Telco giant PLDT Inc. is betting on significant growth from online mobile videos and games —an area that could help slow falling revenue in its wireless business.
PLDT yesterday said it was shifting its mobile internet strategy to increase focus on consumer packages that would encourage users to watch TV shows and play games on their smartphones.
“It’s not just about connectivity anymore,” PLDT chief revenue officer Ernesto Alberto said in a statement.
He said newer packages come with subscriptions to popular internet TV streaming sites like iflix and iWant TV.
Alberto said heavy video consumption led the 78-percent spike in data usage on smartphones and dongles in the network of PLDT-led Smart Communications. Moreover, the latest Ericsson Mobility Report showed that video would account for 75 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2022.
PLDT hopes this would reverse fortunes at its wireless unit.
PLDT noted that mobile revenue, accounting for more than half of total service revenue, sank 16 percent to P42.7 billion in the first half of 2017, mainly as consumers shifted away from traditional text messaging and calls.
One bright spot was mobile data, which rose 3 percent to almost P13 billion during the period.
Early this month, PLDT chair Manuel V. Pangilinan said the company wanted to accelerate efforts to monetize exploding demand for mobile data.
“We expect video consumption to further intensify as more Filipinos start to use smartphones,” Alberto said.
As of end-June, 52 percent of Smart’s customers were using smartphones.
“Our wireless individual business has been impacted by customers’ shift from legacy services like voice and SMS to over-the-top services like Facebook Messenger and Viber,” Alberto said.
“This was a disruption that hit the whole industry. But now we have arrested the quarterly decline in revenue through better monetization of data services and increased usage of bandwidth-heavy services like video streaming and gaming,” he added.