LandBank Corporate Lending to Globe Enters Its Third Round

What It Means

• LandBank corporate lending to Globe Telecom is not a one time event. It has now happened in 2021, 2024, and 2026, each time structured the same way.
• Globe gets a third standing financing channel outside BDO, Chinabank, and Metrobank, from a bank whose legal mandate centers on agriculture and rural development.
• LandBank’s agri and rural lending still makes up 58.4 percent of its total loan book, but that leaves a large and growing share going elsewhere.
• The exposure sits with LandBank’s non-mandate lending capacity, not with Globe, which already has full access to private capital markets.

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Globe Telecom signed a P10 billion term loan with the Land Bank of the Philippines on July 16, 2026, for capital expenditures, debt refinancing, and general corporate requirements. The disclosure reads like routine banking. It is routine, and that is the point.

This is not the first time. In December 2021, Globe closed P15 billion in term loans, P10 billion from BDO and P5 billion from LandBank, for the same stated purposes. In August 2024, Globe secured P22 billion across three banks, Chinabank, LandBank, and Metrobank, again split for capex and refinancing, with LandBank contributing P5 billion. Now, in 2026, LandBank is carrying the full P10 billion on its own, arriving a month after Globe closed a separate P5 billion loan with BDO. Three cycles, one recurring lender, the same two words on every disclosure: capex and refinancing.

A Recurring Line Item, Not a One Off Deal

LandBank corporate lending to Globe follows a pattern tight enough to set a clock by. Every time Globe’s capital spending accelerates, LandBank shows up on the disclosure alongside one or two private banks. Q1 2026 capex hit P12.7 billion, a 51 percent jump from the year before, eating 30 percent of service revenue. Net income fell 20 percent year over year to P5.6 billion even as core net income rose 9 percent to P4.9 billion. Globe needed money, and LandBank was there again, the way it was in 2021 and 2024.

A single instance of a state bank co-financing a private telco’s capex is unremarkable. Three instances of LandBank corporate lending to the same borrower over five years, each shaped the same way, is a standing relationship. Globe did not need to shop for a new lender this cycle. It returned to one that had already said yes twice before.

The Legal Floor Versus the Actual Loan Book

LandBank operates under the Agri-Agra Law, which requires banks to allocate at least 15 percent of their loan portfolio to agriculture and 10 percent to agrarian reform credit. As of March 2026, LandBank’s agriculture, fisheries, and rural development lending reached P908.77 billion, or 58.4 percent of its total loan book. That figure gets cited often, and it clears the legal floor by a wide margin.

It also means the remaining 41.6 percent, a substantial pool of capital, sits in lending that has nothing to do with farmers, fisherfolk, or agrarian reform beneficiaries. Some of that goes to genuine development finance: cooperatives, rural infrastructure, small enterprise credit. Some of it goes to a telecom conglomerate that already has standing credit lines with three of the country’s largest private banks.

LandBank corporate lending at this scale does not violate the mandate. It shows where a growing share of a state bank’s non-agri capacity goes when a repeat borrower comes calling.

LandBank Carries the Risk, Not Globe

Globe carries none of the downside here. A telco this size, with BDO, Chinabank, and Metrobank all willing to lend, treats LandBank as one more line on a diversified balance sheet.

The exposure sits on LandBank’s side. Every peso spent on LandBank corporate lending to Globe is a peso not deployed under the AgriSenso Plus program or similar rural credit lines, and it is a peso of single obligor risk concentrated in one conglomerate’s capital cycle rather than spread across thousands of smaller borrowers. LandBank remitted P32.4 billion in dividends to the national government last year. That dividend depends on a loan book that performs, and a growing slice of that book now depends on how well one telecom’s capex bets pay off.

The Pattern Outlasts the Announcement

Globe will need capital again. Its full year cash capex guidance stays below $1 billion even after the Q1 surge, which means more disclosures and more rounds of the same bank names appearing together. LandBank corporate lending to Globe has run through three separate cycles of state banking leadership without a single one where LandBank declined to participate.

The next Globe financing round is not a question of if. It is a question of which private bank joins LandBank on the disclosure, and how much of LandBank’s non-agri capacity keeps rotating toward the same conglomerate instead of the borrowers its founding mandate was built to serve.

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