Global Crossing's South American Blitz

They haven’t caused much of a stir, but glbc has really been on the march in South America.  It’s not for lack of trying though, the company has issued a dozen PRs since the beginning of the second quarter alone that relate to events in the region.  Today’s deal with Minera Chinalco in Peru is just the latest in a string of awards, deals, and facility expansions. 

Of course, PRs are just PRs and we are all used to shrugging them off, but this division of GLBC has been backing up the fluff with muscle, Q3 revenues from South America were $122M, up 28% over Q3/2007 – and yes that does in fact seem to be organic growth.  EBITDA from the region was $42M, more than ROW or GCUK despite being smaller than either.  Global Crossing’s purchase of Impsat has emerged as one of the shrewdest moves in the 2005-2007 consolidation frenzy.  Take out Impsat’s performance from GLBC’s Q3 numbers and they are anything but inspiring.

The secret of their success?  Limited competition in a region whose bandwidth demands are booming is part of it, but I think the metro depth they have is equally important.  One can compare to it’s US and continental European business, which remains its weakest mainly due to lack of such metro depth.  In the UK there is too much competition, but GCUK is healthy because they do have the metro assets there.  The company still faces many challenges and has a long history of things it would like to forget, but in South America I am hard pressed to come up with anyone with a better combination of assets for the times.

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Categories: Financials · Internet Backbones · Undersea cables