Cable & Wireless seems to be going through a period of rebirth having ceded a great deal of their territory to the completion in past years, as the parent company chopped and changed top management. They are now growing again with pretty strong top-line gains with a stable management team.
There was much growth in the financial year to March and since then the industry has seen much change, with number portability, Flow being acquired by Cable & Wireless and Digicel acquiring Sportsmax.
“We gained around 20,000 new prepaid mobile customers resulting from number portability almost the same as left, revenue for the average new customer is more than the ones we lost” Garfield Sinclair, Chief Executive officer of Cable & Wireless (C&W) stated in a presentation to shareholders and some C&W senior staff at Wednesday’s annual general meeting of the company. Sinclair also stated “we gained four more postpaid customers to each one lost as a result of number portability”.
In a wide ranging presentation at the AGM the C&W CEO stated that the merger of the Flow and C&W has many challenges, none more so than the integration of the staff. The physical plant with differing technologies also pose challenges and with take time to be fully complete. But the CEO stated that they were making progress on all fronts as he commended the Human Resource team in the work they have done in the staff integration so far.
By October we would have completed the upgrading and expansion of our 4G network system on the south coast of the island to accommodate increasing demand by customers and by November that on the north coast, should be complete.
“We now have almost 900,000 cell phone customers, 250,000 landlines and 80,000 data only customers”, Sinclairstated. At the end of the fiscal year to March C&W indicated that the cell phone numbers were around 820,000 but Sinclair confirmed to IC Insider that the numbers are now at 875,000. The annual report stated that in the “peak season Christmas a record 65,000 mobile customers were added to the network”. The 2015 numbers suggest a continuation of the strong gains being made in the acquisition of mobile customers. The name change from LIME to Flow is likely to enhance the prospects for increased mobile customers. The continued growth augurs well for increased revenues and the company’s move to restart generating positive profit.
“Investors have to judge us on the EBITDA not on accounting profits that is the basis used in our industry”, Sinclair said. In this regard he said that by the end of the current fiscal year EBITDA that was at 20% of revenues in 2015 should be at 30 percent. This would work out at around $7.5 billion assuming revenues continue to grow at the 2015 pace on a standalone basis and would result in an absolute profit for the company, the first for several years. In the June quarter EBITDA rose a very strong 82 percent, with net results seeing a sharp fall to a loss of just $303 million, from a loss of $712 million in 2014 as revenues grew 13 percent to $5.45 billion, for the June 2015 quarter, aided by a 17 percent growth in mobile subscribers and 27 percent increased mobile revenues. Operating expenses were static at $4 billion but finance cost was up to $1.1 billion from $962 million in 2014, depreciation was down and amortization up.
EBITDA while an important measure, especially in the expansion phase it cannot be the sole target, ultimately investors want a return on investment and net profit ultimately is the most important measure so that dividends can be paid.
While there were few details of the merger with the Flow operations, that is expected to be a big boost to the system with more revenues and lower cost with some of the cost squeezed out from the elimination of duplications.