The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has boosted its commercial roster by agreeing new sponsorship deals with the Confident Group and Celkon Mobile.
Confident Group will become the West Indies’ team sponsor for the Champions Trophy one-day international tournament in England next month and the 2014 World Twenty20 competition in Bangladesh. Confident Group is an Indian conglomerate, headquartered in Bangalore with interests in infrastructure, hospitality, aviation, entertainment, education and health care. The agreement was brokered by the Total Sports Asia agency.
WICB chief executive Michael Muirhead said: “This association of the West Indies team with another major Asian company is significant from the point of view that we are able to attract some of the most high profile companies from a dynamic and wide-ranging cricket market to our portfolio and it is a demonstration of the confidence of the corporate sector in West Indies cricket which remains a strong brand on the global cricket stage.”
Meanwhile, telecommunications firm Celkon Mobile will serve as the title sponsor of the Tri Nations Series to be played by West Indies, India and Sri Lanka. The series will be known as the Celkon Mobile Cup and will be played in Jamaica and Trinidad from June 28 to July 11.
The title sponsorship is part of the WICB’s decision to grant sponsorship rights for the series to Technology Frontiers, an Indian based company. Technology Frontiers acquired title sponsorship rights to the series, which includes on-field, stump, sightscreen and some perimeter advertising.
WICB commercial manager Nelecia Yeates said: “We have leveraged the expertise of Technology Frontiers in the Indian market which have accrued benefits to the WICB and West Indies cricket. What is most exciting for us as a region is that for the first time in the Caribbean we will have fully digitised perimeter advertising for all the matches, which is now the norm in the IPL (Indian Premier League) and Premier League football in England. This initiative takes us into a whole new realm of maximising our cricket branding for international matches and is one in which we will be looking to repeat and expand for future series as well.”