Digicel grew quickly in the Caribbean after launching in Jamaica in April Within five years, the company had set up services in 13 countries, including St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Aruba, Grenada, and Antigua. Digicel began diversifying its business in the mids with the acquisition of Caribbean Cable Communications Holding Limited and the purchase of the Caribbean Submarine Fibre Network.
The company continued to acquire internet and television companies and relaunch them under the Digicel brand throughout the decade. In October , Netflix ranked Digicel as the best streaming experience in Jamaica. Today, the company provides a full range of telecommunication services—including mobile, television, internet, home entertainment, and business solutions—to 31 markets across the Caribbean, Central America and Asia Pacific.
His guidance has helped Digicel become a leader in opening previously closed or stagnant markets, ultimately driving down prices and delivering valuable services to consumers.
As chairman, he continues to push for new ways that Digicel can help customers around the world with unique, competitive telecom technology. In , he sold Esat Telecom to the British Telecom Group, which gave him funds to start on his next project: Digicel.
So when he saw an ad for mobile licenses on sale in Jamaica, he jumped at the chance. Digicel signed up , subscribers in days. Buoyed by this early success, the company expanded rapidly across the Caribbean, snapping up licenses and acquiring businesses as they became available.
In , it made its first move to another neglected chain of islands, and bought a network in Samoa, in the South Pacific. By Digicel was in another five countries, all of which it set up from scratch, ranging from tiny Nauru to Papua New Guinea.
Its footprint is vast, covering just over a million square kilometres , sq miles of land, an area more twice the the size of California, albeit scattered across half the globe. Digicel built its business model around going to small, difficult countries that larger companies would avoid.
Yet with fixed-line phones a rarity, people were ready to snap up any means of communication they could afford. In the jungles of Papua New Guinea, the company lost nine workers to fatal accidents.
In Haiti, existing networks refused to connect to Digicel. Yet within a month, it had signed up , customers there, after planning for , over five years, says Delves. The other networks quickly relented. Digicel has enjoyed a spectacular run. With no big acquisitions or new countries to invest in, subscriber numbers are stagnating. In , only a handful of countries , such as Cuba and North Korea, remain badly served by mobile operators.
The Bahamas will soon invite bids to break its monopoly but with a population of less than ,, it is a minnow. The days of boosting growth by entering new markets are over, says Delves. Digicel must now find a way to get its
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