Just months af­ter TSTT record­ed a loss of more than $500 mil­lion for the fi­nan­cial year end­ed March 2014, act­ing CEO George Hill says is con­fi­dent the com­pa­ny can earn prof­its of more than $100 mil­lion by the end of the fi­nan­cial year

Hill an­nounced a re­cov­ery in the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­ny's bot­tom line dur­ing a re­cent break­fast meet­ing with busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy jour­nal­ists at TSTT's Ed­ward Street of­fice. He said at the end of the first quar­ter for the cur­rent fi­nan­cial year, the com­pa­ny was on tar­get with its five-year strate­gic plan for fi­nan­cial and op­er­a­tional mile­stones.

The strate­gic plan iden­ti­fied in­fra­struc­ture, au­toma­tion and or­gan­i­sa­tion trans­for­ma­tion as key pil­lars for mov­ing the com­pa­ny to­wards strong prof­itabil­i­ty through tar­get­ed growth and op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cies."When we look at what we are try­ing to achieve based on our strate­gic plan, we took a de­ci­sion to ab­sorb the ex­cep­tion­al one-off costs in the first year which re­sult­ed in the loss, with the un­der­stand­ing that if we stayed on plan, we will be­gin to see tan­gi­ble op­er­a­tional and fi­nan­cial im­prove­ments from year two of the plan," Hill said.

He said unau­dit­ed re­sults of TSTT's first quar­ter per­for­mance show that rev­enue growth and cost re­duc­tions are in line with the plan.The act­ing CEO said an in­te­gral part of the com­pa­ny's or­gan­i­sa­tion­al trans­for­ma­tion is the vol­un­tary sep­a­ra­tion pro­gramme."It was a nec­es­sary one-time cost which will stream­line the com­pa­ny, re­sult­ing in greater ef­fi­cien­cy and prof­its in the fu­ture," said Hill, adding that the com­pa­ny treat­ed the sep­a­ra­tion of its em­ploy­ees as more than just a mat­ter of tak­ing a cheque and leav­ing.

"The sep­a­ra­tion of some­one from an in­sti­tu­tion must be treat­ed with dig­ni­ty and re­spect. Some of the em­ploy­ees leav­ing have any­where be­tween 2- 40 years of ser­vice, so each month, we host a farewell re­cep­tion for staff leav­ing in that month to thank them, be­cause we recog­nise the im­por­tance of their ser­vice and the things they have done for the com­pa­ny."

He said TSTT has been able to fol­low through with its com­mit­ment to im­prov­ing its net­work in­fra­struc­ture which in­cludes chang­ing out parts of its cop­per plant to fi­bre op­tics to max­imise the util­i­ty of the com­pa­ny's core IP net­work. Ma­jor fi­bre op­tic and wire­less broad­band projects have been put in mo­tion.

Un­der­served com­mu­ni­ties will be able to re­ceive wire­less broad­band ac­cess us­ing LTE (Long-Term Evo­lu­tion) Tech­nol­o­gy. Wire­less broad­band in com­mu­ni­ties such as in San­gre Chiq­ui­to, Ran­cho Que­ma­do, Cheey­ou and Gold­en Lane al­lows the Com­pa­ny to bet­ter cater for the needs of cus­tomers now and in the fu­ture.Sev­er­al projects are be­ing rolled out as the year pro­gress­es and Hill ex­plained that the plan in­cludes rais­ing $1.5 bil­lion in fi­nanc­ing.

"The strength of the com­pa­ny's bal­ance sheet was ev­i­dent from the num­ber of com­pa­nies that ex­pressed se­ri­ous in­ter­est in bro­ker­ing this fi­nanc­ing which we hope to con­clude in Au­gust," he said.