At Carriers World Asia 2015, Francisco Cocoy Claravall, Globe Telecom gave the below interview to express his thoughts on a few key subjects relating to the telecom industry in the Phillipines.
What is the current state of the industry in the Philippines for wholesale carriers?
It’s evolving and exciting. The growth of the wholesale market has really been driven by the growth in many sectors, particularly the IT-BPO and big multinational enterprises that are getting services from the wholesale carriers. That’s why our business grew very well last year.
Where do you see the future growth opportunities?
I think connectivity is still the main driver. We recent ly invest in the SEA-US cable which will add another diverse backbone directly to the US via Hawaii. Now we’ve come to the point where in the Philippines we have 3 cable stations in the north and one in the south, wiring up the Philippines for a bigger and fully diversified capacity.
To what extent will the migration to OTT services affect wholesale carriers?
Different carriers approach OTT players in different ways. Some might consider them as a foe. Some will consider them as a friend. We sort of consider them as both, but we work with them more because we realise that when you work more with OTT players, both of you get to succeed. First, it’s because the OTT players they have scale – they have the followers already. We did the partnership with Facebook and now with Viber. A big part of our mobile data revenue grows because we partner with the best – like Spotify. Whoever thought that you could change the behaviour of music in the Philippines? Typically in emerging markets, there’s copyright piracy, now you turn them into something legal and you help the content creator.
Globe aims to be at the centre of our customers’ digital lifestyle. You would have social OTT communication, music and the next integration would be videos – like watching movies. I’m not just talking about global or foreign movies, the Filipino also watch very old local movies as well.
We put them all together and partner with Warner Brothers, Sony, ABS, or the local movie producers to get that content into the hand of the Filipino consumers.
What is your perspective on voice?
Voice is still big but it has come to the point where it becomes part of the expectations. For example, recently we’ve launched a new set of mobile plans, the calling and texting are already part of the base because it is expected. Now what goes o n top of that will make a difference. If you’re more of a guy who likes music, then you will want the music lifestyle kind of app. So we’re changing the behaviour by looking at typical Filipino lifestyle trends and matching our products with that. But the voice and SMS are already built in.
Now there’s another story internationally. How do you keep them alive? Voice is the business where we’re at the stage of defending because there’re a lot of threats coming from OTT, etc. It’s a legend in the business that we’re just protecting, but that doesn’t mean there’s no innovation. One good innovation that we’ve been doing is what we call duo service. When Filipino goes overseas, they can use a US number, Japan number or Korea number. We’ve been working very closely with foreign providers on MVNO relationships. So we’ve already been outside of the Philippines to target places where there are large Filipino communities. So we’re able to tell them that this is still Globe but we’re working through other carriers. At this point, Globe is not anymore a telco. We consider ourselves as a technology company. We’re not at the level of companies like Apple but what we’re doing is getting the best partners, the best content, putting them together to come up with digital lifestyle offerings. So we’re moving, thinking and behaving like a technology company.
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