International communications company Columbus has accelerated its Barbados investments, is likely to be pumping millions of dollars more into the Barbados economy, and is on the verge of hiring more workers.
Last week, as his company celebrated one year of its Flow brand in Barbados, Columbus Barbados managing director Niall Sheehy told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY it was a “phenomenal” last 12 months and he expected the next 12 to be even better.
Speaking during an interview, he said having set out to invest $140 million in its Barbados operation, Columbus had already “spent $100 million of it” and was “currently recruiting” another 30 employees on top of the 225 workers now on its payroll.
Sheehy also reported that while the company had originally planned to build its needed infrastructure over four years, “we will probably do it in less than two years and that’s because we have seen such a huge demand”.
“We [said] ‘why wait and spend the money next year or in 2016 [when] we can spend it now?’. We are confident in the business here, we feel that we actually have a big part to play in helping Barbados grow as an economy, so we are very very happy with the investment here,” he said.
“We are in a fortunate position, we [parent company Columbus Communications] just raised US$1.25 billion on the bond market, so we have access to funds.”
To accommodate its expanding staff in one location, while also catering to its customer base, Columbus acquired the former Orange Mall in Warrens and is now expanding it with the hope of occupying it no later than October this year. This “tens of millions of dollars” investment was on top of the $140 million earmarked for Barbados.
All of this was the result of a plan to satisfy demand for information technology services in Barbados, he explained.
“Some of the objectives we would have set for ourselves was that there are roughly 95 000 to 100 000 homes in Barbados and we had planned that by the end of 2013 to have serviced as close to 25 000 homes as possible, but in actual fact by the end of 2013 we finished at around 50 000. So we more than doubled what we said we would do in terms of the construction of our network, and we have continued that acceleration into 2014,” he said.
“From a customer subscriber base, we significantly exceeded what we had anticipated we would bring on as well and we were pleasantly surprised by the pent up desire and demand for our product and it did us a month or two to readjust what our plan was. There was such a demand for our services that we actually had to bring on about four times the amount of staff required to do installations than we had originally anticipated.
“When I looked at everything we set out to achieve in 2013 as an organisation we more than achieved all of them and in fact significantly over achieved and it’s been a very very positive experience down here for us.”