Philippine Long Distance offers strong dividend, further growth potential

Sandy Pomeroy, manager of the Neuberger Berman Equity Income Fund was interviewed by Bloomberg this morning and mentioned that one of the fund’s top ten holdings included an intriguing emerging/frontier market firm, Philippine Long Distance Telephone (NYSE: PHI), which is a play not only on foreign telecoms–an industry recently touted by Investor’s Business Daily–but also on an implicitly government guaranteed dividend stream of roughly 7.6%. As IBD notes, both Indonesia and the Philippines have proved prime regions to weather the global recession through the enduring and inelastic demand for wireless and broadband–in the third quarter, Indonesia and the Philippines ranked No. 1 and No. 3, respectively in broadband growth. And while Fitch Ratings offered only a modest outlook on the firm’s medium-term growth prospects earlier this fall–citing the country’s cellular market maturity (73 million subscribers through 2009, up from just 6 million in 2000)–a Frost & Sullivan report from September on the Southeast Asian mobile market concluded that while growth would be “marginal” for saturated markets like Singapore and Malaysia, “growing markets like Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, with low mobile penetration and even lower fixed broadband penetration, are likely to see growth in new subscriber additions.”