Villars set to participate in common tower initiative
The Villar family still wants a slice of the telco business and is keen on building cell towers to support industry incumbents and the country’s third mobile player, the Mislatel Consortium backed by China Telecom.
Manuel Paolo Villar, chair of privately held Prime Asset Ventures Inc., said in an interview last week that the group planned to join the government’s massive common tower initiative, which involves the construction of at least 50,000 new cell sites across the country.
Villar is the son of property tycoon and former Sen. Manuel Villar Jr., who is the country’s richest man with a fortune valued at about $6.1 billion, according to Forbes Magazine.
He also owns Streamtech Systems Technologies Inc., among the franchise holders keen on launching a third telco bid but withdrew from the race days before the submission on Nov. 7 last year.
“We might be involved in the third telco as partners at the very least,” Villar told reporters.
Villar also runs the family’s flagship property firm, Vista Land & Lifescapes Inc., which has access to a vast land bank across the country that could aid the third telco’s rollout plans.
“We have a good relationship with Globe and Smart but, at the same time, we are a last-mile provider and we will partner with Mislatel, too,” he added.
The Mislatel Consortium was named the country’s third telco last year after emerging as the sole qualifying bidder left in the race. Its members include businessman Dennis Uy’s Udenna Corp. and China Telecom.
The government’s common tower initiative is a crucial component of the third telco program, which was launched by the Duterte administration last year to inject competition in the country’s two-player telco industry dominated by Smart owner PLDT Inc. and Globe Telecom.
The launch of the third telco, however, has been hit by delays.
The resolution to Mislatel’s franchise transfer in Congress is unlikely to emerge until after the May 2019 elections. Nonetheless, Mislatel is standing by its original goal to launch a commercial service by late 2020.
Through two decades, PLDT and Globe have built a combined 17,000 cell sites across the country. But the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said the Philippines needed an additional 50,000 sites to catch up with close neighbors such as Vietnam.
Degraded mobile services such as dropped calls or slow internet are due to congestion in their networks, the telcos have argued. The answer is to build more sites but these are hampered by the burdensome permitting process, especially at the level of local government units.
Over the past four months, the DICT has identified at least 16 tower builders keen on working with the telcos to build shared telco sites.
The goal is to support the third telco but the DICT said PLDT and Globe could also benefit from tower sharing since this would lower their spending requirements.
