slashing its full-year 2014 profit target by P2.5 billion to P37 billion as it invests more than initially expected to improve data capacity.

Specifically, PLDT said it increased 2014 spending by P2.5 billion to P34.5 billion.

“This capex [ capital spending] is expected to be carried over into 2015, given the market’s continued appetite for data services, as more Filipinos start using smartphones,” PLDT said in its statement on Monday.

PLDT hopes to increase its market share while enticing more of its subscribers to avail of data services despite increasing competition from social media platforms and instant messaging apps.

In the statement on Monday, Smart also announced that its network is ready for the expected surge in mobile data traffic in 2015, as the increasing affordability of smartphones encouraged more Filipinos to acquire devices in the last few weeks of 2014.

Over a fourth of Smart and Sun Cellular’s combined over 69 million subscribers are already using smartphones, helping drive a 112 percent increase in mobile data traffic within the network, the statement showed.

“We can only expect these volumes to increase exponentially in the months ahead,” Lim said in the statement.