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

NEWS 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.