Suzanne Shep­pard

T&T will soon be reap­ing the ben­e­fits of the merg­er of Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (CWC) and Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al with some US$20 mil­lion in cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­ture planned in this mar­ket. The com­pa­ny plans to es­tab­lish a state-of-the-art sports stu­dio and ser­vice op­er­a­tions cen­tre in T&T, cre­at­ing more high-tech jobs lo­cal­ly.

CWC CEO Phil Bent­ley, who spoke with re­gion­al jour­nal­ists via a live we­b­cast fol­low­ing re­lease of the com­pa­ny's lat­est in­ter­im fi­nan­cial re­sults in Lon­don yes­ter­day, said the com­pa­ny is able to con­struct new fa­cil­i­ties in T&T and Ja­maica where there is al­ready high-speed fi­bre in­fra­struc­ture.

In oth­er Caribbean mar­kets CWC is up­grad­ing the broad­band in­fra­struc­ture from the slow­er cop­per net­works.

Com­ment­ing on the com­pa­ny's re­sults for the half year end­ed Sep­tem­ber 30, Bent­ley said in the Caribbean where years of de­cline had halt­ed last year, he is start­ing to see some mo­men­tum.

Over­all, CWC re­port­ed earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est, tax­es, de­pre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­sa­tion of US$427 mil­lion and has raised its cost-sav­ings tar­get to US$125 mil­lion from US$85 mil­lion.

"We re­main on track with our three-year plan and are con­fi­dent our busi­ness mod­el will de­liv­er sig­nif­i­cant long-term share­hold­er val­ue cre­ation," he said.

"We are al­so rolling out high-speed da­ta net­works in our mar­kets and passed an ad­di­tion­al 33,400 homes with 832 kilo­me­tres of fi­bre dur­ing the half whilst up­grad­ing 53,000 cus­tomers in Bar­ba­dos from lega­cy net­works.

"We are al­so ex­cit­ed to have se­cured ex­clu­sive Pre­mier League foot­ball rights from 2016/17 to 2018/19, which we will car­ry on our new chan­nel, Flow Sports Net­work, set to launch in the third quar­ter."

Bent­ley said a deal with Lib­er­ty Glob­al Plc would help both com­pa­nies add scale in the Caribbean which is high-growth, low-pen­e­tra­tion re­gion for smart­phones and broad­band con­nec­tions. He said there was no over­lap in the op­er­a­tions of the two com­pa­nies in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean but de­clined fur­ther com­ment on the sta­tus of the talks with Lib­er­ty.

He said for the first half of the year to March 31, 2016, CWC will con­tin­ue to fo­cus on the in­te­gra­tion of Colum­bus. The com­pa­ny has al­ready launched the uni­fied Flow brand in Bar­ba­dos, Ja­maica, Cay­man, St Kitts and Nevis and T&T and has re­port­ed "ear­ly cross sell­ing suc­cess."