020807: Smart says subscribers now 24M

By Lennie Lectura

Reporter

PHILIPPINE Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) mobile phone subscribers grew by more than one million in the fourth quarter last year and by more than 3.6 million for the whole year 2006 to total slightly over 24 million, company president Napoloen Nazareno reported Wednesday. In 2005, the PLDT group’s total cellular subscriber base for the year grew by 1.2 million to 20.4 million. Smart Communications Inc., PLDT’s larger cellular unit, recorded net additions of approximately 828,400 subscribers while Talk ‘N Text added about 372,000 subscribers to end 2005 with 15.4 million and 5 million subscribers, respectively. Nazareno also said that average short message service, or text, traffic stands at 800 million daily. “Right now, we have a capacity of 1.2 billion. We are handling about 800 [million] messages in a day.”  Smart’s “Lahat 35” text-messaging promo is doing well. “It’s very cheap at only P0.35 per text” to subscribers of Smart, Talk ‘N Text, and to other networks. The P35 fee is good for 100 text messages.” Recently, the cellular firm obtained an approval from the National Telecommunications Commission to offer a flat-rate voice-call service to Smart prepaid subscribers from February 2 to March 4, 2007, where they will be charged only P10 for calls not exceeding three minutes and P15 for more than three minutes but not exceeding five minutes. With mobile phone penetration slowing down, PLDT has begun expanding its data businesses—mainly broadband, call center, and business process outsourcing—to fuel growth. “We are allocating a big portion of our capital expenditure [capex] this year to broadband. Our capex this year will probably be the same as last year.”

 

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