DIGICEL Chief Executive Officer Dennis O’Brien has sounded a warning to the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T), its competitor in the local cellular service sector that it is seeking to overtake the Atlantic Tele Network subsidiary as Guyana’s leading service provider within the next six months. And according to O’Brien DIGICEL is aiming to provide 96 per cent coverage of the country in the longer term.
“We want to get more than fifty per cent of the market share here and we’re not very far from that at the moment. That’s a big mountain to climb and hopefully over the next six months we’ll hit the top of that mountain,” the DIGICEL boss told Stabroek Business in an exclusive interview earlier this week.
O’Brien’s forthright pronouncement of his company’s intention to become the front runner in the local cellular market before mid next year effectively gives notice that DIGICEL intends to continue to engage in the multi-million dollar marketing battle with GT&T which “kicked off” earlier this year and which has dominated the local advertising market.
“Our other target in Guyana is to make sure that all our managers are Guya-nese. We are seeing a lot of people who have been trained in the way that DIGICEL does business coming through and we would hope that over the next six months to a year the management team would be 90 per cent Guyanese.” O’Brien said.
And according to O’Brien the company is seeking to build still further on its phenomenal success in the regional market. “If you look around the region – Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago – we are growing in nearly every country and we’re doing double digit growth in some countries.”
O’Brien told Stabroek Business that DIGICEL currently had approximately 1.8 million customers and that the company had set itself a target of securing 3 million customers “pretty quickly” and 4 million “over the next three or four years.”
Asked about the considerable success that the company’s marketing strategy has realized in Guyana and elsewhere in the region O’Brien said that DIGICEL was seeking to provide the Caribbean with “a completely new experience.”
O’Brien told Stabroek Business that DIGICEL was eyeing still further markets in the Caribbean. “There are still plenty of opportunities for us as a company to enter new markets such as Bahamas and the British Virgin Islands.” He said that there were further “pockets of opportunity” in the region and in Central America, disclosing that the company had recently made a very successful launch in El Salvador and was seeking other licensing opportunities elsewhere in that region.
“One of the disturbing things about the Caribbean is that incumbents, for decades and decades, have had an ‘it would do’ attitude to local consumers. What DIGICEL has decided to do is to change that. We want to provide a First World GSM network to potential customers here in Guyana. It’s a network that they never had before because, basically, the incumbent had no reason to invest in a network to provide the service and people were used to dropped calls and they were used to having customer care that just didn’t care. We’ve decided to change that. We want a First World mobile network here in Guyana and we are providing a First World service. If people are handing over their hard-earned cash to make phone calls we want to make sure that they have a crystal clear network,” O’Brien said.
