
The quake hit the east coast of the island of Mindanao at 8.16am BST (3.15pm local time).
The epicentre, with a depth of 10 kilometres was located about 95 kilometres from the Davao City, the main harbour of the island.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) said Davao City, Mati City and Davao Oriental were the towns, all located on Mindanao, which felt the earthquake the most.
About 22 million people live on the island.
Davao City, the biggest city on Mindanao, is home to more than 1.6m residents.

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Phivolcs added the earthquake was of tectonic nature, meaning it was induced by the movement of magma lying beneath the surface of the Earth.
USGS earlier put the quake at a strength of 6.4.
There were no immediate reports of any casualties or damage caused by the quake, according to Reuters.
The whole Philippines sit along the Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile wide ring of 452 volcanoes.
Since scientists started recording the tectonic activity of the planet, they noticed that 90 percent of the world’s earthquakes occur along this Ring.
Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at University College London explained how dangerous this area is, saying: “The Ring of Fire is a girdle of volcanoes and earthquake zones that circles the Pacific Ocean, and which marks the join between some of the planet’s most active tectonic plates.
“Almost all the of the world’s most explosive and dangerous volcanoes are located here, along with the some of the longest and most deadly earthquake faults.
“Many of the biggest faults in the Ring of Fire are submarine so that their rupture can trigger catastrophic tsunamis, such as those that struck Indonesia and the Indian Ocean in 2004 and Japan in 2011.”
Lying underneath the Pacific Ocean, the ring of fire stretches from New Zealand to Chile.
It also includes Indonesia, which has been recently hit by a string of deadly quakes, and California, US, which sits on the notorious San Andreas Fault, the area geologists have predicted will be struck by a devastating earthquake of at least 8-magnitude.