Profile
Stuart Davies
Cook Islands Telecom Chief Has Got It Wired
Stuart Davies has been keeping the Cook Islands connected to the rest of the world since 1971, when he came there from Hamilton, New Zealand. For 20 years he worked for the Cook Islands Post Office, which also ran the phone service. One day in 1991, Prime Minister Geoffrey Henry called Davies into his office and told Davies he wanted to privatize the phone service and improve access for the outer islands. The PM asked Davies to get a company up and running.
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Davies went to the local bank and deposited $100 of his own money to start an account for Telecom Cook Islands, Ltd., which began its existence at that moment. TCI has since become one of the most respected small telecoms in the Pacific—and Davies himself, now the president of the Pacific Island Telecommunications Association as well as CEO of TCI, is one of the most admired telecom executives in the region. TCI is still 40 percent owned by the Cook Islands government and 60 percent held by Telecom New Zealand.
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Once, when an outside consultant was sent in to recommend that the telecom should be structured completely by market forces, Davies told him to get in the car and proceeded to drive the puzzled expert around the island of Rarotonga. When they’d completed the circle and were back in Avarua, the consultant asked where all the people were. “That’s it,” Davies told him, “and this is where most of the country’s population lives.” The consultant had to rethink his advice.
Davies has since been a vocal advocate for the small Island telecoms that don’t have the market numbers needed to survive on their own. He points out that even in the U.S., the home of free market telecom dogma, rural telcom companies are highly subsidized by a complex network of federal support which comes from a fund paid into by all phone subscribers nationally.
“The Cook Islands government has seats on our board of directors, so we do some things that make no economic sense, but are for the common good, like providing satellite links to remote, sparsely inhabited islands.”
Despite a 1991 fire that gutted the country’s only telephone exchange, Davies had a temporary exchange up and running within three days of the disaster. TCI now boasts a modern NEAX 61E exchange, fiber optic connectivity on Rarotonga and full Internet services since 1998. Through PITA, Davies has become a mentor to other Island telecom managers and is one of the region’s most effective advocates internationally for the needs of small Island telecom markets.
PITA has its annual general meeting on the 7th and 8th of next month at the Raffles Tradewinds in Suva, Fiji. A trade show will follow from April 8 - 11. To register, or for more information on PITA, go to: www.pita.org.fj.
