The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Telecommunications Company's (BTC) chief executive said yesterday he was "cautiously optimistic" over the outcome of impending talks between the head of its 51 per cent majority owner and Prime Minister Perry Christie.

Tony Rice, the London-based Cable & Wireless Communications' (CWC) chief executive, is set to meet with Mr Christie soon. The meeting will come after the Prime Minister again stated that his administration remains committed to "exploring all lawful means" to recover majority ownership of BTC from CWC.

Speaking with Tribune Business following the announcement of rate reductions to the company's post-paid cellular packages, Geoff Housto said: "I'm cautiously optimistic. I would not like to try and preempt or predict how that discussion is going to go, but simply to state that we are here to build a positive working relationship with whomever is in government, and that we are here primarily to do the best we can for our Bahamian customers. Hopefully, by focusing on developing that good customer experience, we will facilitate good returns for all the shareholders of BTC."

Addressing BTC's performance thus far, Mr Houston said: "BTC is still a work in progress, so I would never try and declare success in that we have achieved everything we wanted to achieve.

"I feel we have got to grips with a very big agenda that we needed to get on top of very quickly in the first year, so we could work the restructuring, which was quite painful in many areas.

"We're in the next phase of that. We are now bringing in some new people into the business. That's gone a little better than expected. We have gotten on top of a lot of our network challenges. The technology is the one that has become more complex than the people challenge, which wasn't how we thought it would go; we thought it would be the reverse. A lot of that speaks to the current state of the technology that is here at BTC and the huge amount of change we had to address."

Mr Houston said the company was actively looking to bring in Bahamians to drive the business, with its aim being to keep BTC a predominately Bahamian company.

He added: "It always will be our ambition to keep BTC predominantly as a Bahamian company. We came out of a very tricky restructuring over the last 12 months, but on the back of that it has also created opportunity for bringing some new skills into the business. We are predominantly looking at new skills coming in to sales, marketing, product management and working in the new stores."

Mr Houston added: "Our commitment is always to look first for Bahamian talent locally, even if that means we have to take more of a developmental approach. We are going to make that investment to train and develop. We are actively looking to bring in Bahamian people to lead and drive the business. We are actively recruiting Bahamian talent into the company.

"I think over the last six months we brought in about 40 people - Bahamians. The number of foreigners are actually working for our suppliers. We have a very small number of active full-time employees who are foreigners, and I would suggest today that 97 per cent plus of the workforce is Bahamian."