PLDT Restructures After ₱48B Budget Overrun

After discovering a ₱48 billion “budget overrun” on their capital expenditure spending in the past four years, PLDT Inc is set to restructure its management.

PLDT has appointed Emmanuel C. Lorenzana as chief transformation and customer officer. Lorenzana was the former head of Smart Communications’ flagship wireless unit. PLDT likewise appointed Joseph Gendrano as Chief Technology Officer and Danny Yu as group controller.

This statement comes after rumors of internal investigations in PLDT due to financial inconsistencies.

Suppliers of PLDT brought up concerns regarding the company’s suppliers during the investigation.

However, PLDT highlighted that they did not find any fraudulent transactions, procurement anomalies, or asset losses coming from capital spending overruns.

“Our vendors continue to be committed to their partnership with PLDT and have expressed flexibility with our commercial requests involving reduction of outstanding work,”  mentioned PLDT.

The overruns comprised capital spending (CAPEX) in the last four years from 2019 to 2022.

“In the face of the pandemic, and especially at its height, PLDT and Smart continued it’s CAPEX spend, resulting in enhanced connectivity for our people, and better customer experience,”

“While these substantial CAPEX investments were key to meeting PLDT’s goals, they came at a price—CAPEX investments for these four years aggregated to P379 billion, including an estimated budget overrun of no more than P48 billion,” stated PLDT.

PLDT then disclosed that the amount that exceeded represented 12.7% of the total ₱379 billion CAPEX spending for the period.

“PLDT is undertaking a management reorganization process and has initiated improvements on its processes and systems to address weaknesses that allowed such budget overruns to occur,”

Source: Inquirer