FairPoint CEO sees better times ahead
FairPoint Communications CEO Paul Sunu said in an interview Monday that he expects the company's years-long decline in revenues to reverse itself in 2013.
Last fall, the North Carolina-based company laid off 400 employees, including 130 people in Maine, to better match its work force with its workload – a move that shrank its work force by 10% and was expected to save $34 million annually.
Sunu told the Associated Press that by the end of this year, the growth among business customers should begin exceeding the loss of residential landline customers. It was Sunu's first face-to-face media interview in Maine since becoming CEO two years ago.
Sunu said the company is now aiming to grow its revenues, which shrank from nearly $1.3 billion in 2008 to just over $1 billion last year. With residential access customers continuing to fall, the growth will come from business customers, for both telephone lines and broadband data and Internet services, he said.
FairPoint provides landline telephone, Internet and other telecommunications services in 18 states. Its largest holdings are in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont, where it has about 1.1 million access lines. FairPoint bought Verizon's land lines in northern New England in 2008 for $2.3 billion, and filed for bankruptcy in the fall of 2009. The company emerged from bankruptcy in January after shedding about $1.7 billion in debt
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