With around $34 million in net profit and $293 million in revenue in 2005, the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) has demonstrated that it can operate in a competitive environment, the company’s head suggested while appearing as a guest on a popular radio talk show yesterday.
Leon Williams, acting president and CEO of BTC, declined to comment specifically on why the government has made moves to privatize the company, responding that it was a matter for the shareholders instead. He said working with privatization is “outside his field of endeavour.”
However, he did comment that technology, skills and talent could be bought, suggesting that the company can integrate the essential elements to make the operation thrive more successfully.
When asked on Love 97ﾒs Issues of the Day programme about the benefit of privatization Mr. Williams said: “My challenge is to demonstrate to the Bahamian public that Bahamians can run a telecommunications company today in a competitive environment and [it can] be profitable.”
He said further that the companyﾒs engineers who maintain the network and even the technicians in Family Islands have expertise that are on par with anyone in the Caribbean region and anywhere else.
“To me, technical skills is not the question,” Mr. Williams said.
“We have proven that over and over going way to back to when Barrett Russell and George Moss and those guys came back from school and become AGM. You go to Eight Mile Rock where we installed the first submarine cable and analog cable in 1972, it was engineered by Bahamians and installed by Bahamians.”
The process to find a strategic partner for the company – then the Bahamas Telecommunications Corporation [BaTelco] – was started in March 1999 when the government contracted Deutsche Bank.
Minister of State for Finance James Smith who continues to oversee the companyﾒs privatization effort said in a Bahama Journal interview that he is hopeful that the government will still be able to sell BTC before the end of this present term in office.
“If it’s to be sold at all, it should be sold before that,” he said.
Minister Smith said the government is in talks with an international group, which has carried out similar projects all over the world and was expected to soon decided on the Blue Water groupﾒs offer.
Recruiting new blood, new capital, new ideas and a new culture were viewed as critical in the process.
The Government of The Bahamas has been trying to sell BTC since the late 1990s with the Ingraham Administration starting the process that came to a halt several years later under the Christie Administration.
During the recent budget debate in the House of Assembly, Prime Minister Perry Christie said the FNM government spent more than $140 million on failed privatization with nothing to show for it. He indicated that at the end of the day, the PLP government decided that the offers it had received were not worth selling BTC.
Works and Utilities Minister Bradley Roberts reported that BTC had a “positive year” in 2005. Total assets were $508.7 million compared to $470.3 million in 2004. BTC’s net profit for the first six months ending June 30, 2006 in round numbers was $26 million, he reported.
By: Tameka Lundy, The Bahama Journal
