Two of Amalgamated Telecom Holdings subsidiary companies recorded significant losses in the last financial year ended 31st March 2010 but the company still posted a profit last year.

During a stock brokers briefing, ATH CEO Tomasi Vakatora revealed that Telecom Fiji Limited made a $6.7 million loss while Connect incurred a $2.7 million loss last year.

TFL was affected by $4 million redundancy costs and impairment costs of assests. ATH says performances of TFL, Vodafone, Transtel, Xceed and Connect all declined when compared to previous years.

Vakatora says the impact of competition and weak trading conditions on TFL and Vodafone affected their dividend payments to ATH and as a result, ATH had to reduce its own dividend payment for 2009/2010 by 37.5 percent.

He says last year's performance was also affected by the floods and the global financial crisis however consolidated sales revenue increased by 5.4% over the previous years while this year sales revenue is down by 10.4 percent on last year’s achievement.

The ATH group’s total assets stood at $508 million and total share equity of $246 million.

ATH also revealed that for the 1st quarter of 2010 and 2011 financial year results showed a 42 percent increase in net profit after tax and minority interests.

ATH also revealed that TFL's direct international connectivity through the Southern Cross cable network from November 1st this year, is expected to deliver significant reduction in terms of bandwidth costs.

Despite the hurdles, ATH still managed to post a group consolidated after tax profit of $15.4 million for the year ended March 31, 2010, a 53.5 percent drop on the $33.1 million profit the previous financial year.


Story by: Roneel Lal