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Saturday, January 14, 2006
PLDT keeps eye on prices of PCs for opportunities
The country’s biggest telecom operator is looking forward to the time when personal computers (PCs) and laptops will become affordable to more people as this would create an “explosive” demand for broadband services.
“Like cell phones a few years ago, PCs and laptops will soon be affordable. By breaking the price barrier, allowing more people to own PCs, the demand for broadband is quite big,” Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) and Smart Communications Inc. president and chief executive officer Napoleon Nazareno said in a press interview in Cebu yesterday.
Nazareno came to Cebu for the inauguration of the Smart and PLDT Gawad Kalinga housing project in Barangay Budlaan, Cebu City.
Go down
Nazareno said he expects the prices of PCs and laptops to go down to affordable levels as various computer manufacturing companies are now trying to bring down the cost of these electronic equipment.
He revealed that Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now starting a project of manufacturing and selling laptops that would cost less than $100 (or P5,244 as of the average value of the peso yesterday).
“We feel that this is the right time to really go widespread on connectivity,” he said.
PLDT will shell out some P30 billion to advance its broadband services in the next two to three years, he said.
“We are aggressively pushing both our wireless and fixed-line services to cover the country as soon as possible,” he added.
Widest
He said PLDT, with its subsidiary Smart Communications, has the widest capability in the country to offer broadband services.
“If you look at the wireless broadband services, we have the capability of covering 99 percent of the country because it is deployed as an overlay with our Smart base stations that (covers that much in terms of municipalities and cities in the country),” he said.
Out of more than 1,600 municipalities in the country, he said there are only 18 municipalities, mostly in Mindanao areas, that are not served by PLDT due to some technical difficulties.
He said the potential demand for broadband service is based on the number of people that go to Internet cafés.
“With our own Netopia Internet cafés (with 235 branches nationwide), we have some 10 million unique users. That’s how big the market is once the price barrier of PCs is addressed,” he said.
He stressed that while “figures are not available yet,” PLDT’s net profit in 2005 “should be higher than that of the previous year,” with the growing revenues of the company’s mobile and fixed-line services.
He said PLDT dominates over 65 percent of the market in the fixed-line subscribers base while its mobile phone (through Smart) subscribers make up about 61 percent of the total number of users.
While the number of people using mobile phones is increasing, he said the market for fixed-line still exists “because people still want to have telecommunication base in their homes.” (ALC)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (January 14, 2006 issue)
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