Cignal’s profit surges in H1

MANILA, Philippines — PLDT-backed Cignal TV Inc. is poised to breach the P1 billion profit mark this year as it continues to assert its dominance in the country’s pay TV market following the demise of ABS-CBN’s Sky Direct last year.

Cignal saw its profits surge by 608 percent to P510 million in the first half from P72 million during the same six-month period last year, PLDT and Cignal chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan said.

“Cignal, they have done magnificently because the profits for the first half was P510 million. Their EBITDA was close to P2 billion,” Pangilinan said in an interview with “The Chiefs” on One News/TV5.

“Cignal may hit P1 billion profits for the year. So that’s a magnificent job they’ve had partly because Sky Direct was shut down. It helped their subscriber base,” he said.

Sky Direct, the direct-to-home satellite service of Sky Cable, with 1.5 million subscribers, was ordered by the National Telecommunications Commission to cease and desist operations in June 30, 2020.

Its demise has benefitted Cignal, which now has more than 3.6 million subscribers nationwide and remains to be the number one pay TV provider in the country.

Cignal in November last year reached the three million subscriber count, which Pangilinan called a “milestone for the pay TV industry.”

Cignal is a subsidiary of the PLDT Group’s media and content arm MediaQuest Holdings.

Cignal TV recently partnered with Radius Telecoms Inc., a subsidiary of Meralco, in providing the IPTV channels bundled with the internet through Red Fiber.

It has also introduced Cignal Connect, a broadband service that seeks to provide internet connectivity to areas with limited or no broadband connection.

The service is targeted for subscribers that are located in far-flung areas where fiber broadband and mobile data connection are limited or not available.