BTC on pace to hit half-year revenue goals despite slow economy

Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Andre Foster said yesterday that the company had a good first quarter this year, but was “slightly behind” revenue objectives, which he owed to the slow return of economic activity in the country.

Foster said though, that the company expects its half-year results to be in line with its financial projections.

“We’re slightly behind revenue objectives, but I really would marry that to the fact that the economy reopening is not as quick as anyone would like,” said Foster.

“I think our first half results are pretty much on budget for us. We have some catch-up to do from what we saw in the first quarter.

“Certainly from our perspective we think that our company is still very financially strong and growing these new propositions and improving our service footprint will help to strengthen our ability to take back more of the market.

“My aspiration has always been to grow one to two percent every year to get this business back onto a solid footing. For me this is definitely not a sprint, this is a marathon and we’ve been running this marathon for over a hundred years and we’re going to keep on the pace that we’re at to grow and improve.”

The propositions mentioned by Foster includes the massive increase in the size of BTC’s fiber-to-the-home network, where the company is providing minimum network speeds of 100 megabits per second and moving up to a package tier that offers 600 megabits per second.

According to Foster, BTC’s parent company Liberty Latin America provided “good investment” to BTC this year for the expansion of the fiber network.

He said the company is building the network simultaneously across islands and have already pulled fiber through parts of Abaco, Grand Bahama, Bimini, the Exumas, Long Island, Rum Cay and San Salvador.

Foster said fiber has also been run all over New Providence, with areas like West Ridge, Sea Beach Estates, Tropical Gardens, Flamingo Gardens and the entire corridor of Carmichael Road being serviced this year. Carmichael Road alone will require 10,000 connections to homes, the CEO said. 

“These new propositions we’re launching is creating a tremendous amount of demand,” said Foster.

“Our teams have not been busier. We’re trying to make sure we can please as many as we can as quickly as we can, but there’s some heavy lifting happening from both a design perspective as well as just getting infrastructure installed. 

“It’s helping us to keep money in The Bahamas and certainly keep people employed.”

Foster said the company is investing tens of millions this year to expand its fiber network, noting it is just the beginning of things to come.

“We’ve definitely put a stake in the ground saying this is BTC country,” he said. We’re going to continue driving value to our customers.” 

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source https://thenassauguardian.com/btc-on-pace-to-hit-half-year-revenue-goals-despite-slow-economy/