BRIDGETOWN, Bar­ba­dos – Crick­et West In­dies says it plans to ag­gres­sive­ly con­tin­ue rolling back debt and stream­lin­ing its fi­nan­cial prac­tices, in an am­bi­tious bid to re­alise prof­its by 2023 and place the or­gan­i­sa­tion on sound com­mer­cial foot­ing.

Speak­ing in the wake of an au­dit­ed fi­nan­cial state­ment for last year which showed loss­es in ex­cess of US$13 mil­lion and prompt­ed au­di­tors KP­MG to “cast sig­nif­i­cant doubt on the Com­pa­ny’s abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue as a go­ing con­cern”, CWI chief ex­ec­u­tive John­ny Grave said it was crit­i­cal the board re­mained pru­dent in man­ag­ing costs by ad­her­ing to ini­tia­tives al­ready in place.

He said CWI had al­ready man­aged to re­duce bor­row­ing and while the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic con­tin­ued to present un­prece­dent­ed fi­nan­cial chal­lenges, it was hoped that with­in the next two-and-a-half years the or­gan­i­sa­tion could be in a sus­tain­able po­si­tion.

“Mak­ing good choic­es about our in­vest­ments and how much mon­ey we spend, hav­ing re­al­ly good con­trol over our costs [will be key to im­prov­ing CWI’s fi­nances],” Grave said.

“Hence the re­struc­ture of our fi­nance de­part­ment, em­brac­ing tech­nol­o­gy, im­ple­ment­ing a pro­cure­ment sys­tem. All of these things will give us greater con­trol of our costs.

“We are al­so go­ing to be au­dit­ing all of our in­ter­na­tion­al event bud­gets with our ter­ri­to­r­i­al boards to make sure we’re procur­ing not just di­rect­ly but in­di­rect­ly through our ter­ri­to­r­i­al boards and as­so­ci­a­tions, where we’re procur­ing ser­vices at the best pos­si­ble price.”

He con­tin­ued: “We’re ob­vi­ous­ly look­ing to max­imise rev­enue. That’s ob­vi­ous­ly dif­fi­cult at the mo­ment with match­es be­ing played be­hind closed doors and the enor­mous in­crease in costs we’re fac­ing by host­ing crick­et in the pan­dem­ic.

“So that by the end of 2023, we don’t want to have deficits and we don’t want to have li­a­bil­i­ties – we want to have fi­nan­cial re­serves.”

With the Caribbean host­ing just a sin­gle tour last year due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, CWI saw rev­enues slashed by near­ly a third from the pre­vi­ous year to US$23.5 mil­lion.

Al­so due to the pan­dem­ic, the al­ready cash-strapped or­gan­i­sa­tion was forced to slash em­ploy­ee and play­er salaries in half last year, while al­so re­duc­ing dis­burse­ments for crick­et de­vel­op­ment re­gion­al­ly.

Since the start of the year, how­ev­er, CWI has rolled out sev­er­al ma­jor broad­cast deals and is bank­ing on the re­sump­tion of in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et and tours by ma­jor Test na­tions like Eng­land and In­dia, to boost its in­come.

Eng­land are sched­uled to tour the Caribbean next Jan­u­ary for five Twen­ty20 In­ter­na­tion­als be­fore re­turn­ing in March for three Tests.

(CMC)