Ca­ble & Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tion an­nounced plans to leave the UK af­ter 140 years as it re­turned to prof­it af­ter of­fload­ing busi­ness­es in gam­bling hubs Mona­co and Macau.The com­pa­ny, which record­ed full-year pre-tax prof­it of $35m (�23m) last year com­pared to a loss of $117m in the pre­vi­ous year, plans to move its head­quar­ters to Flori­da in the Unit­ed States as part of a re­struc­tur­ing of the busi­ness.

Tony Rice, the chief ex­ec­u­tive, said the com­pa­ny would re­main British but the move would bring it clos­er to its core op­er­a­tions in Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.Rev­enues slid four per cent, how­ev­er, to $1.9bn on the tough eco­nom­ic cli­mate in its main mar­kets, part­ly caused by a con­tin­u­ing slump in tourism in the Caribbean."In cer­tain mar­kets at least that's not go­ing to go away," said Rice.

He said it had been a "mile­stone year" for the com­pa­ny, which sells fixed line and mo­bile net­work ser­vices. It sold its con­trol­ling stake in Macau's largest tele­coms op­er­a­tor to state-owned Chi­na Tele­com in Jan­u­ary for $750m.That fol­lowed the dis­pos­al in De­cem­ber of its Mona­co and Is­lands di­vi­sion, which served the Falk­land Is­lands and Isle of Man among oth­ers, to Bahrai­ni group Batel­co for $680m.

Rice said the sales had giv­en CWC the "struc­tur­al co­her­ence" it sought af­ter de­merg­ing from Ca­ble & Wire­less World­wide, the British op­er­a­tion bought by Voda­fone (LSE: VOD.L - news) in June."The group is now fo­cused on a sin­gle re­gion with low pen­e­tra­tion for da­ta ser­vices and strong growth po­ten­tial where we have scale and mar­ket lead­er­ship," he said.The group is try­ing to ex­pand da­ta ser­vices as its tra­di­tion­al voice tele­coms rev­enues are de­clin­ing.

It al­so aims to strip out a fur­ther $100m in costs with­in two years with a new sin­gle man­age­ment struc­ture and IT sys­tems run from new op­er­a­tions head­quar­ters in Flori­da."We're fun­da­men­tal­ly re-en­gi­neer­ing the busi­ness as an op­er­at­ing tel­co rather than a port­fo­lio of busi­ness­es," said Rice.The group is look­ing at ac­qui­si­tions in Span­ish-speak­ing Cen­tral Amer­i­ca and Caribbean, where GDP growth is stronger than in Eng­lish-speak­ing is­lands.