By Business & Finance 
Colm O’Neill, CEO, BT Ireland
BT Ireland has announced the financial results of its all-island operation for the year ending March 31st 2015.
Revenue increased by 2% to £635m year-on-year excluding transit revenue and the impact of foreign exchange movements. Profit was up 4% year-on-year, driven by success with fibre broadband and major contracts, and continued cost management.
Colm O’Neill, CEO, BT Ireland said: “We’ve delivered a solid year of growth in revenues and profits in a very competitive sector. Investments in network infrastructure, data centres and product development have underpinned this growth with BT increasingly becoming the partner of choice for multinational and large indigenous organisations requiring global connectivity and IT services.”
BT Ireland has grown its share of the fixed line market (retail and wholesale) to over 17% in the year, according to the latest quarterly report by ComReg, making it the second largest fixed line operator.
In the wholesale sector, more than 50 communications companies are now using BT services to connect their customers in Ireland including Carphone Warehouse, and Sky Ireland whose voice and fibre broadband services are supported by BT.
In the business sector, growing demand for high speed wired and wireless networks, global connectivity, unified communications, cloud and data centre services resulted in a significant number of new business deals including Kerry Group, Icon and Skillsoft, whilst the company delivered new services to existing customers such as Bank of Ireland and Elavon.
Listed amongst BT Ireland’s growing customer base today are six out of 10 of Forbes most innovative companies in the world and eight of the top 10 companies on the Irish Stock Exchange. In addition, BT Ireland has been named Cisco Ireland’s ‘Gold Partner of the Year’ for the third year running for its excellence and quality of execution.
BT Ireland has continued to invest in research and development, expanding its cloud services portfolio as well as pioneering a successful trial which saw it integrate 400Gbps technology into its live network for the first time.
The full deployment of this technology is underway on the BT Ireland network between Belfast, Dublin and London giving customers a greater choice of services and more efficient access to their global networks and cloud services, as well as supporting Ireland-UK trade.
