The Philippines' Globe Telecom has reported a nearly 37% increase in net profit for the first nine months of 2018 to 15.1 billion pesos ($284.5 million) as a result of strong demand for mobile data.
The operator closed the nine month period with consolidated service revenue of 101.9 billion pesos, up 9% year-on-year.
Mobile revenue increased 8% to 79.13 billion pesos, with mobile data revenue growing to account for 50% of gross service revenue. Globe's total mobile customer base grew 10% year-on-year to 65.4 million.
Meanwhile the operator's home broadband business reported revenues for the nine month period of 13.52 billion pesos, a 15% year on year increase.
Globe's home broadband subscriber base increased by around 23% to over 1.5 million, with nearly half of these being home wireless broadband customers.
Corporate data revenue also experienced a double digit increase, growing 11% year-on-year to 8.37 billion pesos, but fixed voice revenues continued to erode with a 16% slump to 2.26 billion pesos.
Globe meanwhile invested around 32.5 billion pesos is augmenting its network to support its growing subscriber base, with around 78% of total spending going towards data related services.
The operator recently announced it is on track to reach its target of covering 95% of the Philippines' cities and municipalities with LTE by the end of the year. Nearly 27,000 of the operator's 40,522 base stations now support 4G.