The Financial Times were reporting exclusively at the weekend that Cable & Wireless will move its headquarters from London to south Florida after 140 years in the United Kingdom capital and a long history as a bastion of the British Empire.The newspaper reported that as part of this strategic change, the group will strip about $100m from costs within two years and move its operational headquarters to Miami or Fort Lauderdale, but it will keep its London listing and UK domicile.Cable & Wireless had operated in Bermuda for almost that long 121 years, until the announcement in February 2011 that it had sold its Bermuda operations to the Canadian cable company, the Bragg Group. Cable & Wireless Bermuda operations had been part of Cable & Wireless Communications' Channel Islands and Isle of Man business unit. In October 2011, Cable and Wireless (Bermuda) Holdings Ltd was rebranded with the new name LinkBermuda Holdings Ltd. EastLink International Holdings Inc.At the time of the acquisition and renaming, Ann Petley-Jones, CEO of EastLink International and the LinkBermuda Group, said: “We have kept, and are growing, our local Bermuda workforce. We have repatriated dozens of corporate functions to Bermuda from the UK. We have hired Bermudians in executive management, operations, sales and customer care positions.”The Financial Times reported that the move to south Florida by the British telecoms group “reflects a corporate overhaul that will narrow its focus on operations in the Caribbean and Latin America.” It quoted chief executive Tony Rice, who said the group was no longer a portfolio of scattered telecoms businesses but rather one with a single operational focus.“This is the opportunity to build the next generation of Cable & Wireless,” said Mr Rice. “I want us to stay a British company, but we need to move closer to our markets. We want to operate in a fundamentally different way.”The precursors to Cable & Wireless were in the first Atlantic cable companies set up by Victorian industrial pioneer Sir John Plender in the 1860s, which merged with Marconi and became a core part of the Britain’s telecoms infrastructure as a nationalised business until privatisation under Margaret Thatcher, explained the London-based newspaper, which added that Cable & Wireless Communications is selling a number of businesses in Asia and Europe.The newspaper also reported that Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa Telecoms & Media, pointed to a long period of decline at the group as a result of heavy investment in the US long-distance market in the late 1990s shortly before the price of bandwidth fell dramatically.Mr Rice told The Financial Times that the group would carry almost no debt and would look for new investments. He added future corporate acquisitions would be focused on mobile businesses in Latin America. Cable & Wireless Communications would focus on providing higher tariff mobile and fixed-line data connections, he said, pointing to the potential growth in a customer basis where less than a quarter of the population use a smartphone.