Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph (GTT), Damien Blackburn says the COVID-19 pandemic “significantly” impacted the company’s revenue, particularly that of the mobile sector.
Blackburn made this disclosure on Thursday during an interview with Stabroek News.
He said the company started to feel the impact during the early stage of the pandemic when businesses were closed as part of the emergency measures.
“…It’s very simple. If you can’t buy the top-up and you can’t buy the data plans, then we don’t earn any revenue,” Blackburn said.
As a result of this, he said customers managed their communication more wisely. “….So it lessens the demand for some of services of mobile users. It had a big impact on our revenues,” Blackburn noted.
This, according to Blackburn placed GTT in a position to make some “tough” decisions in order to survive.
“Thankfully, when things eased up a bit and actually the community and the government and everyone involved got to know a bit more about the specific nature of the threat…we saw a return. I won’t say back to normal but back to more normal around mobile revenues,” the CEO explained.
As it relates to the broadband services, Blackburn said the demand did skyrocket with learning being done virtually and many working from their homes.
“These networks in homes were engineered more to upload data or to download data. And when you are making video calls you are uploading data. And so we weren’t earning any more money, particularly or materially, any more revenue,” he noted.
However, Blackburn said this caused the company to experience a huge engineering cost. “We had to start an engineering network to cope with all this uploading of video…we are still incurring right now,” he said.
As of now 750 persons are employed by GTT, down by hundreds from the early days of the company.
He pointed out that GTT is part of the US Virgin Islands-based Atlantic Tele-Network (ATN) group which operates in other markets and around 100 of the 750 persons work on activities for those external markets.
“So we have for example a call centre operation that answers calls for a US business, a Bermuda business, a US Virgin Islands business. So they answer calls. We actually bought jobs here and we want to build off that,” he further explained.
The recently appointed CEO pointed out that the company is aiming to expand. He specifically said that downsizing is not part of this plan.
“So in terms of the future, things are moving fast here. The future is about rebranding and retooling our team. Not downsizing our team…We just created more jobs in the call centre….This is not about downsizing people,” he said.
According to Blackburn, all this is happening at a time when the country’s oil and gas sector is blooming.
He said GTT has a lot of customers in this sector and is ready to help them to grow and realize all the potential Guyana is expecting.
“We are growing with them as they grow, as our sector grows and we pledge that we will continue growing….If they want to do things we are here to respond to their requirements and needs. Communication is critical in most sectors, very critical in oil and gas and we know we have a special responsibility with those customers,” Blackburn stated.
