Ca­ble & Wire­less Ja­maica, which trades as LIME Ja­maica, is now de­pen­dent on its par­ent for sur­vival af­ter hit­ting a new record in loss­es both at the tele­coms and of any stock mar­ket com­pa­ny in the ex­change's five decades of trad­ing. Au­di­tors KP­MG says the com­pa­ny's fi­nan­cials are too weak to sus­tain it, and could lead to a delist­ing of the CW­JA stock.

But LIME is re­as­sur­ing the mar­ket that par­ent Ca­ble & Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tion will be step­ping in to keep the op­er­a­tion afloat while the Ja­maican tele­coms sec­tor un­der­goes re­form. LIME Ja­maica lost J$20 bil­lion at year-end March 2012, the ma­jor­i­ty of which re­lat­ed to a near JA$16-bil­lion write-down of fixed as­sets. Rev­enue was vir­tu­al­ly un­changed, year-to-year, from JA$20.8 bil­lion to JA$20.4 bil­lion.

It's the fifth straight year of loss­es for the com­pa­ny which spent bil­lions to up­grade its mo­bile and broad­band in­fra­struc­ture to com­pete against ri­vals Dig­i­cel and Flow. LIME's cap­i­tal ex­pen­di­tures have been av­er­ag­ing JA$5-6 bil­lion per year, but in the year just end­ed it was down to JA$3.7 bil­lion.

The cur­rent loss­es have sub­stan­tial­ly weak­ened LIME's bal­ance sheet, which now sports neg­a­tive eq­ui­ty of J$14 bil­lion. The net loss was near­ly 2.5 times worse than the year pri­or, when the com­pa­ny shed J$6.1 bil­lion.

Glean­er