Globe Telecom, Inc. (GLO) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to the Virtual Fourth Quarter 2022 Analyst Briefing of Globe Telecom. We'll begin the presentation with Mr. Ernest Cu, our President and Chief Executive Officer, giving an overview of our performance and a few updates on the Globe Group. Without further ado, we now hand over the floor to Mr. Cu.

Thank you, Jomari. Good morning, and thank you, everyone, for joining us once again today in this virtual meeting. I'm happy to report Globe has been able to sustain its record-breaking pace, despite all the headwinds it faced in 2022. For the year, the company recorded an all-time high revenue number of PHP 158 billion, up 4% against the same period last year. Consistent with prior periods, this growth was mainly driven by mobile and corporate data services as well as the increased revenue contribution of our non-telco subsidiaries. This performance was buoyed by the strong first half numbers, which placed the company in a good position toward the impact of the macroeconomic environment in the second half of the year. EBITDA for the period was also at an all-time high of PHP 79 billion, improving 6% year-on-year, aided by the company's cost management efforts. This translates on a EBITDA margin of 50% in line with our guidance. Reported net income grew 46% year-on-year to PHP 35 billion, mostly due to the onetime gains related to the sale of our data center and passive tower assets. Excluding these one-offs, normalized NIAT still increased by a healthy 13% year-on-year. In terms of our landmark sale and leaseback initiative, our transfer -- our power transfer rather, is progressing quite well, with Globe already turning over 2,410 towers in 2022, representing 34% of the total asset portfolio we sold last year. The proceeds amounted to PHP 30 billion, the balance of which is expected to come in within 2023. Last November 2022, we also announced our entry into the Climatetech space through 917Ventures' strategic partnership with Ayala Corporation and Gogoro to bring 2-wheel electric vehicles and battery swapping technology here in the Philippines. Bernie Llamzon, who was previously Head of our Consumer Sales Effort, will now lead this initiative. He will also discuss this later in the presentation. Lastly, I am pleased to report that our Board of Directors have approved the first quarterly cash dividend of PHP 25 per share, which is proof of the company's commitment to sustainable dividend policy and delivering shareholder value. As I mentioned earlier, 2022 was a year where we saw our non-telco subsidiaries and affiliates deliver significant value and support the growth of our core telco services. These subsidiaries contributed over PHP 4 billion in revenue for the year, more than double its contribution in 2021. ECPay and Asticom remained the largest contributors, followed by Yondu and AdSpark. On the joint venture and affiliates front, we continue to see an increase in contributions to the bottom line with our net share in equity gains increasing by 17% to around PHP 1.4 billion or 3.2% of income before tax. This concludes my portion, and I'll now turn you over to Issa Cabreira.

Thank you, Ernest, and good morning, everyone. For the core telco business, the Mobile segment continued its steady growth, closing the period with over PHP 107 billion, up 3% against last year. This stands as the second highest year for Mobile, just behind the pre-pandemic levels, despite significant inflationary pressures faced by the market in the latter half of the year. This growth was delivered entirely by mobile data services, which continue to grow at 8% year-on-year, ending the period at a record high, PHP 83.8 billion. This was driven by mobile data revenue growth across all our brands, with data traffic sustaining its growth both in total volume and monthly ARPU. Mobile data traffic reached over 4.6 exabytes, while monthly ARPU ended at 10.4 GB per month, both growing by double digits against last year. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, mobile revenues only slightly grew by 1% due to the impact of the economic challenges that softened our consumers' discretionary spending despite the holidays. Nevertheless, as we have stated in the past, we remain committed to continuing our focus to provide our customers with more value-driven, relevant and best-in-class products and services. I also wanted to give the market an update on the SIM Card Registration Act, which was signed into law last year. To date, Globe has successfully registered over 12 million prepaid SIM cards through our two user friendly registration platforms, the registration website and via the GlobeOne app. I'm also very happy to report that our registrants are enjoying a very high success rate of close to 100%, which means we have seen minimal failed registrations and points to the effectiveness of our platforms. We expect registrations to increase further as we also ramp up campaigns encouraging SIM registrations prior to the April 26, 2023 deadline. In terms of its impact to our financial and operating metrics, Globe believes that there will not be any impact to our top line and shouldn't -- or should, in fact, further improve our customer experience as the law reduces, if not, eliminate scam and spam messages in our network. In terms of our subscriber count, we expect to see some reduction in the count as we churn out nonactive SIMs from the network. This will lead to reported subscriber count as well as ARPUs to be more reflective of actual active levels. Rest assured that we will continue to provide the market constant updates on this initiative as we go through the exercise. Now moving on to our home broadband business. Total revenues for the business ended at PHP 27 billion, 8% lower than last year and 1% lower sequentially, owing to the continued normalization of the home prepaid WiFi business. This normalization led to fixed wireless subscribers and revenues decreasing by close to 50%, impacting the overall home broadband performance. As mentioned in the past, this reduction in the prepaid WiFi business, or HPW as we call it, was anticipated, with the actual 2022 subscriber count ending in line with our guidance. We did recognize early on that as customers' reliance on data grows, they will require more stable connections and faster speeds, that only a fixed wired solution can provide. Fixed-wired subscribers on the other hand continued to grow, increasing by 17% year-on-year, now at 1.1 million, due to the take-up of fiber, which saw a 35% increase in subscribers and an 84% increase in our revenues year-on-year. Since 2020, we rolled out a total of 3.7 million fiber to the home lines to serve the broadband market, of which 1.4 million was delivered in 2022 alone. As we look to 2023, our efforts on migrating our fixed wireless and legacy technology customers to fiber will continue. However, we do recognize that the postpaid home fiber market, where all players are actually in right now and servicing, is already nearing saturation, if not saturated already. That's why our focus for the year is on increasing utilization of our network by delivering fiber connectivity to the broader market through our prepaid fiber products, TMBayan Fiber WiFi and GFiber prepaid. As of end January 2023, our TMBayan Fiber WiFi is already available in 652 hosts nationwide. And to complement this, we are preparing as well for the launch of the new GFiber prepaid product in the second quarter of the year. This new product aims to give the customers the true home prepaid fiber experience and help expand the market to cover the uncertain portion of the addressable base. Lastly, corporate data services reported record high revenues at PHP 17 billion, growing 21% year-on-year on the back of the strong performance of ICT revenues, which delivered an 89% year-on-year growth. The growth in ICT revenue was led by business application solutions, data center services and cloud solutions, consistent with prior quarters. That ends my portion, and I now turn you over to Joel for our network updates.

Thank you, Issa, and good morning. Complementing the fiber rollout Issa mentioned are the investments we have made on the mobile network to maintain the quality of our service to our consumers. As of end 2022, we have built over 1,700 new cell sites, upgraded over 13,600 mobile sites and installed over 2,200 5G sites. Furthermore, Globe is also the first in Southeast Asia to deploy the first multi-beam, multi-band lens antenna technology that significantly improves capacities and coverage of 4G and 5G networks. This new technology meets the capacity demands of data-heavy smartphone applications and also provides much better indoor penetration and reach that makes it an ideal solution for large outdoor and indoor events, rural areas as well as densely populated cities. The pilots we ran last year churned out impressive results against our existing multi-beam antennas on all categories, delivering higher mobile download and upload data speeds with much more stable connectivity resulting to better customer experience. We plan to deploy this technology to more areas this year. As a testament to our improving network quality, Globe once again received recognition from Opensignal for toping their latest report on 5G video experience, upload speed and most importantly, core consistent quality. This is consistent with Globe's continuous effort to deliver network reliability and consistency to our consumers as we aim to deliver best-in-class customer experience. On our sale and leaseback initiative, I am pleased to report that the turnover of our tower assets to the buyers of our assets have been proceeding as planned. To date, we have turned over 2,410 sites, which is around 34% of the total towers we have sold last year. For MIDC, we have turned over 860 towers, which is 39% of their portfolio, while we have transferred 1,550 towers or 44% to Frontier. For the last portfolio we sold to PhilTower, we have successfully hurdled the first milestone by getting PCC approval for the transaction last month. We expect the first tranche of closing to occur very soon. Last more importantly, this fast turnover allowed us to fast track the inflow of proceeds to the company and utilize it for our capital requirements. We have so far received close to PHP 30 billion in gross proceeds, and we are working to keep this pace up to get the balance of proceeds soon. We do expect closing to occur progressively over the next few quarters, and we will update the market if and when there are developments. That concludes my portion. And I now turn you over to Martha, who will provide updates on Mynt.

Thank you, Joel. Good morning. GCash finished the year strong as we move forward in our journey to financial inclusion. At the end of the year, our registered base reached 76 million users, with more and more Filipinos using and trusting the GCash platform. Our consistent focus on merchant acquisition and partnerships has made us the largest digital ecosystem in the Philippines. Our merchants and social seller base stood at 5.8 million, that's 1.29x larger year-on-year, while our cash in and cash out outlets grew to 640,000 or 3.7x higher than a year ago. Combined, we offer the most number of touch points for our users. Meanwhile, our mini program, or what we call GLife, now serves as a digital storefront for over 855 GLife merchants, including categories like content, health, insurance and e-government. We continue to see high user engagement with daily log ins going as high as 36 million and the volume of daily transactions going as high as 24 million. With all of these, GCash remains to be the #1 finance app in the country with the GCash app user base 5x larger than that of the next e-wallet and even higher than those of popular social media sites based on reputable third-party platform, data.ai. This shows that we remain embedded in the everyday lives of Filipinos as we continue to scale, all these while maintaining our profitability, proof of our sustained unit economics across our use cases. We continue to make a difference in the lives of Filipinos by making even more financial services easier to access and understand. For our lending, we're confidently lending to more Filipinos, providing access to those that needed the most. As we expand our product stream and increase our eligible base, we've grown our unique borrowers to 2 million, 2x of what it was a year ago. We ended the year with PHP 57 billion total disbursed value, which is 2x growth year-on-year. Amid this growth in borrowers and credit disbursements, we were proud to say that we've been able to maintain best-in-class NPL upgrades across all our products, driven by the following key factors, while coverage of variety of major merchants across different categories, GScore, our proprietary and powerful tool that provides customized loan offerings across -- according to each user's trust score, and real-time auto deduction that enables efficient collection and increased credit limits that go as high as PHP 125,000. For savings, we're very proud with our efforts. 1 out of 4 bank Filipinos now have a GSave account. We've done this by giving our users more options in the GSave marketplace, which now has 3 partnered banks, CIMB, BPI and more recently, Maybank. For investments, 3 out of the 4 IPs are now conducted through the GCash platform. In our GFunds marketplace, we've also added 4 new ESG-related funds enabling more access for our customers who want to invest sustainably. For insurance marketplace, GInsure, we launched 10 new products across 7 insurance categories in 2022 alone. GInsurer now has more than 33 product offerings as we have partnered with more than 10 reputable names in the industry. Beyond traditional insurance products, we also have unique offerings such as home fire protection, pet insurance and our first micro VUL. With extensive insurance offerings, we have sold a total of 6.2 million policies life to date, growing 422% year-on-year. We'll continue to offer more accessible innovative and exciting products to Filipinos as the Cascadeo [indiscernible] [leader] in the financial services industry. We take every opportunity to be present in the daily lives of our users, and we've been making special occasions even more special by celebrating it with them digitally. To celebrate our GCash birthday in October, we elevated our execution to give out GCash vouchers amounting to PHP 240 million as treat to our users, which drove massive drive -- which drove massive acquisition and engagement among Filipinos nationwide. As in previous years, our successful Merry GCash campaign have spread some joy and Christmas spirit. And we worked with our partners to provide PHP 800 million worth of prices to our users. Another milestone that we're celebrating is a recent achievement of the payment card industry data security standard certification, which is one of the most rigorous security standards in the industry. Trust and security has been and will always be our #1 priority as a company. This certification proves that we have the processes in place to continue to keep our customers' funds and data safe and secure at all times. This ends in the GCash updates for the past quarter. We look forward to an even more exciting 2023 as we strengthen our market leadership and our position as a national champion of financial services. Turning you over now to Bernie for his presentation. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Martha, and good morning to everyone. As part of Globe's continued expansion to the digital space adjacent to telco, we are glad to announce our formal entry into the Climatetech industry with Gogoro. This initiative, which was initially announced last November 2022, is a strategic partnership with one of our major shareholders, Ayala Corporation. And Gogoro, which is the world's leader in battery swapping technology and holds a dominant 90% market share in the electric vehicle industry in Taiwan. Through this partnership, we aim to fast-track the adoption of electric vehicles in the country, in support of the Philippines' UN commitment of a 75% reduction in carbon emissions by the year 2030 and Globe's own commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 50% in 2030 and net zero by the year 2050. This partnership leverages the strength of the three shareholders to be able to create a big impact with a deep relationship of the Globe Group in the Filipinos as well as its expertise in network building with the fast-growing Philippine 2-wheel market. Globe and 917Ventures bring with them a deep knowledge of the customer base as well as our expertise on infrastructure rollout, to be able to help build this initiative an efficient charging station network and ensure a superior and relevant customer experience. Gogoro will be bringing its proprietary technology, which is currently using and operating in several markets, including Taiwan and Ayala Corporation brings the strength of the Ayala Group enabling synergies with the different business units to allow for scalability of the business. The 2-wheel battery swapping product pilot is expected to be launched within the next month, with Globe's year 1 investment to 917ventures amounting to approximately USD 4 million. We will provide more information to the market once there are more developments. So to provide you more context on this initiative, please watch this short video that features both the electric 2-wheel vehicle of Gogoro as well as its world-leading battery swapping platform. [Presentation]

As mentioned earlier, the Gogoro brand is a leader in the 2-wheel electric vehicle market in Taiwan, where it holds a 90% market share in the EV industry through its advanced battery swapping technology, which it uses as a 2-wheel EV charging platform. Through Gogoro's battery swapping platform, which was showcased in the video, riders can simply swap out batteries within seconds and be on their way instead of waiting for hours to recharge a typical EV battery. Furthermore, through Gogoro's proprietary IQ system, EV range and [indiscernible] as a mobile app will direct them to the nearest charging station as well as the close of battery life and its corresponding kilometerage. Focusing on the vehicle itself. The Gogoro smart scooters are built with modern, futuristic design and functionality required in the modern urban environment. These vehicles can reach a top speed of up to 90 kilometers per hour and comes with a wide array of safety and security features. As the name suggests, these vehicles are also intelligent. Gogoro smart scooters can receive firmer over-the-air updates, ensuing the smart scooter system is always updated. It has advanced security and anti-theft features and can even lock the batteries at the go station, should it ever be alerted of theft. And as we expand the business in the future, it is important to note that Gogoro also supports multiple OE and 2-wheel brands, such as Hero, Yamaha, Suzuki and others, which have models that are compatible to the Gogoro network. This will allow us to expand the demographic of our addressable market and widen our customer reach, which is something that is important, especially in a market such as the Philippines. This ends my presentation, and I would now like to turn you over to Rizza.

Thank you, Bernie. Good morning, everyone. Just to recap, gross service revenue is at a record high of PHP 158 billion on the back of strong first half performance and resilient second half, notwithstanding the challenging conditions that face the business. Fourth quarter revenues were likewise an all-time high for the company at PHP 40 billion, increasing by 2% versus last quarter. Year-on-year, operating expenses and subsidy remained flat, bringing EBITDA up 6% to PHP 79 billion and EBITDA margin to 50% on the back of strict control measures implemented by management. Full year margin was also in line with the guidance we shared earlier last year -- or early last year. Depreciation, however, grew by 11% to PHP 46 billion driven by the elevated CapEx investments we had the last few years as we took the opportunity to fast-track network investments and improve our service to our customers. Coupled with net positive nonoperating charges for the period, reported net income increased by 46% year-on-year. Nonoperating charges for the year include onetime gains related to the partial sale of our data center assets in March, as well as the gain on the sale of the first few tranches of the towers we sold to Frontier and MIDC last year, as discussed by Joel in his presentation. Net gains from the tower sale amounted to PHP 6.3 billion after tax. Excluding these onetime gains, normalized net income would have improved by 13% year-on-year. In terms of our operating expenses, marketing and subsidy declined by PHP 1.2 billion or 13% year-on-year, as we ensured efficiency in our spending on advertising and promotions. Services and other expenses also declined by PHP 1.6 billion or 7% from lower cloud and professional fees. Network costs rose by PHP 2.8 billion, driven by higher utility and administrative expenses as well as repairs and maintenance charges from the expanded network. This was partially offset by lower lease expenses due to the reassessment of certain operating leases to capitalized leases. Provisions increased by PHP 496 million or 11% year-on-year due to higher trade provisions. Meanwhile, stock costs posted a 5% growth year-on-year, and interconnection charges grew 15% due to the increase in our A2P business. On the next slide, moving on to CapEx. We ended last year with CapEx of $1.9 billion, which is the highest level we have ever spent and is coming from the $1.8 billion we spent in 2021. These past 2 years of peak CapEx levels were due to the opportunistic network investments we made to take advantage of the easing of the permitting process during the pandemic, which allowed us to maintain our industry-leading network consistency score. Given all of these significant investments made in the past few years, as well as the focus on fiber port utilization versus rollout, we expect CapEx intensity to significantly lessen starting 2023, where spending will drop by around 30% as we expect to spend only $1.3 billion. And moving forward, we expect levels to further drop. And we'll aim to bring cash CapEx down to $1 billion in 2024, as we focus our attention to sustainable free cash flow generation. Ernest also shared in his section that our Board of Directors approved the payout of PHP 25 per share, which, on an annualized basis, is equivalent to the dividend payout for the past 3 years. This is proof of Globe's commitment to a sustainable dividend policy that is in line with our earnings and cash flow generation as well as to our commitment of delivering value to our shareholders. Key dates for this declaration are the payment date of March 8, 2023, to shareholders on record as of February 20. Now on to our balance sheet. Gross debt level is at PHP 233 billion, with unrestricted cash level at PHP 16 billion. All ratios remained well within our covenants and are now significantly lower than the year-end 2021 levels. Owing to the execution of the non-debt fundraising initiatives we launched last year, which is our data center asset carve-out our landmark power sales and our first stock rights offering in over 2 decades. Through these initiatives, we have been able to bring back the much-needed flexibility and efficiency to our balance sheet. I'm on my last slide. And finally, we wanted to share with you our guidance for 2023. For our service revenues, we are guiding to mid-single-digit growth versus the record-breaking level of 2022. And while for EBITDA margin, we are maintaining the guidance of a 50% level. For CapEx, as mentioned earlier, we are committing to $1.3 billion for the year as we ramp down our spending and maximize the investments made in the last 3 years. We are likewise committing to focusing our efforts to free cash flow sustainability with 2024 CapEx further declining to around $1 billion. Now we've also been getting some questions on the impact of SIM card registration, both on the top line and on expenses. So we do not see any negative impact on SIM card registration to top line. If not, it's actually positive because then we will get a better grip of our active subscribers and also contribute to lesser fraud and over the period will actually lessen our expenses in managing our subscriber base. Tower proceeds sales are also expected to come. So the balance of about 70% of the proceeds are expected to come through -- throughout this year, and will allow us to defer any long-term debt drawdown towards the latter part of the year. And meantime, we would be using our short-term facilities to provide any gap in funding as the proceeds come in different months throughout the next -- I guess, throughout the end of the year. And finally, we wanted to share that one of the things we're also managing and thus, the target of 50% margin is the increase in depreciation, coming off the elevated spending from 2020 all the way to end 2022. And with that, we can provide more guidance in May when we have seen the first quarter results of this year. So this ends my portion of the presentation, and I turn you over to Jomari for the Q&A section.

Thank you, Rizza. Before we begin with the Q&A session, we'd like to introduce the management panel. First, of course, we have Mr. Ernest Cu, President and Chief Executive Officer; Ms. Rizza Maniego-Eala, Chief Finance Officer; Ms. Issa Guevarra-Cabrera, Chief Commercial Officer; Attorney Marisalve Ciocson-Co, Chief Compliance Officer; Mr. Bernard Llamzon, Director of the Globe Capital Ventures, Inc; Mr. Joel Agustin, Head of Network Planning & Engineering; Mr. Darius Jose Delgado, Vice President of Consumer Mobile Business; Ms. Martha Sazon, President and CEO of Mynt; and Mr. Raymond Policarpo, Brand Management Head. I also like to acknowledge the fact that Bernard or rather Bernie, Marivi and Raymond are joining the panel for the very first time.

We'll now begin the Q&A session. Our first set of questions come from Rachel Rodriguez of Maybank Securities. The first question is on broadband. And the question reads, what caused the Q-on-Q decline in fixed broadband subscribers? Can you also discuss why wireless broadband subscribers continue dropping at a higher rate?

I'll take this one, Jomari. So let's give it to the newcomer. Good morning, everyone. So the quarter-on-quarter decline in fixed broadband subscribers came from our legacy DSL services, while subscription or fiber service continued to grow despite the stricter acquisition controls that we put in place in some areas in the fourth quarter of 2022. The drop in wireless broadband subscribers was driven by the continuing decline in our HPW, the Home Prepaid WiFi. Recall as early as end 2021, we recognized the shift in preference of the customer base to the more reliable fixed wired home connection, specifically e-fiber technology. This was because the work from home, learn-from-home and the increase in entertainment use cases changed the requirements of connectivity to the home, and wireless technology was no longer sufficient in most cases. So it's in line with our guidance, our HPW users dropped to 1.3 million users by the end of 2022. I hope that answers it.

Thank you, Raymond. The second question is on mobile. So this is for Darius. The question is, is the current number of SIM registrants in line or behind your expectations? How much churn are you expecting to result from this? Also, do you think the lack of IDs would be a huge hindrance?

Thanks for that question, and good morning, everyone. So yes, it's substantially in line with expectations. And we anticipated that the initial rush to register would taper off, and then regain momentum at a certain point as we approach the deadline. And this behavior is especially true for the younger cohorts of our base who normally cram and take their time. We also expect that our inactive base will churn. Though it's still too early to determine to what extent the cumulative base will bottom out. And as Issa mentioned earlier, the SIM card registration tends to correct the base but would have no significant revenue impact. On the IDs, the IRR supports more than 16 government IDs, and therefore, customers have a lot of options. Some challenges remain, of course, as issuance of some government IDs would take time.

Thank you, Darius. The next set of questions come from Stephen Oliveros of China Bank Securities. Again, the first question is on mobile. So this is for you, Darius. What were the drivers of higher churn in the mobile business in the fourth quarter 2022?

So thanks again for that question. So on the overall, softening seen in the mobile basis was basically driven by the inflationary consumer environment, which impacts the mass market the most, especially our TM customers, where more than half are financially constrained and extra sensitive to economic pressures or fluctuations. Also, we have been more targeted and effective in customer acquisitions, also shifting our efforts more to mainstream and digital channels, getting higher quality customers. Hence, you'll notice that churn rates actually are stable quarter-on-quarter at the minimum and ARPUs have increased across all brands.

Thanks for that, Darius. Again, the second question of Stephen is on mobile. Question is, do you expect persistent weakness in the legacy mobile voice and SMS this year? Any trends you've been seeing so far in the first quarter of 2023?

Again, thanks for that question. There has been an industry-wide weakening in core services as customers become more and more habituated to mobile data, and we expect that to continue moving forward as we push and graduate more customers to MDS, or mobile data services. It is, however, too early to be definitive to what extent or a degree this will continue in the first quarter. But based on our January performance alone, we have seen momentum on mobile data being sustained consistent with our expectations.

Thank you, Darius. The third and final question from Stephen is for Issa. The question is, any color in the current competitive landscape in both mobile and broadband businesses? What's your view on the potential entry of now telecom in the 5G space?

Thanks for the question, Stephen. The consumer space, especially for mobile, is already highly penetrated across segments as we know. However, as I mentioned in my presentation earlier, the broadband area remains to be an opportunity, specifically for the prepaid segment. As well, we are expecting that competitive pricing moves across the players will remain to continue as our customers remain to be economically challenged. Now moving on to the 5G question. On our 5G strategy, we are steadfast in our conviction that 5G, given that it has still no killer use case, is meant to improve not just overall experience in terms of speeds as it offloads traffic from our 4G, but also, it will help in terms of improving our product cost structure as 5G is more efficient. Thus, our 5G rollout strategy remains to be deliberate and purposive despite the entry of Now Telecom. It's too early to actually give a view on the entry of Now Telecom, but we expect aggressive pricing from such new entrant, typical, as we've always seen in the past when new entrants come into the telco space.

Can I provide additional color on the question on Now Telecom? I think I would hardly call the study funded by the U.S. government to the tune of PHP 180 million and entry into the 5G industry or telecom industry. One would have to really look at what the capability of the company is that's entering. With regard to spectrum assets, entering into 5G requires a massive amount of spectrum, which we are not sure that they have. Second, it requires massive capital. And if you look at the balance sheet of this particular company, it is highly doubtful that they can actually implement something as big as what DITO is doing who, with a large backer, is already having difficulty penetrating the market. So I guess we're all watching and seeing what the next moves are. But they echo Issa's sentiments, there is saturation in the market. 5G is not really, at this point, a differentiator given the fact that absent a really killer use case at this point that takes advantage of its fantastic technology in terms of speed and latency. So that's -- for us, it's a wait-and-see attitude. We're going to see and wait and go on our normal business. We've seen how the entry of a third telco has not really affected our industry so far after several years of implementation. And another player, if they do come in, and let's see how they come in, in a big way, right? So it's nothing new to adjust to report -- at least for the industry there's nothing new for players to attempt to enter our market. Thank you.

Thank you, Ernest, for those very important insights. The next set of questions come from Hussaini of UBS. The first question is on mobile, and this is again for Darius. The question reads, how do you see mobile competition post the SIM registration event?

Thanks for that question, Hussaini. We believe all the players will enjoy higher quality customers. Staying inactive and rotational churners are removed from the base. So the focus will be more and more quality versus quantity across the board in the entire market. Hopefully, though, the market players wean away from price bonds to protect total industry value and focusing how to further become relevant in the saturated market, where we believe whoever focuses on innovations that solve real-life customer problems beyond just connectivity will win.

Thank you, Darius. The next question is for Issa. The question is, how do you see the impact of inflation on mobile and fixed broadband growth?

The market -- the Filipino market, as we know, is largely the mass [indiscernible]. So we do expect that people are the mass base of the telco industry will continue to be very economical in their spend when it comes to their telco spending. So in this regard, we, in Globe, actually remain steadfast in continuing our offerings to be relevant and affordable and reliable for them across all our brands, across all our businesses, while ensuring that our hygienes across our network, our IT infra and our digital channels are ready to serve the very discerning and now very economical customer that we have to date. So quite challenging for the customers, but Globe is ready to serve them.

Okay. Thanks for that, Issa. The next question is -- was asked already earlier on wired broadband. So I'll skip this, and then share with Hussaini offline the answer that was given earlier. The next question, again, is on broadband. So this is for Raymond. The question is, when is Globe going to roll out prepaid broadband offers? What is delaying the process?

Well, we launched TMBayan Fiber WiFi, our community-based prepaid WiFi service, last August. And it's already available in around 652 hosts nationwide, that's of end January. So we have around 650 or so hosts already. As for our GFiber prepaid product, we are preparing for the launch in the second quarter of this year. We're just fine-tuning the digital experience and ensuring that we're ready for the Simply Pay As You Use product that we're coming up with. We plan to offer speeds and reliability of a fiber connection. Of course, with the flexibility and affordability of a prepaid, hence on the following selling propositions: no lockout fee, easy applications, no contract, no fixed monthly fee and of course, budget friendliness. Thank you.

Thank you, Raymond. Hussaini, if you don't mind, we do appreciate the fact that you sent us quite a number of questions, but we will take on that again later on after we ask the questions from the other analysts. So the next set of questions is from Arthur Pineda of Citi. And again, Raymond, this is on broadband. What drove down fixed line broadband subscriptions Q-on-Q? And are the churn pressures one-off or is it sustaining in the first half of 2023?

The quarter-to-quarter decline in fixed broadband subscribers came from our DSL service, while our fiber service grew despite stricter acquisition controls implemented in fourth quarter. So with the internal acquisition controls that we put in place, we expect a better share numbers in the coming years -- in the coming months, rather.

Thank you, Raymond. Again, the next question is on broadband. So Raymond, the question is how much more should we see fixed wireless broadband subscriptions decline by in 2023? And also, when do you see it reach a stable state?

Recall as early as in 2021, we recognized a shift in preference of our customer base to the more reliable fixed wired home connection, specifically fiber technology. With this and the ongoing SIM Registration Act, we are expecting wireless broadband to still decline year-on-year this year in 2023.

Thank you, Raymond. You can take a break for now because the next question is on mobile for Darius. What drove the softness in mobile subscriptions and revenues into the fourth quarter? Is this owing to competition or weak macro consumption? The momentum seems to be very different versus the reported GDP growth trends? Darius?

Thanks for that question again. So as mentioned earlier, it's really more the macroeconomic environment that drove the seemingly soft performance in Q4 of mobile more than the competitive pressures, though we still grew 1% Q-on-Q amidst the constraints. And such softness is driven by our financially constrained base in our value brand. We have existing plans running today to sustain such base through engagement programs and rewards to tie them over during the economic crunch, which are starting to actually bear fruit as evidenced by TM's churn rate improvement in quarter 4.

Okay. Thanks for that, Darius. The next set of questions come from Matthew De Leon of COL Financial. Matthew, your first two questions were already asked earlier. So we'll just share with you off-line the answers regarding your questions on mobile and broadband. The other question from Matthew, and this is for Rizza. How should we look at depreciation moving forward? Can we expect this to taper in the medium to long term?