C&W dips into £4.7bn cash pile to keep investors sweet

The benefits of being a telco without debt...

Cable and Wireless profits slumped nearly 85 per cent in the first half of the financial year, prompting the telco giant to kick-start plans to buy back 15 per cent of its shares. The company will also give shareholders a one-off dividend totalling £300m - 11.5p per share - to preserve their goodwill. The company claims the poor results, share buy-back and shareholder dividend will not jeopardise its ability to invest in new products and technologies needed to move the company forward. C&W is currently one of the few telecoms leviathans that doesn't suffer from a crippling debt mountain. Investors are believed to have recently lobbied the firm to hand some of its cash pile - which now totals £4.7bn following the sale of Optus - back to shareholders. In its latest financial results, C&W made profits of £83m for the six months to the end of September, as opposed to £537m for the same period last year.