Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Video and mobile games lift data usage, revenues of PLDT wireless units

PLDT said on Monday, May 20, that its mobile business posted record revenue growth in the first quarter of 2019 due the growing appetite of its customers for online video and mobile games.  

Service revenues of its individual wireless business, which includes the consumer sales of its Smart, Sun and TNT mobile brands, jumped 18% year-on-year to P16.9 billion, net of interconnection costs.  The surge in revenues was driven by a robust increase in data and broadband revenues which accounted for 65% of the total.  

PLDT?s wireless brands also added 3.4 million customers in the first quarter of 2019, adding to a subscriber base that is increasingly becoming more active in using data. About two-thirds of these subscribers are smartphone owners, of whom about 70% are data users. Mobile data traffic rose by 127% year-on-year to 304 petabytes.

These data-savvy customers are watching more and more video on their smartphones.  With the introduction of the Video Every Day data packages late last year, more customers have been accessing various video services like YouTube, NBA, iWant and iFlix.

The monthly users of YouTube, already boosted by last year?s Free YouTube promo, further increased by 35% in the first quarter. Viewers of other popular video apps also increased sharply: users of the NBA video service nearly doubled; those of iWant soared 153%; and iflix, 170%.

Mobile gaming has contributed to the continuing increase in data usage, following PLDT and Smart?s initiatives to organize their official professional eSports team, ?Omega?.  They also sponsored the professional league in the Philippines of the popular mobile game Mobile Legends.

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