Eliseo Rio Jr said the third player might not necessarily come from China, despite President Duterte’s earlier pronouncements.

According to presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, the President wants the third telco player to be “up and about” by the first quarter of next year and the government would name the prospective third player by the end of that deadline. The third player would need to have a war chest of at least $2.7 billion to be able to compete with existing players, he said.

Rio did not identify the four companies, opting to let them make the announcements themselves but said they were from the United States, Japan, South Korea and Australia.

While he did not officially identify the interested parties, Rio cited familiar names such as Australia’s Telstra Corp. and Japan’s NTT Communications Corp.

To recall, Telstra earlier negotiated with San Miguel Corp. to partner in a telecommunication venture last year but later decided against pursuing the project. NTT Communications, on the other hand, is already in partnership with telco giant PLDT Inc.

Rio said he was not sure how NTT’s possible next move would affect its existing arrangement with PLDT.

Nothing is definite or official, Rio said. “They just indicated through some publications that they are interested.”

Since the Philippine Constitution limits foreign companies from having full ownership of telcos in the country, the third player would have to be a partnership between foreign and local parties, he said.

In the end, he said, this remained a “business decision” since it would be up to local telcos to decide whether or not they would wanted to enter into a partnership with foreign firms. Only after the joint ventures are formed would the government be able to determine which would be the best for the job, he added.

Rio said the government would not want another incident wherein a potential third player would be “gobbled up” by PLDT and Globe Telecom, which is what happened when the two companies bought the telco assets of San Miguel Corp. last year.

Presidential Communications Secretary Martin Andanar previously quoted Rio as saying that China had selected state-run China Telecom to invest in the Philippines as the potential third telecom industry player. A Reuters report confirmed this based on an interview with Rio.

He, however, clarified that this did not necessarily mean that the state-run Chinese company would be the third player.

“I must emphasise here that for that slot, it is not [necessarily] the China telco. What came out in the news was the President ordered us to open up the industry and the China telco would be the third player. That’s not true,” he said, explaining that the third player would have to be a company owned by Filipinos. This Filipino company could, however, have a foreign partner, he added.