Ernest Cu Retires as CEO; Nation Pays Tribute to a Man Who Personally Did Not Make the Signal Bad But Presided Over the Signal Being Bad

Reported by Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

BONIFACIO GLOBAL CITY, Philippines — Ernest Cu, President and CEO of Globe Telecom, announced his retirement this week after 28 years with the company, a tenure that coincides almost exactly with the period during which mobile telecommunications transformed from a luxury for the Philippine elite into a daily necessity for 115 million Filipinos who use it to stream videos, conduct business, transfer money via GCash, and periodically throw their phones across the room because the signal dropped during something important.

Cu, who joined Globe in 1997 and became CEO in 2009, oversaw a period of extraordinary expansion in Philippine mobile and data infrastructure. He leaves behind a company that connects the majority of Filipinos to the digital economy, a GCash platform that processes trillions of pesos in transactions annually, and a mobile app that, by common consensus across the Philippine social media landscape, “sometimes works, depending.”

The Legacy, Balanced

“Ernest Cu’s tenure represents a period of transformational growth for Globe and for the Philippine digital ecosystem,” said the Globe board chairperson in a statement that is accurate and that anyone who has spent a weekend in a provincial area trying to load a map will nonetheless want to annotate.

The annotation would read as follows: the growth is real, the infrastructure investment is documented, the GCash achievement is genuinely significant for financial inclusion, and the internet in many parts of the Philippines still runs at speeds that would embarrass a 2009 router, not because Globe did not invest but because the Philippines is an archipelago of 7,000 islands, many of which have mountains, and connecting them all at high speed is an infrastructure challenge that money alone does not solve quickly. Also, some of the investments went to areas that were already well-served. Also, the duopoly structure of Philippine telecommunications (Globe and SMART) has faced persistent criticism for insufficient competition. Also, the app sometimes does not load.

The GCash Achievement

GCash, Globe’s mobile financial services platform, is the most significant legacy of the Cu era regardless of all other considerations. Before GCash, the majority of Filipinos had no access to formal financial services. Today, GCash has over 90 million registered users, processes remittances, enables bill payments, provides microloans, and has done more to reduce the unbanked population in the Philippines than any policy intervention of the past 20 years.

This is a genuine, substantive achievement. The BSP’s financial inclusion survey data supports the claim that mobile financial services have materially expanded access. Millions of OFW families receive remittances via GCash. Sari-sari store owners access credit via GCash. Market vendors collect payments via QR code. This is real change and it is large in scale and Cu’s leadership made it happen. The app, while still occasionally crashing on peak cashback days, has been updated.

The Signal, However

The signal, however, is a legitimate topic. The Philippines consistently ranks among the lowest in Southeast Asia for average mobile data speeds, a fact that coexists with the Globe and SMART infrastructure investment narratives in a way that both companies find uncomfortable to discuss. The NTC (National Telecommunications Commission) has issued improvement directives. Both companies have announced upgrade programmes. The speeds have improved. They remain, by regional comparison, in the lower tier. This is not one person’s fault or one company’s fault. It is a structural result of island geography, regulatory history, right-of-way constraints on tower construction, and the economics of serving rural areas where revenue per tower is low. It is also the thing that makes Filipinos tweet the crying emoji at telco accounts every time a Netflix stream buffers during a finale.

What Comes Next

Globe’s board has not yet named Cu’s successor. The company’s share price held steady on the announcement, suggesting investors were not surprised, which suggests the succession was managed in the orderly fashion that 28-year tenures tend to produce. Globe’s competitors and partners in the Philippine digital economy noted the retirement with the standard professional courtesies.

Cu’s final public act as CEO was the announcement of a new Globe network investment commitment for 2026, which includes fiber expansion targets and 5G rollout milestones. Whether the targets are met will be determined by his successor. Whether the signal improves will be determined by physics, geography, investment, and the continued patience of 90 million GCash users who will keep using it even when it buffers, because it is still better than going to the bank.

For connectivity issues you can relate to, see The Daily Mash.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/