Departing CEO Credited with Transforming Philippine Telecommunications from Unreliable to Merely Inconsistent
BONIFACIO GLOBAL CITY, Philippines – Ernest Cu, the chief executive who guided Globe Telecom for 28 years through the transformation of the Philippine telecommunications landscape from a market with two fixed-line providers and a payphone that may or may not have worked to a market with two dominant mobile operators and a prepaid load ecosystem that is simultaneously more sophisticated than most people realize and more frustrating than it needs to be, announced his retirement this week, leaving behind a company, a legacy, and an app that connects to its server successfully on most attempts.
Cu’s tenure at Globe coincided with the mobile internet revolution, the smartphone era, the explosion of OFW remittance platforms, the rise of GCash as a financial services infrastructure that now processes transactions for millions of unbanked Filipinos, and the ongoing challenge of delivering adequate broadband connectivity to an archipelago of 7,641 islands, varying geographic terrains, typhoon-prone infrastructure, and a regulatory environment that has historically moved at approximately the pace of the internet speeds it was meant to govern.
The App That Sometimes Works
The GlobeOne app, which allows subscribers to manage their accounts, purchase load, pay bills, and monitor data consumption, has been available on iOS and Android since approximately 2017 and has maintained a consistent user rating in the 3.1-to-3.8 range across that period, which is the rating range that technology observers describe as ‘functional but not beloved’ and that users describe as ‘I use it because I have no choice and it usually works eventually.’ The app’s primary technical challenge is the same as the network’s: serving a very large user base with variable connectivity, particularly in areas where the signal itself is the first problem, making an app that requires connectivity to diagnose connectivity issues a circular tool of limited utility in the moments when it is most needed.
Globe’s GCash division, by contrast, has become one of the most significant financial technology stories in Southeast Asian emerging markets. With tens of millions of registered users, GCash processes peer-to-peer transfers, merchant payments, government benefit disbursements, and microloans for a population that has historically been excluded from formal banking by a combination of minimum balance requirements, branch access barriers, and documentation demands that many informal workers cannot meet. The Manila Bulletin has called GCash ‘the financial infrastructure of the Philippine digital economy,’ which is accurate and also means that when GCash experiences downtime, as it periodically does, the disruption is felt in the livelihoods of people for whom it is the only banking they have.
The Connectivity Gap
Philippine mobile and broadband connectivity has improved significantly over Cu’s tenure and remains, by regional comparison, below the median for Southeast Asia in terms of both speed and reliability, a discrepancy that reflects geography, infrastructure investment timelines, and the structural economics of serving a market where the most profitable customers are concentrated in Metro Manila and the most underserved are distributed across rural Visayas and Mindanao. The Manila Times has documented the government’s National Broadband Plan with the same careful attention to the gap between the plan’s targets and the delivery dates, which has widened in some years and narrowed in others, producing an overall trajectory of improvement that is slower than the plan projected and faster than pessimists feared, which is roughly the story of Philippine infrastructure generally.
The incoming Globe CEO inherits a company with strong GCash momentum, a mobile subscriber base that is vast and price-sensitive, a broadband business that is growing but not yet meeting demand, and an app that connects on the third or fourth attempt, which is progress from where it was, and which is the kind of progress that the Philippines specializes in – genuine, documented, insufficient, and continuing. Cu’s 28 years produced a telecommunications sector that the country needed. Whether his successor produces one the country deserves is the next chapter, available when the signal permits.
The telecommunications industry Cu is leaving is structurally different from the one he entered. In 1997, Philippine telecommunications was dominated by PLDT and its legacy of fixed-line monopoly, with mobile services emerging as a disruptive challenger that Globe championed. By 2026, the mobile duopoly of Globe and SMART (PLDT’s mobile arm) has itself become the incumbent structure, challenged by the arrival of DITO Telecommunity as a third player with Chinese backing and infrastructure commitments that it has met unevenly but measurably. The competition has produced lower prices and, in some markets, better service than the duopoly would have delivered on its own, which is what competition theory predicts and what Philippine consumers have been experiencing in the gap between their expectations and their actual download speeds. The incoming CEO at Globe will navigate a market where GCash’s financial services ambitions are expanding beyond payments into insurance and investment products, where 5G infrastructure rollout is ongoing and contested by geography, where artificial intelligence is beginning to affect the economics of customer service operations, and where the regulatory framework continues to evolve at the pace that Philippine regulatory frameworks evolve, which is measured in years rather than quarters. Cu built a telecommunications company out of a challenger brand. His successor must decide what kind of company Globe is in a market where the phone bill and the bank account have become the same product for tens of millions of Filipinos, and where dropping that product is no longer just an inconvenience but a financial emergency.
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