After almost a year of talks, PLDT officially acquires Sky Cable for Php 6.75 Billion. The merger took a while since both parties need to get approval from the Philippine Competition Commission, which they got today.

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Based on previous disclosures regarding the acquisition, PLDT will take over 100% of Sky’s stocks, effectively making PLDT the new owner. The sale of Sky Cable comes in light of the company’s slumping sales following the decreased demand for cable TV services. Sky Cable’s woes worsened further after NTC ordered to cease its cable broadcast services back in 2020.

While the PCC gave approval on the PLDT-Sky deal, PLDT clarified that “the proposed transaction is still subject to other closing conditions,” so there might be changes on the final transaction.

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Because of these factors, Sky Cable has since focused more on its Sky Fiber services, with its cable services being an add-on option. However, despite a focus on Fiber internet services, Sky Cable is having a hard time catching up with the competition–especially when you compare the speeds their fiber internet plans have to offer vs rivals like PLDT, Converge, and Globe. 

It’s also worth noting that Sky Cable does not offer pure Fiber Internet services, as some of the areas it covers still uses copper wiring. This explains why they could not offer speeds of more than 100Mbps.

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How will PLDT’s acquisition of Sky Cable affect everyone? While the details are not yet clear at this point, we speculate that Sky Cable will start working on a transition process for its subscribers to make them PLDT subscribers. This is similar to what happened to Sun Cellular when it was acquired by Smart back in 2022. In Sun Cellular’s case, their parent company Digitel was bought by PLDT back in 2011, and it took PLDT over a decade before they decided to drop the Sun Cellular brand.

The migration process will take a while, and we expect Sky Cable to issue an advisory to its subscribers in the coming weeks. Given the acquisition, it’s possible that the Sky Cable branding will be dropped eventually. 

 

How about Sky Cable’s cable TV services? It seems that they have completely abandoned it, since the Sky Fiber website no longer shows the prices for their broadband + cable TV bundles as of today (January 22). PLDT does have its own cable TV services with Cignal, but it’s not clear what will happen to the cable TV services of Sky Cable following the acquisition.

(Updated on January 27) Sky has confirmed that they officially transition to be a “purely broadband service provider”, and plans to end its cable TV operations by February 27.

While there will be no changes for current Sky Fiber subscribers, Sky Cable subscribers will have the choice to either switch to Cignal Cable or Cignal TV.

Even if PLDT’s acquisition of Sky Cable is now official, there are still some questions that need to be answered–specifically what will happen to Sky Cable’s services.  We expect both parties to release a statement on the merger soon to inform all of their subscribers.