AFTER grabbing 55 per cent of the cellphone market in the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI) and boasting 100 per cent population coverage, Denis O’Brien’s Digicel is looking to enter the fixed line market in the British Overseas Territory.

O’Brien teamed up in 2005 with TCI citizen E Jay Saunders’ Telemedia to form Digicel Turks and Caicos, after winning the first telecoms licence under TCI’s market liberalisation thrust.

In keeping with the terms of the licence, O’Brien holds 51 per cent of the shares and Saunders 49 per cent.

Ordinarily, no foreigner can hold more than 49 per cent under the licence but the telecoms minister, upon application by Saunders, exercised his powers to vary the terms of the licence to allow O’Brien majority ownership.

Saunders, the son of former Chief Minister Norman Saunders, said the partnership had worked very well.

“We actually launched operations in 2006 and in that relatively short time, we have 55 per cent of the market and we are offering 100 per cent coverage of the Islands,” he said.

“We have applied for the relevant licences to operate fixed, voice and data, to be followed by ISP for Internet services,” Saunders told Caribbean Business Report in an interview.

That means Digicel has stepped up the competition with the two other contenders LIME and Island.com, for TCI’s roughly 33,000 residents.

“As part of our success, we have been able to win a major contract with the Government to build a new telecoms network — LAN, WAN, Internet services. This will make us the primary supplier of telecoms services to the Government, replacing LIME,” Saunders crowed.

The Rufus Ewing administration recently announced the successful applicants for a 700 megahertz spectrum to be used for Long Term Evolution (LVE). Digicel took the number one spot, with Island.com coming in at number two.

Digicel TCI is enjoying a healthy bottomline, with the financials for the year ending March 31 showing a capital investment of US$8 million, bringing total investment to just over US$20 million.

The company’s growing staff of 30 includes at least four Jamaicans, Saunders emphasised.

He said the company, as was typical of Digicel everywhere else, had been giving back to the country by providing critical support for social development projects.

Saunders is particularly proud of the company’s work with the Doris Robinson Primary School in Middle Caicos, the largest but most remote of the chain of islands.

“It is the most difficult to get to and is populated with 300 mostly poor retired folks and kids. There are no businesses over there so it was somewhat ignored. We have decided to take it on by providing every child in school with a hot meal every day.

“We pay the cook, buy the groceries and so on. It’s very gratifying to see the response of the folks there. Most of the kids would not have had a meal otherwise and we all know the correlation between learning and nutrition,” Saunders noted.

Digicel also sponsors the TCI’s Football Association league and the national men’s and women’s soccer teams.

Saunders himself serves on the multi-sectoral committee that guides government and public support for AIDS-prevention and control programmes through education and medication