CONVERGE ICT Solutions, Inc. has formally launched its entry in Boracay island where it projects tourists and transients to be the base market for its product offerings.
“The biggest potential here is the tourism areas. But the transient areas will have a market here also, but for prepaid products,” Converge Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dennis Anthony H. Uy told reporters on the sidelines of the media launch on Wednesday.
He said that the company’s Boracay entry is part of its P2-billion underground infrastructure investment in Panay in Western Visayas.
“The infrastructure we built here covers the entire Panay island. It does not only cover Boracay, it covers the entire five provinces,” Mr. Uy said.
“We just selected Boracay because it is a tourist destination and there were a lot of complaints here regarding connection service and the like,” he added.
The company’s rollout in the area will initially be for businesses and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
“As of today, we are targeting the enterprise market which are the big hotels and then the SMEs. Next month, we can open residential, low-end postpaid, and prepaid offerings,” Mr. Uy said.
Aside from these, Mr. Uy said that the company sees potential in the condominium owners in Boracay who use their units as vacation homes.
For its next rollout, the company is targeting another tourism destination located in Palawan.
“The next would be Palawan, it will be in a tourism area. This is in El Nido. It’s actually up and running, we will just formally launch it,” Mr. Uy said.
“The marketing team is just working on the schedule. But I think in June this year, we will try to launch it,” he added.
PREPAID OFFERINGMr. Uy said that Converge is looking into more offerings under its prepaid segment, after reaching 30,000 subscribers.
“The traction is very strong; I think we already have 30,000 subscribers. But we want to see our customer’s behaviors to see how many percent are loading and how many percent have complaints,” he said.
The company has yet to study its prepaid customers’ behavior as all of the services offered for this segment are online and do not have a call center, Mr. Uy said.
“I think we need to increase our banners to really make this available nationwide. Slowly we’ll go there,” he said.
Previously, the company launched its first low-cost prepaid fiber product which aims to make fiber connectivity affordable to the masses.
Called Surf2Sawa, the product allows subscribers to make use of unlimited fiber internet at a 25-megabyte-per-second speed for as low as P50 per day to P700 for 30 days. — Justine Irish D. Tabile
