By Al Edwards, Business Co-ordinatorCELLULAR SERVICE provider, Digicel is to offer a landline and data service to Jamaica firstly to business customers and then the general public.
The company will be testing this service in the Cayman Islands before rolling it out in Jamaica later this year, Digicel's chief executive officer Seamus Lynch said.
"We are now looking at employing an alternative submarine cable operation to offer fixed line services," Mr. Lynch said. "We will be targeting sections of the market before undertaking a full scale service to the public."
The new service is intended to offer an alternative to that provided by Cable & Wireless (C&W).
"Digicel is laying the gauntlet down," Mr. Lynch said. "You will see all the banks and the business sector moving over to us." If the service goes well in the Cayman Islands, Digicel will launch this service in Jamaica, "at the end of this year," he said. "Businesses will have access to high speed local and international connectivity."
The installation contract will go to the Lewis Group (Ja) Ltd. The Lewis Group has done land- line installation for customer premises in Bermuda, St. Lucia, Antigua and for TSTT in Trinidad.
The Lewis Group (Ja) is headed by CEO and President David Eason and has its headquarters in New Jersey, United States with offices in Trinidad and Barbados.
To date Digicel has invested about US$500 million in the Caribbean. It has now rolled out its service in seven Caribbean countries, with the last being the Cayman Islands earlier this month. It next hopes to offer a service in Guyana and Suriname with it eyeing both Trinidad and Turks &Caicos later down the road.
ONE MILLION CUSTOMERS
"We now have around a million customers in Jamaica and we are still aggressively going after more," Mr. Lynch said. "We can still add another 10 or 15 per cent to that number because we believe there are still customers out there who are not getting value for money."
He said the company had re-invested "every cent" it had earned in the Caribbean region.
"Every time we take on a customer on the network we subsidise their handset normally to the tune of US$100, so there is a significant pay back on that," he said. Added to that is the cost of the network itself.
"As far as profits are concerned, we are in line with most providers who are expecting a pay back in 3 to 5 years," he said. "We are looking at coming good in that period ourselves."
LOCAL SHAREHOLDERS
When the company first came to Jamaica, "we struggled to find local partners and at the time the telecoms market was at an all time low," he said. "In all the other markets we have gone into we have taken in local shareholders."
Asked whether there are any plans to list on the stock exchange, he said, "Right now we are well capitalised and have no immediate plans to list. That's not to say we won't consider a listing in the future as we seek to finance further expansion. We are concentrating on bedding down our operations. We have gone through 7 launches in less than three years, with 6 in less than a year."
Speaking on its customer cellular customer base in both the Cayman Islands and Barbados he said that it was significantly ahead of initial projections but would not be drawn on numbers.
Addressing the arrival of AT&T on the Jamaican scene he said that both the level of service and customer care would significantly improve in Jamaica.
TRANSPARENCY
"We will not be put off at all but we will be looking for transparency and providing value for money," he said. "We paid just under US$50 million on our licence three years ago so we would still see a value on our licence of around US$37 to US$40 million. We are the greatest proponents of competition-it benefits everyone.
"AT&T have taken a different approach from us in the Caribbean. If we have taken 50 to 60 per cent of each market they have taken around 3 per cent. We are not afraid of these big companies. More often than not the bigger you are the slower and more cumbersome you are to react to market conditions. We will always remain agile and fairly flat in our organisation. There are only around four areas of management between myself and any of the guys in the Caribbean. We are passionate and focused upon delivering what is best for our customers."
Cable&Wireless currently has approximately 500,000 fixed line customers in Jamaica.
