Converge breaches 2M subscribers after entry into mass market segment

MANILA  -Fiber internet tycoon Dennis Anthony Uy’s Converge ICT Solutions Inc. surpassed two million nationwide home broadband subscribers as its entry into the prepaid and mass market segment pays off.

In a stock exchange filing on Monday, Converge noted the “significant upswing” in its new products apart from “stable growth” in postpaid as of the first nine months of the year.

“Converge is positioned to maintain this growth momentum as we bolster our penetration into the different segments of the market,” said Uy, who is CEO and co-founder of Converge.

Converge, which pursued an aggressive rollout program in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been turning to new markets to sustain growth.

Its pioneering prepaid product dubbed Surf2Sawa (S2S) has helped drive this growth as the business expanded by 77 percent or more than 25,000 net additions it registered in the second quarter of the year versus the previous quarter.

“We are proud to mark this milestone in our mission to leave no one behind as we empower Filipinos with world-class fiber connectivity. This is a result of our effort to expand growth opportunities through providing more affordable connectivity solutions,” Uy said.

READ: New business: Converge targets 1M prepaid subscribers by 2025

Moreover, postpaid subscribers “sustained its steady growth as the newly-introduced low-cost postpaid plan Bida Fiber”.

More affordable than its Fiber X plan, Bida Fiber costs P888 per month with a speed of 35 megabits per second.

Converge ended the first half of the year with 1.97 million residential subscribers, comprising 1.92 million postpaid and over 54,000 prepaid customers. Its net additional subscribers reached more than 92,000 for the January to June period.

READ: Converge exhausts P10-B bond sale proceeds for capex

The company said sales were especially strong in August, which was its “best-performing month in terms of sales”

“We are encouraged by the continued growth of our residential subscriber base in the first half of 2023. This is further proof of the superiority of our broadband product, coupled with our people’s laser-focus on meeting customers’ needs,” Converge chief operations officer Jesus C. Romero said in the same filing.

Converge operates the biggest fiber-to-the-home network in the country with more than 7.8 million ports nationwide, as of the first half of the year, as well as one of the country’s most extensive cable systems with 670,000-kilometer fiber backbone.

As of the end of June 2023, the fiber broadband provider’s network infrastructure has passed over 16.6 million Filipino homes. This is equivalent to 62.3 percent of household coverage nationwide.