MANILA - Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) will report a growth of less than one million wireless subscribers for the third quarter from 38.5 million at end-June, said its president yesterday.

“The subscriber take-up for the period was lower than one million. It was a bit lower than the first quarter and the second quarter take-up,” said PLDT president Napoleon Nazareno in an interview.

The PLDT Group’s total cellular subscriber base for the first quarter of 2009 grew to 36.9 million subscribers from 35.2 million in 2008. A growth of 1.6 million cellular subscribers, meanwhile, was recorded in the second quarter this year.

PLDT expects to add a total of four and half million to five million new cellular subscribers this year.

The third quarter, explained Nazareno, is traditionally the weakest period of the year. The official said earlier that the company has detected signs of slowdown in terms of revenues and subscriber net additions in the early part of the third quarter.

Somehow, the phone giant is hoping that there would be a “balancing effect” from an anticipated slower growth in the third quarter to a stronger fourth quarter this year given that the October to December months are the strongest period of the year.

But the subscriber take-up for this month showed slight improvement mainly due to a “notable” increase in cellular revenues, particularly on September 26, when typhoon ‘Ondoy” hit the country.

According to Smart Communications Inc.’s wireless consumer division chief Bong Mojica, revenues from text messaging, multimessage service and cellular voice calls went up by 12% compared to the previous day.

“It’s hard to quantify how many text messages passed through our network, but definitely revenues went up,” he said.

On average, Smart handles 800 million text messages in a day.

“Many depend on cellular calls as a means of communication during the weekend and we benefited from that as our signal was up and strong,” said Nazareno.

He added that the September numbers may result in “good bottom line performance” for the group.

PLDT chairman Manuel Pangilinan said early this week that the group was seeing a “better” third quarter profit compared to last year.

“The growth for the entire third quarter was lower than expected but we noticed a slight improvement in subscriber take up for September alone. The contribution of Meralco plus cost reduction programs helped us post a good bottom line,” said the PLDT official.

PLDT, partly owned by Hong Kong’s First Pacific Co Ltd. and Japan’s NTT Group, purchased a 20% stake in the country’s largest power utility firm the Manila

Electric Co. for P20.07 billion through Piltel (Pilipino Telephone Corp.), which will cease to be a telecommunications company and become a holding unit for a substantial stake in Meralco.

Piltel’s earnings in the future will depend on how Meralco will perform.

On top of the 20% stake Piltel holds in Meralco, the pension fund of PLDT called the Beneficial Trust Fund (BTF) also has a 10.2% stake in the utility firm, bringing the dominant telco’s shareholdings to 30.2%.

For now, there are no planned acquisitions that will be folded into Piltel. It has also not been decided yet if Piltel will be delisted in the local bourse.