Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company - History

History

PLDT was established on November 28, 1928, by an act of the Philippine legislature and approved by then Governor-General Henry L. Stimson by means of a merger of four telephone companies under common US ownership . Known as Act 3436, the bill granted PLDT a 50-year charter and the right to establish a Philippine telephone network linking major points nationwide. However, PLDT had to meet a 40-day deadline to start implementing the network, which would be implemented over a period of one to four years.

By the 1930s PLDT had an expansive fixed-line network and for the first time linked the Philippines to the outside world via radiotelephone services, connecting the Philippines to the United States and other parts of the world.

Telephone service in the Philippines was interrupted due to World War II. At the end of the war, the Philippines' communications infrastructure was in ruins. U.S. military authorities eventually handed over the remains of the communications infrastructure to PLDT in 1947, and with the help of massive U.S. aid to the Philippines during the 1940s and 1950s, PLDT recovered so quickly that its telephone subscribers outpaced that of pre-war levels by 1953.

On December 20, 1967, a group of Filipino entrepreneurs and businessmen led by Ramon Cojuangco took control of PLDT after buying its shares from the American telecommunications company GTE. The group took control of PLDT's management on January 1, 1968, with the election of Gregorio S. Licaros and Cojuangco as chairman and president of PLDT respectively. A few months later, PLDT's main office in Makati City (known today as the Ramon Cojuangco Building) was opened, and PLDT's expansion programs begin, hoping to bring reliable telephone services to the rural areas.

PLDT was permitted to operate during Martial Law. During the 1970s, PLDT was nationalized by the government of then President Ferdinand Marcos and in 1981, in compliance of then existing policy of the Philippine government to integrate the Philippine telecommunications industry, purchased substantially all of the assets and liabilities of Republic Telephone Company, becoming the country's telephone monopoly. Under this monopoly, service expansion were severely curtailed or practically nonexistent. In the Martial Law years people would apply for phone service only to wait for years and years on end behind an impossibly long application backlog. It is not unheard of for people and small businesses back then to barter for a single telephone line in the black market for tens of thousands of pesos. The incumbent Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore referred to the situation when visiting the Philippines during the term of President Fidel V. Ramos. He said, albeit in jest, “In the Philippines 95% of the population has no telephone, while the remaining 5% are waiting for that dial tone.”

In 1986, after President Marcos was overthrown, the company was re-privatized as Ramon's son, Antonio "Tonyboy" Cojuangco assumed post as PLDT chief. By 1995, with the passage of the Telecommunications Act and the subsequent deregulation of the Philippine telecommunications industry, the company has been de-monopolized. Later that year, Hong Kong-based First Pacific Company Ltd. acquired a 17.5% stake in PLDT making it the majority owner of the conglomerate. The company's CEO Manuel V. Pangilinan became the new conglomerate's President replacing Cojuangco, who assumed post as Chairman until 2004, when Pangilinan became his successor.