Co-founder Smart Communications Orlando Vea

One of the reason why almost every Filipino owns a handheld phone is because of Orlando Vea, one of the founders of Smart Communications. A shining example of a successful businessman, Vea turned not only a single product into gold, but an entire industry and culture altogether, teaching the nation’s mass consumers to also see the gold in a once virtually invisible commodity.

Orlando Vea is one of the country’s leading technology entrepreneurs by being the co-founder of Smart Communications, and Chief Executive Officer of Mediaquest.

Orlando’s father was a civil servant and his mother is a retired schoolteacher. He was raised in a simple family but with perfect moral strength and values. He was taught to have community awareness and work ethics (which he is apllying now in his telecommunications business).

He was always curious about science and technology as a child that he had been a scholar in Physics. This was not the course he took, though, in college but Economics which he finished at the University of the Philippines as a cum laude.

Together with Dave Fernando, they founded Smart Communications in 1991. They made cellular phones more affordable and more available to the people. They put cell sites in remote areas providing coverage to everybody anywhere in the country. They aim not only to give mobile devices available for all but also the basic telephone service which they think the people really need. To be able to make this happen, they partner with First Pacific Group and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) which were then the biggest telco in the world in terms of market capitalization.

Smart Communications is the Philippines’ leading wireless services provider now with 27 million subscribers on its GSM network as of end-June 2007.

Orlando Vea is also the chief executive officer of Media Quest, a company that delivers news, entertainment, education, and other information through the use of satellite, cable, fiber, wire or wireless networks to a television, mobile phone, PDA, PC, movie screen or any digital broadcast receiver.

“ My greatest high now comes from seeing the cellphone in the hands of little people like market vendors, farmers, fishermen, tricycle drivers, household help and many others…