And, it would be good if some that increased business went the way of Digi whose revenue has declined sharply.
As we told you last night, Belize's biggest telecoms provider is cutting salaries across the board. That's on a three month provisional basis after which the company will review its position.
And a large part of that review will be based on how Belize's economy is doing. Yesterday the CEO told us that since the COVID shutdown and state of emergency, their sales of phone credits and data have dropped sharply. Now you might have thought that data sales went up because during the lockdown there were so many video calls being made, and so much streaming of YouTube and Netflix. But the CEO says most of that happened at home where users have fixed - not mobile - internet:
Ivan Tesecum
"In terms of our prepaid we have seen a falloff in double digits in terms of percentages compared to the normal day to day, in terms of revenues on the prepaid side, on the prepaid mobile side."
"In terms of the fixed network, because of our vast network that covers over 90% of the country and because we are the largest provider of broadband services, those who have to work from home or those who are doing home schooling, or home learning, we have seen an increase in traffic but remember those are fixed charges, so it's not usage based, it's a fixed charge, so we have seen again a double digit increase in traffic on the Diginet network, but that has not increased our revenues. And we have seen as well a decline in usage of the prepaid ( data) because obviously when you're home, you switch to wi-fi. For the couple weeks in May we have not seen a very vast increase in traffic, I would have expected more, so it means that there are probably a lot more who are still probably at home."
A 20% contraction is forecast for Belize's economy - and BTL expects the same for its earnings - which stood at163 million dollars last year, leading to a net profit of 17 million dollars.
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