The COVID-19 pandemic did not stop Megacable last year, and neither will it in 2021. Enrique Yamuni, CEO of the telecommunications company, is clear that the need to remain connected will continue, despite the reduction in measures of social isolation in the country, so the investment plans are aimed at priority objectives: allocate 400 million dollars in the migration to fiber of GPON technology, continue with the deployment of Xview +, its video platform, and accelerate growth of the business network.
For the executive it is important not to postpone or modify business plans, as he is completely sure that we will never return to normalcy in January 2020. “This new way of life is here to stay, we got used to email, to making meetings by videoconference , work, study and entertain ourselves remotely (…) We offer an essential service and our priority is people ”, he explains.
The company started the year on the right foot by increasing its profits by nearly 9% and its revenues by nearly 8%, a record figure. During the first quarter of 2021, the number of subscribers of the mass segment (which includes internet, video and mobile telephony) grew, with the virtual mobile operator Megamóvil being the most profitable after generating revenues 25% higher than those registered in the same period of the previous year . In addition, it grew 24.7% in users.
Internet revenues and subscribers grew 14%, while average speed increased 25% between January and March. The video segment increased 1% in revenues and in net adds 6.3%. Megacable’s OTT, Xview +, registered a 60.6% increase in the number of users.
Expansion: What are the plans for Megacable in 2021?
Enrique Yamuni: This year nothing changes from what we had already defined. We continue with the evolution of the network to GPON [passive optical network with gigabit capacity], we now have more than 50% of the project and we plan to finish it before the end of 2021. We are going to fully finish our Xview + deployment (the company invested more of 100 million dollars in this new platform launched on February 23) and we will continue to push strongly the service of the virtual mobile operator. We also plan to continue growing our network to six new cities where we now have neither of the two (business and residential), such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juárez and Aguascalientes. We are going to grow towards San Luis Potosí. This implies an investment of over 400 million dollars. We are a strong company, with practically no debt, that can carry out its expansion and service improvement plans. At the end of 2021, the company will grow more or less 10% in connections of the three services (television, internet and mobile telephony), plus the business one.
I: What actions are you implementing to meet user demand in the ‘new normal?
EY: Our priority is GPON. Last year we invested nearly $ 400 million in building network infrastructure and technology to upgrade the fiber optic network and migrate residential users. Terminal equipment of more or less than 1.8 million homes must be changed, in addition to moving all that equipment to what we are not yet migrating to in order to double the capacities of the network, make it more reliable and have more bandwidth that allows it to compete perfectly with any fiber network. We continue with a good market share and a good response from subscribers.
Xview + is also very interesting. It is a good interface that allows the user to see up to 48 hours ago in programming, record future events. It has more than 8,000 hours of video available as part of a package that includes HBO, Netflix and Amazon Prime, we already have Disney +, but we need to add it as a streaming platform. We are betting on more in the coming years because we know that users are migrating to these types of services. Today we have more than 300,000 subscribers.
E: What was the most profitable service for the company during the pandemic?
EY: We have done well in all three products, broadband, television and telephony, because we became essential for all the people who took classes, worked and operated from home. The network, for example, never suffered saturation although the traffic increased in a week between 30% and 35%, around 99.5% of the subscribers did not complain of slowness or that they could not make videoconferences or talk on the phone. Our goal was always to provide good service and for people to be connected, we succeeded and sales went up.
In the television part, many people took classes through this medium, we had to do things that were not ours. For example, in states like Sonora and Sinaloa there are one or two hours less than in Mexico City, so classes were broadcast at five or six in the morning. We used a satellite feed for those areas with one of the services we have on PCTV (Megacable owns more than 80% of the shares, the content producer and distributor) to pass the content two hours late.
And the mobile service, which we have had for a long time, but we relaunched from November with a greater marketing effort (the company launched a campaign with the singer Christian Nodal to offer unlimited data service for 200 pesos). This helped us to take off, not only in the mobile service, but in the rest of the offer we have because if you hire Megamóvil you receive residential megabytes. Every time we try to package more services.
E: And what was the segment most affected?
EY: The part that we were affected was in the corporate and companies. Many small businesses closed, practically all the hotels and restaurants, which reduced the income. We are recovering it little by little, since some have reopened.
Rather, what we struggled a bit with last year was filling vacancies. People were afraid to go looking for work. There came a time when we were 20,000 employees after being a staff of 22,000. Right now we are over 23,000 and we must end the year with more than 24,000 workers. Our goal is to grow the workforce between 6% and 7% more or less.
E: What is the most important challenge for the company this year?
EY: What we see is that the company is going to deal with the new outsourcing law, it came to shake us because we have always complied with the law, and we hired collaborators in that way to cover work peaks. It is a problem because the Social Security Law does not make a difference between the risk levels of employees within the same company, it is not the same as that of office personnel or that of a collection box, the technician who rises 20 times a day to a ladder for servicing. That is something we must resolve, but it does not change any of our plans.
