According to a Cable & Wireless statement, Barrow will have a senior director's job "with responsibility for regulations, communications and strategy for many of the C&W national telecoms operations across the world".

Barrow will take up his appointment on October 1, but the statement did not say for which countries he will be responsible and neither did it elaborate on the specifics of his new job.

It, however, stressed that Barrow will be "the first Caribbean national to hold such a senior position in the London office and will report directly to Kevin Loosemore COO Cable and Wireless Plc".

A successor to Barrow has not yet been named.  But there was speculation last night that, with financial and business operations of the Jamaican subsidiary having been substantially completed, the parent company will now appoint someone with a marketing bent with a mandate to tackle head-on the competition from the other major providers in Jamaica's telecoms market, particularly the Irish-owned mobile provider, Digicel.

It was suggested that the new boss will be recruited from outside Cable & Wireless Jamaica.

Barrow, in his mid 40s, was promoted to the top job at C&WJ when its former boss, Errald Miller, was named to head a newly created Miami-based regional organisation that was to over-see C&W's business in the Caribbean.

But a little more than a year after that restructuring, new management in London scrapped the regional super-structure to create a flatter organisation, with a regional CEO reporting directly to the head office.  Errald Miller's resignation was announced ahead of the restructuring.

Barrow, who has worked for Cable & Wireless for 14 years, came to the top job at a time when Jamaica was beginning the liberalisation of its telecommunications market, breaking the monopoly that was enjoyed by C&W its predecessor companies.

With many thousands of Jamaicans then without telephones and angry over what they felt was monopoly arrogance, people, in droves, flocked to Digicel, an aggressive up-start that brought slick promotion and marketing campaigns and pre-paid mobile services that widened the market.

Currently, Digicel is estimated to have about a million mobile subscribers, against 700,000 by Cable and Wireless.

Ironically, Barrow's promotion came only days after the weekend announcement that Seamus Lynch, who spearheaded Digicel's launch in Jamaica and its attack on C&W's monopoly elsewhere in the Caribbean, was leaving the region but would join the board and help the company's founder and major shareholder, Dennis O'Brien, develop new telecoms opportunities.

During his tenure, Barrow presided over the slashing of C&WJ's staff by about a third, the upgrading of the company's mobile and land line networks and its first GSM network, stirring attempts to shakeoff its image of a lumbering monopoly and present itself as spiffy and competitive.

Most of the company's top executives, including some from London, joined the local operation during Barrow's tenure.

"Gary has done a tremendous job in transforming the company during a difficult period of liberalisation and although I am sorry to see him leave the local operations, I am pleased that his skills and expertise will now be available to the wider Cable and Wireless group," Len DeBarros, the chairman of CWJ and the C&W plc's chief operating officer for the Caribbean said in yesterday's statement.

Barrow is leaving as C&WJ is returning to profit, having taken a whopping $11-billion hit in its last financial year, to write down assets, believed to include its older TDMA mobile network.

The write-down caused the company to post losses of over $5 billion for the financial year, which ended in March.  But the company recently reported a 31 per cent rise in profit for the new financial quarter, reaching a pre-tax $1.2 billion.

Part of the gain was from a 20.5 per cent reduction in depreciation charges, a result of the previous year's write-down.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/html/20040823T230000-0500_65102_OBS_BARROW_GETS_LONDON_JOB.asp