Globe Telecom Inc. has sustained its growth in mobile revenues in the last five weeks, despite mandatory registration of subscriber identification module (SIM) that resulted in the deactivation of its 30 million users.
“We see that SIM registration has no material impact on revenues. We’ve observed our top-ups remain unaffected and acquisitions in the last five weeks are still at least 50 percent higher than pre-deadline run rates. It’s evident that we have already covered 99 percent of our revenue base,” said Darius Delgado, head of Globe consumer mobile business in a statement.
Out of over 80 million subscribers last year, Globe registered 53.7 million subscribers which account for over 99 percent of its revenue-generating subscriber base.
Delgado said the 30 million unregistered SIMs Globe deactivated after the SIM registration deadline are predominantly inactive. They were the result of push-selling activities in the past, which were discontinued in the latter part of 2022.
The SIM Registration Act mandated all mobile phone and prepaid broadband users to register their existing SIMs by July 25, 2023, or face SIM deactivation. It was implemented to curb the spread of scam and spam messages.
Issa Guevarra-Cabreira, Globe chief commercial officer said the company’s focus on customer quality over quantity.
“As we’ve always emphasized, we do not focus on subscriber count but rather on the quality of customers. And we have seen that our ARPUs (average revenue per user) are absolutely improving quarter on quarter as mobility increases. This is despite the headwinds that we’re actually anticipating in the back half, perhaps driven also by the back-to-school and the economic activity that has returned to the country,” she said.
Globe took over mobile leadership in 2016, with both its subscriber count and mobile revenue market share consistently beating competitors over the last 27 quarters. The growth of its mobile business is primarily attributed to the company’s prepaid brands and is driven entirely by the surge in mobile data services.
Globe’s mobile business continues to sustain growth in the first half of the year with revenues reaching P54.8 billion, a 1 percent increase from the P54 billion reported the previous year. Revenues remain unaffected despite mandatory SIM registration, which filtered out inactive subscribers from its total base.
