The board of directors also declared an interim dividend of P36 per share in line with the company’s dividend policy of a 60 percent payout of the underlying core income of P11.7 billion and 60 percent of the gain from asset sale of P1.4 billion.

PLDT Inc. on Thursday announced unaudited financial and operating results for the first half of 2018 with consolidated service revenues (net of interconnection costs) amounting to P72.5 billion, following the new accounting standard PFRS 15 adopted in 1 January 2018.

This represents a 2 percent increase from 1H 2017. If based on the previous accounting standard, PAS 18, service revenues amounted to P74.2 billion, a 4 percent rise from the previous year.

Excluding ILD/NLD revenues, service revenues were actually higher by 6 percent year-on-year.

Consolidated EBITDA reached P33.2 billion (based on PFRS 15) or P33.3 billion (based on PAS 18), a 4 percent increase from 1H 2017.

EBITDA margin improved slightly to 43 percent from 42 percent in the previous year.

Core income from telco operations (i. e., excluding Voyager) grew 6 percent year-on-year to P13.0 billion. With Voyager, core income would be P11.7 billion, slightly lower by one percent.

Taking the following into account, among others:

P1.4 billion gain from the sale of 6.8 million Rocket Internet shares, the P1.5 billion revaluation gain on the remaining Rocket Internet shares we hold P3.6 billion in accelerated depreciation arising from the shortened estimated useful life of some network assets resulting from PLDT’s aggressive network transformation program

Reported Net Income stood at P11.8 billion, 29 percent less than the previous year mainly due to a higher gain from asset sales in 1H 2017.

The board of directors also declared an interim dividend of P36 per share in line with the company’s dividend policy of a 60 percent payout of the underlying core income of P11.7 billion and 60 percent of the gain from asset sale of P1.4 billion.

The dividend is payable on 11 September 2018 to stockholders on record as of 28 August 2018.

As of end-June 2018, consolidated net debt and net debt to EBITDA stood at $2.4 billion and 1.89 times, respectively. Gross debt totaled $3.5 billion, of which only $0.2 billion or 7 percent is unhedged. Fixed rate loans made up 89 percent, while floating rate loans accounted for 11 percent.

For purposes of analysis, a comparison of the Company’s first half 2018 results with the same period of 2017 on a pro-forma basis (using PAS 18).

On this basis, consolidated service revenues (net of interconnection costs) rose 4 percent to P74.2 billion.

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