By McPherse Thompson, Staff Reporter 
DIGICEL JAMAICA, the first company to offer competition to Cable & Wireless Jamaica (C&WJ) in mobile telephone services when it launched under a year ago, could generate some $6 billion in revenue in its first year of operation.
The company's chief operating officer, Seamus Lynch, would not discuss the average monthly income of the company when Wednesday Business asked him about its revenue base recently.
However, last Saturday, Finance and Planning Minister Dr. Omar Davies, without naming the cellular telephone company, said figures submitted to the tax department showed that one of the new entrants in the market would have a turnover of $6 billion annually.
Digicel has the biggest customer base of the new entrants to the cellular market.
Speaking at the national seminar on trade policy in the Assembly Hall on the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI), Dr. Davies, against the background of the accessibility by Jamaicans to goods and services brought about by globalisation, including what he said were significant advances in technology, said the advent of two new cellular telephone companies has totally transformed the domestic market in terms of wireless talk.
By way of an example, he said the General Consumption Tax Commissioner (GCT) and himself were "looking at some numbers recently from one of the newer cellular companies," and the data revealed that the company in question, "in one year, starting from scratch," would have "a turnover of $6 billion annually." He added that "if you work out 15 per cent of $6 billion you can understand why I am interested" in their revenue base.
Dr. Davies, while contrasting such growth with the era when C&WJ enjoyed a monopoly in telecommunication services, and hence the impact of globalisation on the market, said there were other issues which arose, among them, whether people were using their disposable income wisely.
He said the data also showed that the per capita expenditure by Jamaican cellular users who subscribe to the service was more than US$50 per month, "which is an amazing statistic" for a country considered by some standards to be "poor, backward, Third World, whatever."
The Finance Minister was addressing seminar participants on Jamaica's response to "Globalisation/Free Trade" and whether it meant "More Poverty or More Jobs?"
The seminar was organised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade as part of its public education programme on trade, and was part sponsored by the UWI and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung.
And in a recent telephone interview with Wednesday Business, Mr. Lynch, asked to say whether the company was in fact earning tens of thousands of US dollars monthly, said: "We haven't released those figures yet ... I prefer not to discuss revenues at this time, we are not ready to say just yet."
Mr. Lynch revealed, however, that Digicel, one of several companies granted licences a few months ago to operate an islandwide fixed-link network, would be concentrating on providing that service to the business sector and might not extend it to residential customers.
"That's where we see the opportunities," he said, adding that "the concept of a fixed line at home, we see that as a thing of the past. We see mobile cellular replacing fixed lines in households."
Noting that the business-to-business fixed line service could be up and running in about another three to four months, Mr. Lynch said: "We have done our market research and there's a good demand among businesses for an alternate service."
He said Digicel, which entered the market in April 2001, has already invested some US$225 million in mobile services and is expected to pump in another US$100 million this year.
