Smart cited as one of Top 10 Philippine companies

Smart Communications, Inc., the country’s wireless services leader, was cited as one of the Philippines’ Top 10 leading companies in an annual survey by the Far Eastern Economic Review, a leading Asian weekly magazine.

In this year’s Review 200 survey, a ranking conducted annually by the magazine of leading companies engaged in business in Asia, Smart ranked 10th in over-all performance among Philippine companies.

This is the second time in the past three years that Smart has figured in the Philippine Top 10 list. Fast food giant Jollibee Foods has been ranked no. 1 for the third year in a row.

Administered by AC Neilsen International Research (Hong Kong) the survey which is now in its eighth year, reflects readership perception of performances of over 500 companies in 11 Asian countries.

Some 3,800 respondents were asked to rank selected multinational and local firms on overall leadership as well as other five key leadership categories: service and product quality, long term vision, innovative response to customer needs, financial soundness, and whether they are companies others try to emulate.

Within the subcategories, Smart ranked fourth in innovation and response to customer needs. Respondents said this was one of the most important leadership qualities of the five subcategories listed. The youngest company in the Philippine list, Smart also placed 10th in being a role model for other business organizations in the country.

"We are gratified that Smart has again won this recognition, particularly in the field of innovation in responding to customer needs," said Napoleon L. Nazareno, Smart president and CEO.

"The Review 200 citation highlights our ongoing efforts to introduce trend-setting wireless services, including new customer care services," he added.

Smart ended the year 2000 by introducing several new wireless services – Smart Zed, its new mobile portal for personalized wireless services; Smart Money, the country’s only electronic cash card linked to a mobile phone network; Smart ACeS, the Philippines’ first satellite GSM service which also runs on Smart’s network and Smartalk, the first GSM based public calling office (PCO) which is also capable of sending text messages.

These new services capped a year in which the company introduced a wide range of mobile data and e-commerce services, including mobile banking using text messaging and wireless applications’ protocol (WAP) as platforms. Smart’s mobile banking service is also the most extensive in the country.

In the past year, Smart also built the country’s largest-capacity digital cellular network, with a network capacity of over four million GSM subscribers.

This has enabled the company to post a huge increase in its GSM subscriber base – a 13-fold rise from about 191,000 at the end of 1999 to over 2.6 million, including the GSM subscribers of Piltel’s Talk N Text service.

The 11 countries covered by the survey were Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.