Helping shape a tech-powered nation
The past two years presented a challenge no one had ever seen or prepared for before. Remember that 10, even just five years ago, all companies were planning their “Vision 2020,” where 2020 would be everyone’s best year ever.
However, the past two years became instead everyone’s most challenging period as we were faced with lockdowns and quarantines that kept people off the streets. Medical professionals seemingly became the only profession that mattered. The business sector was the most hit as all our customers were off the streets, while we determined which of our employees had to go to work to continue providing services, or just be safe and stay at home.
At Dito CME (DCME), we decided to continue working toward our vision of empowering and enabling the digital lifestyle of every Filipino. This became more important than ever during the pandemic, when Filipinos had to learn to conduct much of their daily activities online, whether it was buying through e-commerce, being informed and entertained through social media, or going through their work tasks via Zoom and other digital platforms. Given these new realities, DCME looked for opportunities where we could help drive the digital enablement of Filipinos.
DITO Telecommunity is the only player with an all-brand-new, state-of-the-art 4G and 5G Network, and we are committed to delivering to the market a differentiated customer experience around truly superior broadband speed, unique digital experiences across the front, middle and back-end interfaces, and through “simple to understand, easy to buy and use” telco services at the highest “value for money price points.” The next-generation mobile technology network of DITO Telecommunity is an enabler and aggregator of superior digital possibilities. Holding the majority interest in the country’s new major telco player, and complemented by other digital-first businesses, we are confident of our capabilities to be a catalyst for market growth.
Beyond the commercial and economic opportunities that lie before us, what is important is that we help stimulate a healthy competitive environment to spur digitalization. By doing so, we empower the next wave of Filipinos to be technologically equipped and truly world-class.
We also saw that the pandemic had put face-to-face education on hold. At the same time, companies were rightsizing their organizations, and many professionals were finding the need to upskill themselves to keep themselves employable. We saw an opportunity to create LUNA Academy, an ed-tech portal where we would partner with the biggest technology companies to provide continuing and relevant education to working professionals. In the year of its launch, we partnered with more than 20 content providers and placed 400 courses on the platform, which garnered more than 200,000 visits and 4,000 registered learners.
At a time when the out-of-home (OOH) advertising business was in the doldrums due to lockdowns and the shift toward digital channels, we also took the opportunity to consolidate our OOH partners and help them market their business by developing economies of scale and volume with our advertisers, starting from within the Udenna Group and eventually expanding to marketing organizations outside the group. Currently, we have more than 30 partner organizations and have access to more than 10,000 OOH inventories, including our own from Phoenix Gas stations and Chelsea Shipping lines.
Read what Donald Lim wrote about Udenna Corp. in InBetween: Let’s take advantage of this great pause
As we commit to driving digital transformation for a better Philippines, we firmly believe that Filipino organizations can make their work processes and customer interface more efficient by digitizing them. Thus, we set up Unalytics to partner with the best global providers of digital transformation solutions—among them SAS, Strikartech, and LivePerson—to provide customer service experience and data solutions that would exponentially drive the growth of organizations.
As the dust starts to settle and the economy slowly gets back on its feet, we at DCME are more determined than ever to drive the first wave of digital transformation initiatives we had set out to do during the pandemic. With this, DCME looks forward to helping guide the Philippines to a new digital order and bring about its progress.