Bermuda Telephone Company (BTC) is looking to cut its workforce by about 25 employees — or more than 12 percent — as it seeks to reduce costs and restructure its business.

Those who will be impacted from a workforce of approximately 200 are management and line staff from various departments of the company and all are Bermudian.

BTC President & CEO, Mr. Francis Mussenden, who held talks with all BTC employees to unveil the company's 2010/11 business strategies last week, said the decision was mainly driven by falling profits in the land line sector.

This follows the news that Cable & Wireless made eight of its workers redundant, but rehired one of them, last week.

Mr. Mussenden confirmed that talks were ongoing with the staff and union representatives to find the best way to achieve the reduction in numbers, starting with voluntary redundancies and not filling open positions.

"The Bermuda Telephone Company is faced with a major paradigm shift in the way people and businesses communicate," Mr. Mussenden said in his address to staff. "We used to measure our business success in the number of new land lines people added, today we need to add value to that experience, as lines by themselves are ultimately no longer necessary."

Mr. Mussenden said that the decline in land line business brought on by the "phones without homes" cell phone phenomenon had impacted BTC, like many telecom providers worldwide.

The company had been forced to reposition its business model by stopping offering services or products its 50,000 account holders no longer wanted or required, including telephone equipment rental and traditional voice telephone services.

He likened this technological revolution to the changeover from typewriters to computers and noted that the outcome of this paradigm shift would result in employees having to retool and retrain, with some eventually losing their jobs.

"Data and Internet are the currency of the new world and it is not only important to have access to technologies that run over the Internet, but it is important to be a supplier of international bandwidth to individuals and corporate entities."