By Arjay L. Balinbin, Senior Reporter

DITO CME Holdings Corp. expects revenues from Unalytics, Acuity Global, and Luna Academy to more than double next year, the company’s president said.

“2022 is when we become ambitious. You’ll see more than doubling of [their] revenues,” DITO CME President and Director Ernesto R. Alberto told BusinessWorld in a virtual interview on Oct. 21.

DITO CME, which owns 54% of DITO Telecommunity Corp., handles the Udenna group’s investments in media, communications, entertainment, and information technology.

Unalytics — 100% owned by DITO CME — is a managed analytics services company that aims to enable enterprises harness their data to offer “real business values” in the areas of compliance and advanced and conversational analytics, DITO CME Chief Operating Officer Donald Patrick L. Lim said.

DITO CME’s wholly owned Acuity Global curates media properties across platforms and provides media planning and buying.

Meanwhile, Luna Academy, which is 75% owned by the listed holding company, is an online education platform aimed at equipping users with future-ready skills, credentials, and certificates.

These units are still “quite nascent,” Mr. Alberto said. “These are all startups we’ve created. We will probably close the year, for Unalytics, with about over $1 million or P15 million in revenues. That’s just the start.”

“For Acuity, about P40-P50 million. Luna Academy is very, very nascent, because it takes time for people to get wind of online learning courses, but we’re getting traction. We will close the year with a little over P1 million,” Mr. Alberto added.

As for DITO Telecommunity, Mr. Lim said: “We have achieved about 3.5 million subscribers already, surpassing the technical audit requirement (51.01% national population coverage) of the National Telecommunications Commission.”

The goal for the year is to capture 4.5 million mobile consumers.

“I think the target for break-even then to profit is a little bit more aggressive by the third year,” Mr. Alberto said.

Mr. Lim said that Unalytics is looking at opportunities in risk and fraud analytics, customer analytics, and advanced analytics, which have addressable markets of P3.8 billion, P2.4 billion, and P1.8 billion, respectively.

In terms of the acuity market, DITO CME anticipates sustained growth in media ad spend in the Philippines over the next five years.

“There is a growing list of potential advertisers for political ads,” Mr. Alberto said, when asked how the company would take advantage of the upcoming political campaign period.

“As a matter of fact, that [will] probably [be] a big source of our one-off revenues for next year,” he added.

In its initial content rollout, Luna Academy, which was launched in February, provides up to 700 short courses and 50 to 70 more advanced microcredentials, Mr. Lim said.

“The first phase of our business strategy is to load a lot of courses in, so we are not doing any marketing yet. We have 100,000 unique visitors today, and 3,000 are currently doing their courses,” he noted.

Luna Academy’s courses and certificates are offered by big technology companies such as Google and Microsoft.

“There are two markets for Luna Academy. One is individual and the other is B2B2C (business to business to consumer), which is allowing us to leverage more volumes into our programs,” Mr. Alberto said.

“We are partnering with some institutions (like San Beda) and some organizations like JobStreet,” he added.

For the first six months of 2021, DITO CME’s net income attributable to parent equity holder decreased 70.5% to P16.3 million from P55.3 million previously.

Total expenses for the period ballooned to P35.8 million from P1.6 million in the previous year.

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