The government is receiving almost double the revenue from the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC) as a 49 percent owner than it did when it owned the entire company, BTC CEO Geoff Houston said yesterday.
“In 2010, BTC reported annual net earnings of $12.8 million,” Houston said.
“And since privatization we paid dividends to government of $8.8 million with another $20 million coming this year. So you can say we’ve almost doubled the returns to government in a 12-month period.”
Houston addressed Rotarians at the Nassau Sunrise Club’s early morning meeting at the British Colonial Hilton Hotel.
“We feel at CWC that we have brought a lot of benefit to the business,” he said, while outlining achievements since Cable and Wireless Communications (CWC) purchased a 51 percent stake in BTC in April 2011.
Houston said BTC has benefited tremendously from CWC’s procurement power and that has helped to turn the business around.
“If I look at a lot of the operating support contracts that we have, we’ve renegotiated all of those, and we’ve actually reduced our operating costs by about $15 million to $20 million by using our existing prices that we have with those same suppliers,” he said.
“So that procurement power, that kind of know-how we’ve been able to bring to BTC to reduce the cost there.
The Ingraham administration planned to offer nine percent of BTC shares to the public. It is unclear whether the Christie-led government intends to follow through on this plan. Prime Minister Perry Christie has started talks on getting a majority stake in BTC back.
