Average monthly data usage per customer escalated to 10.8 gigabytes, up by 23% from last year and 17% from full year 2022. While the industry availments of number portability remains small since the implementation of MNP in 2020, the majority of customers that ported their numbers, moved to Smart, reflecting recognition of PLDT’s network advantage. Next please. In the first nine months of 2023, 82% of our consolidated service revenues were from data and broadband. By service type, mobile data rose by 3% year-on-year while broadband and corporate data grew by 4% and 6%, respectively. ICT revenues were up 10%, including an 8% price in data center revenues. Our broad-based cost management effort — next, please — was undertaken, resulting in a 3% or ₱1.7 billion in total expenses, including provisions and subsidies.
The combined impact of increase in revenues and decline in costs, is a 4% rise in consolidated EBITDA to ₱78.4 billion, a nine-month record high, with margin up 52%. Next, please. Telco core income for the period grew by 2% to ₱26.1 billion year-on-year, reflecting the impact of higher EBITDA, partly offset by higher depreciation, higher financing costs and higher tax provision. Telco core for the third quarter is stable compared to the same quarter last year. Next, please. On a reported basis, PLDT income grew by 1% to ₱27.9 billion, mainly from the gain from the tower sale and leaseback transactions, ForEx and derivative gains, partly offset by MRP costs. Note that our share in losses from Maya stood at ₱1.7 billion, lower than the ₱2.4 billion reported last year.
This moderation in losses is in line with the expectation of breakeven and profitability towards the end of 2024. Next, please. PLDT’s balance sheet remains healthy. With net debt-to-EBITDA at the end of September at 2.44x, lower than the 2.48x at the end of June. We expect this to further improve with the receipt of the remaining tower sales proceeds. Gross debt amounted to ₱274.5 billion, of which 15% are dollar denominated and 5% unhedged. Interest costs for the period stood at 4.49% pretax, while the average life of debt is 6.7 years. Next please. Total CapEx for nine months amounted to ₱55.3 billion, consisting of network and IT CapEx of ₱49.4 billion, and business CapEx of ₱6 billion. In line with our objective of bringing down CapEx and aiming for positive free cash flow, CapEx intensity for the period has fallen below the 40% mark to 37%, and is lower than the 46% recorded last year.
In addition, the CapEx of ₱55.3 billion is ₱23.1 billion lower than EBITDA for the period of ₱78.4 billion. We maintain our CapEx guidance for the year of between ₱80 billion and ₱85 billion. This includes approximately about ₱11 billion out of the ₱33 billion prior year’s commitment. We continue to tightly screen and closely monitor our CapEx, especially multiyear projects, as well as introduce end-to-end process improvements in the value chain covering plan-to-budget approval, procure to pay, build to provision and related record to report. Next page, please. This page shows the usual network highlights. On the fixed network, we passed 17.3 million homes and cover about 18,100 barangays representing 43% of the total barangays in the Philippines.
Total fiber ports grew to 1 — to 6.2 million, as we have accelerated port rollout. We continue to carefully rationalize the rollout of the ports to ensure optimal utilization. PLDT total fiber footprint remains unparalleled, with a total of over 1.1 million kilometers. Population coverage of our wireless network stands at 97%, about 82% of the total handsets on the network are LTE or 4G. Next page, please. The number of unique 5G devices and 5G data traffic continue to register improvements from the end of 2022. As part of our network optimization to realize operational CapEx and spectrum efficiencies, we reduced the number of our 5G base stations. Nevertheless, our 5G speed remain faster than that of competition based on Ookla’s speed test.
Let me…
Shailesh Baidwan: Thank you, Danny. So in 2023, we continue to push the boundaries of our FinTech ecosystem with Maya Digital Bank at the heart of it, and continue to launch new products and growing all our businesses. So in the Philippines, we are the #1 digital bank in terms of number of depositors and the deposit balance, and we continue to see very good growth across our loans portfolio, and I’ll touch upon that. On the merchant acquiring business, which is where we process Visa, Mastercard to our PH domestic debit. Again, we are the leaders in number of transactions processed in the Philippines across all these various fund sources, and continue to see that market share expand. And we are the number one finance app in the Philippines, which is our Maya consumer app.
So let me give a little more color across each of these. So if we look at, on the Maya consumer app, which was largely a payment-centric app and now has gone on and evolved into an all-in-one full financial service app for consumers. We introduced a high-engagement saving product, last year. Customers look forward at the start of the month to pay the electricity bill, to pay various utility bills, to do their various purchases, which then helps them to earn higher interest rate. And the bulk of that information that we are able to collect on customers, we are able to create better profiles and deeper understanding of the behavior, which then goes into our credit scoring models and allows us to provide them with our credit products as and when they need those.
Very pleased, we have launched our first credit product last year, Maya Credit. And last month, we expanded that with a longer tenure product, Maya Personal Loans. And we’ve seen extremely positive take-up of that in the early stages of its launch. We continue to expand our services by adding on investments. So now customers are able to purchase and invest in a number of funds, and we will add the ability to purchase individual stocks on the Philippines Stock Exchange over the coming weeks. So what this has enabled is, really helped the Maya consumer app to become the all-in-one primary financial services app for the customers, and we are seeing them generating 2x to 4x more ARPU and profit per user versus of payments only. We see the same story when we look at the enterprise side of the business, this is a business where we provide with a large online player, a multi — an omnichannel there, providing you with a full suite of payment solutions including, whether it’s just for QR or whether it’s Visa, Mastercard or any other fund source, including domestic debit.
As I mentioned, our share in a number of transactions today in this business is over 50% across Visa, Mastercard, QRPH, that’s a market. And with the addition of Maya Bank, we’ve now been able to integrate the ability for merchants, especially the SME, the MSMEs to be able to use Maya Bank deposit to put their settlement account. And we have now started testing and piloting better products to both macro and to small SMEs. So in the same portal, where they do all their transactions for payments, they are now able to draw down on credit, on working capital products, which we are able to provide on the back of seeing their payment transactions and business flows. So this is another area where we have piloted a number of products and are now scaling those and rolling those out through the course of the rest of 2023.
And if you go to the next slide. To give you some color around the numbers, the number of depositors that we have in Maya Bank grew to 2.6 million. In fact, as of now, the number is pretty much close to 3 million depositors. And that has resulted in us having a deposit balance of nearly ₱24 billion. We have been, as I mentioned, we started with dispersing consumer loans, adding on newer product consumers and of course adding on the micro and SME products. We have disbursed over ₱16 billion of loans in the last month, and as a result of this expansion and the Maya, both the business on the enterprise side and on the consumer side, becoming key drivers. We’ve seen our segment of data across the business have become profitable in the third quarter of 2023.
And as Danny mentioned, thanks for that. Not only have we been able to grow it more than double our net income year-on-year, but we’ve been able to bring down our cash burn by nearly 40% versus last year, and with the expansion that we are seeing in the business with the continued growth in the net income as we launch new product and scale new products, we are looking at making the business cash flow positive towards the end of 2024. With that, I’m going to hand us back to Al.
Al Panlilio: Thank you, S.B. And this on nine months.
Shailesh Baidwan: I just wanted to give the outlook guidance for 2023. Service revenue growth, low-single-digit growth for the group. EBITDA will also be low-single-digit growth. The core income will be at least ₱24 billion. CapEx will then it will be ₱25 billion operated nine months last year. And we will try to, we will continue, obviously, in dividends — sorry, in this year. And then for dividend, we will obviously try to maintain a 60% dividend payout. MVP, if you might want to add a few things?
Manny Pangilinan: No, I’m good, Al. Thank you. Thank you.
A – Melissa de Dios: [Operator Instructions] The first set of questions comes from Stephen Olivero of China Bank Securities. The first one, how does TEL plan to sustain its top line momentum in 2024, given projected period of elevated interest rates and inflation?
