On May 27, technology writer Mark Lyndersay posed questions to newly appointed TSTT CEO Lisa Agard. The company responded on Tuesday this week.

You are back and in as CEO at TSTT: what is that like after all these years?

A lot has happened in the telecoms industry since I left TSTT in 2012. I was involved in an adjacent industry (broadcasting) for a year and a half and jumped right back into telecoms with my involvement in Massy Communications.

At that time, Massy made a significant investment in a fibre-to-the-home project to serve residential customers in Trinidad. Massy and TSTT began to co-operate in some areas, and this led ultimately to TSTT acquiring Massy Communications in 2017.

What were your priorities when you were asked to act as CEO last year?

The most important priority was dealing with the impact of the covid19 pandemic, and the negative impact on our revenue.

Intuitively, a lot of people think that telecommunications is an industry unaffected by a pandemic such as covid19, as a broadband connection becomes imperative to facilitate remote work and school.

That is not the case. While residential broadband customers have remained relatively unchanged, the negative macroeconomic headwinds have severely impacted the mobile business, in particular the pre-paid segment.

So, in order to ensure the sustainability of the business, we had to introduce austerity measures to reduce operational expenditure.

What did you believe were the pain points of the company at that time and what actions have you taken to manage them?

In our annual operating plan for fiscal 2021/22, we have embedded the operational cost savings that we implemented in the last fiscal (year). We have to continue that focus.

That positively impacts our cash outlay and we also have devised strategies around cash collection, which is a growing challenge in the current economic environment.

We continue to actively engage our customers by providing exemplary customer service, while we invest in developing innovative products and services like smart home and fintech solutions.

[caption id="attachment_899725" align="alignnone" width="640"] e-Tender, TSTT's online procurement platform, is being adopted by a growing number of ministries and state entities. -[/caption]

In order to grow revenue, we will leverage our capabilities being a full-service provider offering mobile, fixed, broadband, entertainment, security and enterprise products.

In addition, we plan to enhance our array of digital service offerings, our e-Tender, IaaS and SaaS (products, while) utilising our Tier-3 TIA-942-B fully redundant data centre to support those digital solutions as well as provide hosted solutions, public and private cloud.

How has Amplia performed as a business sector since it was bought by TSTT?

In each of the financial years since the acquisition by TSTT in August 2017, Amplia has exceeded