‘We were quite fortunate last year’
THE COMPANY took a beating when its tourism-based and some corporate clients shuttered their operations due to coronavirus restrictions.
“All our enterprise customers – the villas, large and boutique hotels – closed and we had to work with those customers. We had to write off a lot of the debt of those companies. That segment represents a significant part of our revenue in terms of business to business,” he said.
The company was, however, able to ride the tide and recoup some of the lost revenue, Price said, while declining to give greater details on this or future plans for growth.
“We were quite fortunate last year. We grew year-on-year from 2019 to 2020, even though we lost a ton in terms of small businesses, the hospitality and BPO sector closing. While those revenues fell initially, towards the latter part of the year, they started to pick back up. We are still not where we need to be, but we have been fortunate,” he said.
RETAINED ALL EMPLOYEES
Despite the challenges, the company was also able to keep “every single employee in a job, no matter their role, even those through third-party contractors”, the country manager said of his 3,000-member team.
Four years ago, the company also “drew the line in the sand” regarding its older copper technology and has been replacing these cables with fibre technology to “create access for underserved homes”, which it sees as “key towards continuing our growth”, Price said.
“Anything that we built or replaced, we did so with fibre,” he said, noting a US$65-million spend on capital investments.
“Over the past three years, we have averaged US$60 million in terms of investment in the network. For 2018 to 2020, we spent some $180 million on mobile technology, which is the core, in terms of switching and upgrades, new cell sites and transitioning the entire network from 3G to LTE and now LTE Advance,” he said, adding the company is continuing the investment in adding fibre on additional routes.
Price said the company plans to continue its expansion of LTE capacity this year “because it is the most affordable way for most people in innercity and rural areas to get connectivity”.