Just months af­ter com­plet­ing its ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al, Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Plc (CWC) has an­nounced that its group rev­enue is up four per cent to US$1.8 bil­lion for the year end­ed March 31.

The com­pa­ny said this strong per­for­mance re­flects strate­gic progress over the year, in­clud­ing a 7 per cent in­crease in earn­ings be­fore in­ter­est, tax­es, de­pre­ci­a­tion and amor­ti­za­tion (EBIT­DA) of US$585 mil­lion and a suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed US$100 mil­lion cost re­duc­tion plan.

With the Colum­bus ac­qui­si­tion com­plet­ed on March 31, CWC said in­te­gra­tion was un­der­way

Com­ment­ing on the re­sults, Phil Bent­ley, Chief Ex­ec­u­tive of CWC, de­scribed 2014 as "a year of trans­for­ma­tion and growth."

"We cre­at­ed a new se­nior ex­ec­u­tive team op­er­at­ing out of our new Mi­a­mi hub. We de­vel­oped a new vi­sion and strat­e­gy for the group, backed by our US$1 bil­lion Project Mar­lin in­vest­ment pro­gramme. We be­gan to ex­e­cute a per­for­mance im­prove­ment plan and de­liv­er our strat­e­gy to grow.

"The team's hard work has start­ed to de­liv­er re­sults as we saw top-line growth for the first time since de­merg­er and EBIT­DA mar­gins im­prove." he said. Bent­ley said the Colum­bus ac­qui­si­tion "trans­forms CWC, and is one that will ac­cel­er­ate the de­liv­ery of our strat­e­gy across the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca."

He added: "Colum­bus is an out­stand­ing busi­ness, backed by a state-of-the-art ter­res­tri­al and sub­ma­rine fi­bre net­work. Our com­ple­men­tary fixed line and mo­bile net­works and our fo­cus on pro­vid­ing the best cus­tomer ser­vice, bring­ing to­geth­er the skills and ca­pa­bil­i­ties of over 7,500 team mem­bers, will po­si­tion us bet­ter to serve our cus­tomers and im­prove the ICT in­fra­struc­ture of the com­mu­ni­ties in which we op­er­ate."

Bent­ley said CWC be­com­ing a bet­ter com­pa­ny–a gen­uine quad play op­er­a­tor, with strong mar­ket shares in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can mar­kets and good long-term growth prospects across con­sumer, busi­ness so­lu­tions, and net­works busi­ness­es. "Over­all we are pleased with the re­sults fol­low­ing the first year of our new strat­e­gy, but there re­mains much to do to re­alise the full po­ten­tial of the busi­ness," he said.