Last night at the Biltmore, BTL held its 11th annual General Meeting. The company paid out 45% of its 20 million dollars in profits, amounting to 10 million dollars in dividends. That's about 19 cents per share - down from 23 cents the year. That works out to a return of just under 4% annually - which is better than the commercial banks - but far from the company's heyday in the 90's when it had a monopoly and paid as much as a 25% annual return.
But the 1990's are long way from 2017, when long distance communication, phone calls and text messaging have been replaced by data services such as WhatsApp and Viber.
To compete in this changing landscape, BTL's CEO told shareholders last night that the company must make a 96 million dollar investment which will keep profits in the low side for a few years:
Rochus Schreiber, BTL CEO
"We also started on a very big project, to completely replace our decades old copper network with fiber technology."
"It's a 96 million dollar investment we are making into updating the technology. It will be spent over two years and it will bring to the people in Belize the ability to experience entertainment, education, work from wherever they want with the same quality of service and the same speed as customers anywhere in the world."
"What we will see over the next two years while we are building this network is a modest growth in revenue. We expect the revenue will go up to 162 million dollars. In parallel, we will see a slight decrease in profits, as we are re-investing the profits into the new infrastructure. However, after we completed the buildout, we will see and we expect a growth in revenue to about 170 million dollars."
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