Susan Gordon, Staff Reporter
( L - R ) COLIN WEBSTER, COO MIPHONE and ALEX HILL
SAYING THAT it intends to be more visible and aggressive, MiPhone has structured its management hoping to grab a bigger share of Jamaica's competitive market for mobile telephones and other telecommunications services.
Collin Webster, who is emerging as the company's new face in Jamaica after being named this week as its chief operating officer, said the more aggressive stance of the company had finally been placed on a financially sustainable path. It became EBITDA positive earlier this year, so that it is earning an operating profit, net of depreciation and amortisation.
"We expect to see an increase in marketing with the new products literally next month," said Webster, who previously ran the company's IT operations. The company had kept a tight rein on costs, holding its staff count to 200, and that number is set to start growing once again.
Alex Hill, formerly vice president for sales and marketing, has been named senior vice president for corporate development, a promotion which the company says will cause him to look beyond MiPhone's branded products and to find ways to leverage the assets of MiPhone's parent, Oceanic Digital Jamaica "within Jamaica and the Caribbean."
In addition to these appointments, MiPhone gave new responsibilities to is chief financial officer, Maurice Marston, asking him to oversee human resources as well as regulate and facilitate management. With a little over 100,000 subscribers, MiPhone, which was slow out of the starting blocks after acquiring an operating licence more than five years ago, is the smallest of mobile phone companies in Jamaica, lagging far behind Digicel and Cable and Wireless. Digicel has over one million subscribers, twice as many as C&W.
But now the company wants to rev-up its marketing, to take on both its mobile competitors as well as emerging data carriers, such as Michael Lee Chin's Flow, which is about to launch in the market.
According to Webster, he is about to push MiPhone's CDMA mobile phone technology, telling Jamaicans that it is better than the GSM technology used by its competitors.
