Phil Britt (Aussie Broadband)
Aussie Broadband's revenue increased 89 per cent to $157.4 million during the six months ending 31 December last year, while earnings before tax jumped 87 per cent to $7.3 million and net profit before tax sank even further into the red at $10.5 million.
These are the first results that the company has posted since it was listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in October with a $40 million initial public offering (IPO).
Under the IPO, 40 million shares were offered at $1 per share, giving the company an initial market capitalisation of $190.3 million.
During the half year, Aussie Broadband provided 342,634 broadband connections, up 31 per cent, and signed a mobile virtual network operator agreement with Optus Wholesale to access its 4G and 5G networks to provide voice, mobile data and fixed wireless broadband.
Aussie plans to release a new retail and business mobile offering in the fourth quarter of FY21.
The telco indicated it increased its broadband market share from 2.8 per cent in December 2019 to 4.2 per cent.
“In a year with significant disruption to the community and many people and businesses doing it very tough, our team has managed to significantly grow our market share, maintain network performance and further improve our customer experience. All during the peak of a pandemic and while listing on the ASX,” managing director Phillip Britt said.
“We have continued to build out critical infrastructure for our network that will shape the quality of our service for years to come, and invested heavily in our Australian team and technology capability, including internal software enhancements and network automation.”
About 79kms of dark fibre construction connecting six data centres and seven NBN points of interconnect was also completed, representing 7 per cent of the project, which is tracking to schedule and budget, the telco said.
In June last year, Aussie also launched its Carbon platform for businesses and managed service providers, which can connect, customise and manage services based on a fully automated platform.
Carbon was developed by Aussie’s in-house software team and it added a hosted phone system offering, counting more than 300 managed service providers on the platform.
Aussie Broadband is forecasting to beat its financial expectations for the full financial year, signalling revenue would sit between $345 million to $355 million and normalised earnings before tax to reach $13 million to $15 million. In its prospectus, Aussie Broadband anticipated reaching $338 million in revenue and $12.3 million in earnings before tax.
However, the company has indicated it expects an impact from the NBN HFC stop sell, which has been allowed for in the guidance provided.
NBN Co indicated it will start a stop sell on HFC orders on 1 February, due to a worldwide shortage of chipsets used in the manufacture of a range of devices, including HFC NTDs. Aussie Broadband indicated that if this happened in January, it would have impacted 9 per cent of its orders.
The telco said through increased marketing activities, it expects to offset most of the potential order decline with increased orders on other NBN technologies.
