GLOBE Telecom, Inc. aims to reach a middle-single-digit or around 5% revenue growth this year as it hopes the inflation rate will ease for the rest of the year.
“We can see that the mobile business remains very very strong and I would say the only wrinkle would be the growing inflation numbers,” Globe President Ernest L. Cu said during the listed firm’s briefing on Thursday to present its fourth-quarter results.
He said that higher inflation, which reached 8.7% in January, could impact the lower end of the market.
“Absent that, I think things are quite stable. There will be a mid-single digit growth that we are expecting and hopefully, there will be an upside with the easing of the inflation throughout the year,” Mr. Cu said.
Globe’s Chief Finance Officer Rosemarie Maniego-Eala said the company is set to maintain a 50% margin for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA).
“We have a guidance of a revenue growth of mid-single-digit in 2023. It is the same guidance that we had in 2022. We also gave a guidance of wanting to maintain a 50% EBITDA margin,” said Ms. Maniego-Eala, who is also the company’s treasurer and chief risk officer.
“You can use the growth rates of 2022 as a basis for estimating 2023, stocking up to the 5% growth guidance for 2023,” she added.
In 2022, Globe’s service revenues reached P157.98 billion, 3.8% higher than the P152.26 billion revenues it booked in 2021.
Despite this, the company’s core net income was 9.8% lower at P19.17 billion in 2022 from P21.25 billion previously.
Meanwhile, Ms. Maniego-Eala said Globe is keeping its capital expenditure (capex) lower for the next two years.
“We plan to maximize our partnerships with the different tower companies. We have 15 total partners and three of which have purchased some of our towers,” she said.
The company closed last year with a capex of $1.9 billion, 9% higher than the earlier year, marking Globe’s record investment in its mobile and fixed network.
According to Ms. Maniego-Eala, the shift in the company’s focus on its assets, which comes after previously investing in its network, bolsters its move to cut capital spending.
“It gives us confidence to start reducing our capex spend to $1.3 billion this year and further to $1 billion in 2024 without sacrificing customer experience and revenue opportunities,” she added.
For 2023, the company said it will be focusing on the turnover of towers and getting the balance of those sold last year.
Globe raised a total of P29.8 billion from closing deals for a total of 2,410 towers with Frontier Tower Associates of the Philippines and MIESCOR Infrastructure Development Corp. (MIDC).
“We’ve actually sold quite a lot last year. But at the moment, we are really focusing on turning over the towers that we’ve sold. We received proceeds of over 30% last year and so the focus is really to get the balance,” Ms. Maniego-Eala said.
In 2022, the company was able to get around 34% of the proceeds from the sale of the towers amounting to P29.8 billion, P10.3 billion of which is with MIDC and P19.5 billion with Frontier.
The company is planning to use proceeds from the tower sale to pay debt and to support the capex needed for its ongoing network expansion.
On Friday, Globe shares slipped 0.48% or P10 to close at P2,080 each. — Justine Irish D. Tabile
