PLDT chairman and CEO Manuel Pangilinan acknowledged rival Globe Telecom likely surpassed it in mobile subscribers in Q4, but attributed part of its recent losses to a move to clean up inactive accounts.

Pangilinan said while PLDT moved to curb subscriber losses, customer numbers have less impact on the bottom line than in the past, the Inquirer reported.

The newspaper quoted Pangilinan as saying: “It’s not as important as before. What is important is to take a look at the total telco revenue.”

PLDT is still the largest telecoms operator in the Philippines by turnover: its revenue for the first nine months of 2016 was PHP118.9 billion ($2.4 billion) compared with Globe’s PHP89 billion for the January-September period, the Inquirer said.

Mobile World Live reported on Tuesday Globe overtook PLDT’s mobile unit Smart in Q4 taking a 52 per cent market share, according to figures from GSMA Intelligence. Globe added more than ten million subs last year while Smart lost nearly three million. Since the end of 2014, Smart’s subscriber base dropped by 7.8 million and its market share fell from 61 per cent to 48 per cent. However, in Q4 it had 300,000 net additions, its first quarter of significant growth in a couple of years. Its user base peaked at 73.4 million in Q2 2013.

PLDT, which also has seen profitability drop sharply, in November announced a management reshuffle in an effort to turn around its prolonged slump.