The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) 2021 full-year revenues were $17.4m below pre-COVID levels despite representing a 4.9 percent year-over-year gain on 2020.

The Bahamian carrier’s ultimate parent, in 2021 full-year and fourth quarter results released yesterday, disclosed that BTC’s top-line income remained 8.4 percent below 2019’s pre-pandemic $207.3m, standing at $189.9m.

The latter, though, represented a more-than $8m improvement on the $181.1m in revenue that BTC generated in 2020. That increase will likely have been driven by the easing of COVID-19 lockdowns and border restrictions, and the economy’s gradual re-opening, which will have aided increased tourist roaming revenues as well as Bahamian communications activity.

Liberty Latin America (LiLAC) does not publish details on BTC’s profitability, or that of any of its subsidiaries, which makes it hard to evaluate the Bahamian company’s overall financial performance. However, BTC, which saw its long-lived assets decline by 5.6 percent year-over-year, from $342.4m to $323.9m at end-2021, recently paid out $50m to its shareholders.

This was revealed in the Government’s recent update for the first six months of its 2021-2022 fiscal year, which confirmed that the Public Treasury received an unexpected “$24.5m BTC dividend payment in December”.

Extrapolating based on the Government’s 49 percent BTC stake, it would appear that Cable & Wireless Communications (CWC) would have received a similar $24.5m payment given that it, too, holds a controlling 49 percent equity interest in the carrier. The remaining $1m would have been received by the foundation that holds the remaining 2 percent ownership interest in BTC.

The upshot is that $50m was taken out of the company as a capital return to its shareholders even though revenues have yet to recover to pre-COVID levels. However, BTC was able to reverse the post-liberalisation decline in its mobile subscriber numbers by adding a total of 1,300 new customers in the 2021 fourth quarter.

Some 900 new pre-paid, and 400 post-paid, subscribers were added during the three months to end-December 2021, according to figures published by LiLAC. BTC closed the year with some 176,400 mobile customers, divided into 143,100 pre-paid subscribers and 33,300 of the post-paid variety.

Yet, while the mobile front provided better news, BTC also lost some 2,900 “revenue generating units” or customers in other areas of its business over the same three months. Internet and TV subscribers declined by 1,200 and 100, respectively, during the 2021 fourth quarter, while fixed-line phone subscribers also fell by some 1,600.

This dropped BTC’s total non-mobile customer base to some 72,400 subscribers at year-end 2021. This was made up of 33,000 fixed-line phone clients, some 30,000 Internet subscribers and 9,400 TV customers.

Andre Foster, BTC’s chief executive, told Tribune Business in a recent interview that the carrier plans “to become a real attacker” in the battle for market share with ambitions to build-out its new network by end-2023.

He pledged that all subscribers across The Bahamas will enjoy faster, better quality broadband Internet and TV services when it completes the transition from its legacy copper infrastructure to fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) within the next 23 months.

“It’s progressing well,” he said of the switch. “I wish I could say I was exactly where I want to be, meaning we have 100 percent of our network converted to fibre-to-the-home. We’ve made a commitment to have fibre-to-the-home available throughout the archipelago by 2023.”

While conceding that more remote locations in the Family Islands will likely be serviced by wireless, as opposed to fibre, technology, Mr Foster said The Bahamas would be “fully FTTH in the main islands” by year-end next year as BTC and its parent entities continue to invest millions of dollars in the network’s transformation.

“Our goal is to be off the copper network by 2023. That’s a big focus for us, and why we’re building it as quickly as we can,” he told this newspaper. The BTC chief also revealed that BTC plans to take the offensive in the battle for market share with Cable Bahamas and Aliv, asserting that 2021 had seen it build a platform to make gains in this area during the current calendar year.

“We are very focused on growing our fixed footprint, and we did a fairly good job in achieving some objectives around that in 2021, so we feel very confident that we are rolling back to BTC a strong base of fixed customers,” Mr Foster told Tribune Business.

“We feel post-paid mobile, we have done very well with that. On the pre-paid side I would say we are feeling good about our future there. We do have some great things coming up that will really bring back some subscribers in that area. We feel good about where we ended 2021. We feel there’s an opportunity to become a real attacker, retain our customer base, and we’ll see more of that happen for us in the future.”