The Tribune

By NATARIO MCKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) expects to “ramp up” its franchise initiative in the 2013 first quarter, its vice-president of branding and marketing telling Tribune Business it would be looking at more than 35 franchise opportunities over the next 18-24 months.

Speaking with this newspaper at the Exuma Business Outlook conference, Marlon Johnson said BTC’s first franchise in Grand Bahama was off to a solid start.

“Our first franchisee is off to a pretty solid start, and we are very impressed with the numbers he is doing. We are getting very good feedback from the customers,” Mr Johnson said.

“We’re off to a good start.We’re still perfecting our model, and that’s one of the things we wanted to do, open it as a pilot, work out the kinks, make sure our supply chains and process are fine, and we really hope to ramp up activity in the New Year.

“I think over the next 18-24 months a lot more energy is going to be put into the franchise model, and in different forms. Some forms will be full stores like the one in Grand Bahama, and others will be smaller operations like a store within a store or an appendage to existing stores.

“Our goal is to look at more than 35 franchise opportunities of different sizes and types across the country, beginning in January, over the next 18 -24 months. It’s exciting for us because you’re moving from just creating employees to creating employers. There is keen interest in it. We just haven’t formalised the application process as yet, but we are going to be looking to deepening our partnerships throughout the community.”

Mr Johnson said BTC’s retail roll-out was also going well. “We have completed probably 10, and that’s an amazing feat. It’s an extraordinarily ambitious project, and we expect to have a very exciting Christmas,” he added.

Regarding the company’s plans for a Long Term Evolution network (LTE), Mr Johnson said: “LTE, what they called Long-Term Evolution, is the next generation of mobile speeds there is. We are one of the few jurisdictions in the region that actually has 4G, and we will be among the first outside of North America, in this hemisphere, that will have 4G LTE.

“It triples the speed of 4G, and persons with LTE handsets will be able to move, surf and navigate at speeds faster than most landline connections.

“We are looking forward to rolling that out. We have made a commitment to the regulator by virtue of getting the license, that once we kick off we hope to have 75 per cent of the population covered in 18 months. By the middle of next year we should be to the point where we start to deploy commercially.”