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PHILIPPINE Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) through
its unit MediaQuest Holdings Inc. plans to sell its entire stake in
the country’s largest cable TV company, its chairman said.
“We’re down to 16 percent.
So, we’re minority—that’s not our policy. We’d rather sell
our stake [in Beyond Cable Holdings Inc.],” Manuel V. Pangilinan
told reporters.
Operations of SkyCable and Home
Cable merged in 2001 under holding firm Beyond. The holding company
is 66.5 percent owned by Lopez-led Benpres Holdings Corp., with
MediaQuest owning another 33.5 percent. Prior to the merger,
MediaQuest controlled a majority stake in Home Cable while SkyCable
was a wholly owned subsidiary of Benpres.
Earlier, ABS-CBN
Broadcasting Corp. purchased the bulk of SkyCable’s debt amounting
to P1.8 billion from creditors through cash payment and fresh
borrowing.
The amount purchased was about 67
percent of the total outstanding principal of P2.74 billion when the
invitation to SkyCable’s creditors was made over a month ago.
The company offered two
options for the retirement of SkyCable’s outstanding obligations.
The first involved ABS-CBN buying the cable TV operator’s debt at
a 30-percent discount, while the second entailed swapping
SkyCable’s IOUs with those of the broadcast giant Carlo Katigbak,
SkyCable chief operating officer had said that the company
programmed P600 million in capital expenditures this year to roll
out digital boxes (Digibox) in Metro Manila and Cebu.
Katigbak said SkyCable plans to
roll out 40,000 units this year, adding the company had issued
65,000 boxes in Metro Manila and Cebu as of last year.
He said the Digibox will address
the problem of cable signal theft through the use of encrypting
technology, which would prevent illegal taps into SkyCable’s
network. This effort is expected to generate single-digit growth in
subscribers this year, the executive said.
Last year, SkyCable posted a
profit of P122.6 million, reversing several years of losses.
Subscription revenues grew 7 percent while expenses edged up by 4
percent as programming costs benefited from the stronger peso.
--DARWIN G. AMOJELAR
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