The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas Telecommunications Company’s (BTC) revenues increased by 6 percent year-over-year for the 2022 first quarter as the carrier continued its steady recovery from the lows caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Bahamian carrier’s ultimate parent, Liberty Latin America (LiLAC), unveiling its results for the three months to end-March 2022, disclosed that BTC enjoyed a $2.7m increase in top-line income for the period as this rose to $47.7m compared to $45m during the 2021 first quarter.

However, subscriber growth proved hard to come by. On the mobile business, where BTC remains locked in fierce competition with its Aliv rival, total customer numbers fell by 2,900 compared to year-end 2021. The carrier, which remains 49 percent owned by the Government, lost 1,700 pre-paid customers and 1,200 from the higher-margin post-paid segment during the three months to end-March 2022.

As a result, BTC’s total mobile subscriber base declined by 1.6 percent during the 2022 first quarter, falling to 173,500 from 176,400 at year-end 2021. As at end-March, the mobile incumbent still has 141,400 pre-paid customers and 32,100 post-paid clients. This contrasts sharply with the end to 2021, when 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.

Subscriber gains in BTC’s other business lines were modest during the 2022 first quarter. While the carrier added 200 TV, and 700 Internet, customers over that period this was largely negated by the loss of 700 fixed-line telephone subscribers. All in all, BTC lost 1,400 fixed-line “customer relationships”.

This continues the trend set late last year, when BTC lost 2,900 “revenue generating units” or customer relationships during the 2021 fourth quarter. Then, Internet and TV subscribers declined by 1,200 and 100, respectively, while fixed-line phone subscribers also fell by some 1,600.

Andre Foster, BTC’s chief executive, told Tribune Business in an interview earlier this year 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.”