PLDT chairman and CEO Manuel Pangilinan doesn’t expect its fintech arm Voyager Innovations to make a profit until 2024, after suffering a loss of PHP1.33 billion ($26.2 million) in the first nine months of 2019.

In March, he predicted the business would turnaround by 2021. The unit posted a loss of PHP3 billion in 2018, up from PHP1.2 billion in 2017.

Pangilinan forecast Voyager Innovations to break even, cash-wise by 2023, “so by 2024 we would see the light of day”, BusinessWorld reported.

PLDT’s digital payments unit PayMaya, which is Voyager Innovations’ core business, posted strong year-on-year growth in the first nine months of the year.

The company raised $215 million in new funding in the final quarter of last year. In November 2018, Voyager Innovations raised $175 million worth of private investments after selling minority stakes to private equity company KKR and Tencent. A month later, it closed a $40 million investment from International Finance Corp and IFC Emerging Asia Fund.

Responding to a question about the possibility of selling more shares in Voyager Innovations, Pangilinan said: “I think there’s an effort to raise funding,” the newspaper wrote.

The Philippines company’s mobile unit Smart Communications had a 43 per cent market share by subscribers at end-September.