HAVING RAISED $250 million in February through a bond issue, Denis O’Brien’s Digicel mobile phone group made first use of the new funds with the acquisition of Voilà, a wireless rival in Haiti. The deal was agreed in New York last Friday.
Neither Digicel nor Voilà’s owner, US-based Trilogy International Partners, would disclose the acquisition price but information provided to bondholders indicates a sum of $97 million changed hands.
This gives Digicel a market share of about 80 per cent in Haiti, its single biggest market in terms of subscribers.
Digicel has added about 1.2 million new customers there in the past year and revenues for the three months to the end of December rose by 15 per cent to $111 million.
It is also investing $16 million to bring an undersea fibre-optic cable ashore to Haiti that will link it with the US and improve voice and data capacity.
Speaking from his Jamaica base this week, Digicel’s chief executive Colm Delves told me that other deals are in the offing.
“We have a number of opportunities that we are considering at the moment,” he says, indicating that the Caribbean and Central America are its main focus.
Digicel last year agreed to sell its assets in Honduras and El Salvador to Carlos Slim’s América Móvil, in return for that company’s operations in Jamaica.
The Honduras and Jamaica legs of the deal have been concluded but El Salvador stalled on regulatory concerns around the surrender of spectrum to rivals.
Delves says a new application had been lodged with the regulatory authorities there and he expects to receive a decision within the “next two months”.
Digicel’s financial year closed on March 31th. Delves would not disclose its trading numbers but said it had been a “good year overall”.
Revenues and Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) both rose by 27 per cent last year to $2.23 billion and $954 million respectively.
“I’m happy with the progress we made in the past year,” Delves adds.
