Ca­ble & Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, (C&W), which op­er­ates the Flow brand in T&T, suf­fered a re­duc­tion of video sub­scribers in this coun­try which it blames on in­creased com­pe­ti­tion and a chal­leng­ing macro­eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment.

The com­pa­ny, a lead­ing telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions op­er­a­tor in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca, in just re­leased first quar­ter re­sults for 2016/17, said while on the video front 2,000 sub­scribers were added, this was dri­ven main­ly by growth in Pana­ma. There were de­clines in video sub­scribers in the Caribbean, par­tic­u­lar­ly in T&T and Bar­ba­dos.

The com­pa­ny said it is "work­ing to mit­i­gate these fac­tors by re-vamp­ing our prod­uct of­fer­ing in these mar­kets", such as the re­cent launch of the Flow Sports Pre­mier chan­nel fea­tur­ing HD con­tent and ex­clu­sive­ly to Flow's cus­tomers across the re­gion.

C&W's op­er­at­ing and fi­nan­cial high­lights for the quar­ter were as fol­lows"

�2 De­liv­ered 14,000 sub­scriber ad­di­tions in Q1 2016/17, as com­pared to 4,000 adds in pri­or-year pe­ri­od

�2 2,000 video ad­di­tions dri­ven by its DTH busi­ness in Pana­ma

�2 5,000 broad­band in­ter­net and 6,000 tele­pho­ny sub­scriber adds, sup­port­ed by net­work in­vest­ment

�2 Mo­bile da­ta pen­e­tra­tion up sev­en per­cent­age points year on year to 53 per cent

The com­pa­ny re­port­ed: "In our mo­bile busi­ness, which rep­re­sents rough­ly 40 per cent of our to­tal rev­enue, the to­tal base in­creased by 148,000 sub­scribers or four per cent year-over-year to 3.7 mil­lion. This per­for­mance was led by a 21 per cent in­crease in sub­scribers who pur­chased a da­ta plan. Mo­bile da­ta pen­e­tra­tion now stands at 53 per cent our to­tal mo­bile sub­scriber base, up two per­cent­age points from 51 per cent at March 31, 2016.

"Turn­ing to our fixed-line busi­ness, we added 14,000 sub­scribers dur­ing the quar­ter, with year-over-year im­prove­ments across all three prod­ucts. We re­port­ed 5,000 broad­band net ad­di­tions in Q1 2016/17, as we in­creased pen­e­tra­tion over our im­proved net­works."

C&W said it is in­vest­ing to dri­ve fu­ture per­for­mance, in­clud­ing:

�2 Com­plet­ed roll-out of uni­fied Flow brand across re­gion

�2 Ac­ti­vat­ed LTE-Ad­vanced net­work in Cay­man pro­vid­ing peak through­put > 75Mbps

�2 Launched fixed bun­dles in Trinidad & To­ba­go

�2 Strength­ened B2B port­fo­lio with launch of cloud-based call cen­tre so­lu­tion

�2 De­ploy­ing new ad­vanced video plat­forms in Pana­ma and the Ba­hamas

C&W is part of Lib­er­ty Glob­al, the world's largest in­ter­na­tion­al ca­ble tele­vi­sion com­pa­ny.