Ca­ble&Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the mi­nor­i­ty share­hold­er in telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions provider TSTT, last week re­port­ed that its share of the af­ter-tax prof­its of the lo­cal com­pa­ny had de­clined by more than half from US$19 mil­lion (TT$121.6 mil­lion) in 2010 to US$7 mil­lion (TT$44.8 mil­lion) in 2011. Ca­ble&Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, which owns 49 per cent of TSTT, is the Lon­don-based group that owns telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­nies through­out the re­gion. Ca­ble&Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tion's share of the rev­enue al­so ex­pe­ri­enced a mar­gin­al de­cline. For the year end­ed March 2010, the group's share of TSTT's rev­enue amount­ed to US$238 mil­lion (TT$1.52 bil­lion) while its share of the lo­cal com­pa­ny's rev­enue de­clined to US$232 mil­lion (TT$1.48 bil­lion) by the end of March 2011. In its an­nu­al re­port for the year end­ed March 31, 2011, is­sued on May 25, Ca­ble&Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions al­so an­nounced that it will roll out the iPhone4, the high­ly suc­cess­ful Ap­ple phone, in its Caribbean mar­kets, in­clud­ing its joint ven­ture in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

A TSTT source said the com­pa­ny would launch the iPhone4 in the next few weeks and de­scribed the launch as "a very ex­cit­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty to bring one of the most in­no­v­a­tive prod­ucts in the world to Trinidad and To­ba­go." The of­fi­cial said that TSTT has been pre­vent­ed by Ap­ple from pro­vid­ing much pre-launch pub­lic­i­ty on the prod­uct. Asked whether TSTT would have ex­clu­sive rights to sell and ser­vice the smart phone in the lo­cal mar­ket, the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions of­fi­cial said: "It is not ex­clu­sive, but when we launch we will be the on­ly au­tho­rised Ap­ple dis­trib­u­tor of phones." Ver­i­zon, the US mo­bile provider, re­leased the iPhone4 in Feb­ru­ary. On March 2, 2011, at the iPad 2 event, Ap­ple an­nounced that they have sold 100 mil­lion iPhones world­wide and that by lever­ag­ing sol­id vol­umes and the iPhone's high sell­ing price, Ap­ple be­came the largest mo­bile hand­set ven­dor in the world, sur­pass­ing long-time leader Nokia.

Ca­ble&Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions may be hop­ing that the launch of the iPhone4 pro­vides a boost to TSTT's sag­ging re­sults.

Of TSTT's three main lines of busi­ness, it ex­pe­ri­enced de­clines in the num­ber of its mo­bile and fixed-line sub­scribers but dou­ble-dig­it growth in the num­ber of its broad­band sub­scribers. The com­pa­ny had 288,000 fixed-line sub­scribers in 2010 but this de­clined to 277,000 sub­scribers in 2011. TSTT, how­ev­er, saw a 13 per cent growth in the num­ber of its broad­band sub­scribers with those jump­ing from 82,000 in March 2010 to 93,000 in March 2011. At the end of March 2010, TSTT had 883,000 mo­bile sub­scribers but this had de­clined to 877,000 by the end of March this year. The com­pa­ny's dis­clo­sure that it had 877,000 sub­scribers at the end of March rais­es ques­tions about whether TSTT can still boast of be­ing the na­tion's num­ber one mo­bile provider. The quar­ter­ly mar­ket re­port pub­lished by the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T states that T&T had 1,839,695 mo­bile voice sub­scribers as at March 2010. This sug­gests that TSTT had 48 per cent of the lo­cal mar­ket and its bit­ter ri­val, Irish-owned Dig­i­cel, had 52 per cent of the lo­cal mo­bile mar­ket 14 months ago. At the end of 2010, the to­tal num­ber of mo­bile sub­scribers in T&T inched ahead by 2.6 per cent to close the year at 1,894,240 sub­scribers.

While TSTT has con­cen­trat­ed its mar­ket­ing might on at­tempt­ing to blunt the Dig­i­cel on­slaught, it al­so faces a threat from Flow Trinidad's in­tro­duc­tion of its triple-play pack­age of­fer­ing tele­vi­sion, In­ter­net and tele­phone ser­vices to T&T.

Ex­plain­ing the TSTT re­sults, Ca­ble&Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tion wrote in its an­nu­al re­port: "TSTT faced dif­fi­cult eco­nom­ic con­di­tions re­sult­ing in fixed line and mo­bile us­age de­clines, whilst set­tle­ment of union lit­i­ga­tion and in­creased hand­set sub­si­dies to main­tain mar­ket lead­er­ship fur­ther im­pact­ed re­sults. "We al­so saw in­creased lev­els of de­pre­ci­a­tion fol­low­ing cap­i­tal in­vest­ment in the net­work dur­ing the year."

Asked to com­ment on the TSTT re­sults, the com­pa­ny's chief fi­nan­cial of­fi­cer Rakesh Goswa­mi not­ed that 51 per cent of TSTT is owned by Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd (NEL), which is a com­pa­ny that is list­ed on the lo­cal stock mar­ket. Goswani said: "We can­not and should not com­ment on any TSTT re­sults un­til they are de­clared by NEL. "We are not al­lowed to talk about TSTT's num­bers that have not been de­clared by our par­ent com­pa­ny." NEL, which com­pris­es share­hold­ing of the State in TSTT as well as Trin­gen, Phoenix Park Gas Proces­sors, At­lantic LNG and the Na­tion­al Flour Mills, is ex­pect­ed to re­lease its March 2011 re­sults this month.