The business division of Anchorage-based telecom company GCI has opened a new Seattle office, significantly increasing the company's footprint in the region.
The new Pacific Northwest headquarters for GCI Business, which opened this month, came around the same time that GCI announced its plans to slash capital expenditures company-wide.
The amount of office space the company has in Seattle grew from 4,000 square feet to 14,000 square feet, said GCI spokeswoman Heather Handyside. It's part of an initiative to expand the company's services for business customers in the Pacific Northwest and Texas, GCI said in a press release.
Handyside said the company has had customers in the Pacific Northwest for more than a decade but is now "being more formal" with its expansion.
"I just wanted to emphasize, we're making that investment in the Pacific Northwest because we are broadening our customer base," Handyside said. "But we are also still making significant investments here in Alaska, still building out our TERRA network."
The TERRA broadband network stands for Terrestrial for Every Rural Region in Alaska.
In its second-quarter earnings report, filed earlier this month, GCI said it plans to cut its capital spending for 2017 by about a quarter because "the state government has not been able to adopt a workable long term fiscal plan in 2016." That means the company will allot about $158 million to $168 million for capital spending next year.
Handyside couldn't say which areas of the business those cuts might hit.
GCI employs about 2,300 people, with most of those in Alaska. Handyside said the Seattle office will have about 50 people plus "room to grow," but said there's no specific goal for how many people that office might hire in the future.