With Over 10 Million Subscribers, Dennis Uy's Dito Now Wants to Be Country's Top Telco
Dito Telecommunity Corp., the telco company owned and controlled by businessman Dennis Uy, is gunning to be the country’s top telco. With a current user base of 10.3 million subscribers, the company aiming to break up the duopoly of Globe and Smart says it is positioning itself as the superior mobile network provider and is no longer content to be just the so-called “third player.”
Dito is no longer just “crawling” its way to the market, its chief administrative officer Adel Tamano said Thursday.
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“Our CEO [Dennis A. Uy] has always said that from the start—that we are aiming for Number 1,” Tamano said in a press conference. “I think Dito started from a crawl to a walk to a run.”
With 10.3 million subscribers as of July, Tamano is confident it will reach, if not surpass its target of 12 million subscribers by the end of the year.
“Our goal for this year was 12 million, so if we’re at 10.3 million in just July, the most basic is, I think with some level of confidence, we will definitely hit the 12 million [mark] by the end of the year,” Tamano said.
To compare, as of March 2022, Globe's total mobile subscriber base was at 87.4 million, while Smart had 70.2 million.
Dito’s current subscriber base is about five percent of the overall telecommunications market but represents about nine percent of the industry In terms of data usage.
“I don’t think that is not significant,” Dito Chief Technology Officer Rodolfo Santiago said. “In less than two years we grabbed the data-centric segment.”
“But the reality on the ground is that competitors are not making it easy for us,” Tamano added.
According to the executive, both Globe Telecom Inc. and Smart Communications Inc. have been copying the service buckets and offers of Dito to fend off customer churn.
“At the end of the day it is the consumer that benefits from it,” Tamano said. “It just reminds me though, that how come you’re just offering it now? That is why it’s not going to be easy for us to get the market share, they have more money than us, they’ve been here in the market far longer than us.”
He added that Filipinos will soon realize the superior product offerings of Dito.
Dito said it is aggressively pushing for the deployment of new tower assets to cover as much as 80 percent of the population by mid-2023.
“The remaining 20 percent of the population would be within the areas that are really very hard to build infrastructure—these are the island municipalities,” Santiago said. “But we will be building there because we need to do the 84 percent on the fifth year.”
Part of Dito's commitments when it won its license was to ensure coverage of up to 84 percent in its fifth year of operations.
“We’re now ready to run and go head-to-head with our competitors because last Friday, we started our independent audit and we’re confident that we will be meeting the population coverage of 70 percent. We’re not too worried about the speed, 55 Mbps. We are confident that we can maintain that. With that coverage, we are true to our promise that we are comparable if not better than our competitors for where we are,” Santiago said.
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