Superloop and Uniti see revenue double as acquisitions are bedded down

Among a bevy of telco results on Tuesday morning, the standouts were Superloop and Uniti Group seeing significant contributions from the pair’s recent acquisitions.

For Superloop, it was the AU$100 million addition of Exetel that impacted its results, with revenue for the first-half to December 31 up 125% to AU$120 million with operating expenses increasing 84% to AU$30.5 million.

This gave the telco an underlying earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA) of AU$9.1 million, up 12%, but once AU$3.2 million in transaction costs from buying Exetel and selling its Hong Kong business and parts of its Singapore business as well as a AU$2.7 million EBITDA hit from those businesses were accounted for, the telco was left with statutory EBITDA of AU$3.2 million, a drop of 44%.

For its bottom line, the telco closed its net loss by 28% to end at AU$18.5 million in the hole for the half.

Superloop said its consumer broadband subscribers had more than tripled to 155,000 and revenue rocketed from AU$14.7 million to AU$59 million for the half, while business revenue grew 180% to AU$35.7 million and wholesale saw 13% growth to AU$18 million in revenue.

“Fundamentally, Superloop now has a simpler, more focused business, and a greater strategic focus on growth. It is particularly pleasing that the growth across all segments demonstrates the true strength and diversification of the Superloop business model,” CEO Paul Tyler said.

“Whilst we have seen some solid contribution of the Exetel network synergies to be realised from the acquisition during the first half, we are looking to a greater contribution in the second half.”

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For Uniti Group, the results follow its purchases of Opticomm and Telstra Velocity, which it spent the past year integrating.

The results were a 98% jump in revenue to AU$110 million, a 355% spike in EBITDA to AU$65.8 million, and an increase in net profit from AU$3.9 million to AU$29 million.

“Well over 90% of our earnings are now generated from high margin, recurring, annuity revenues which are delivered predominantly on our owned super-fast FttP networks, and this ratio will continue to expand as our contracted FttP order book of nearly 300,000 premises deploys over the years ahead,” Uniti managing director and CEO Michael Simmons said.

“With integration and simplification largely completed in 2021, Uniti is now primed for continued organic growth in greenfields and adjacent property markets and inorganic growth through asset acquisitions aligned to our core infrastructure business.”

Elsewhere in the telco space, following its acquisition spree, Swoop saw revenue increase 62% to just shy of AU$24 million, and EBITDA almost tripled to AU$3.8 million, as it closed its net loss by 11% to posting being down by AU$2.86 million for the half to December 31.

The company saw its connections number grow 47% to 37,500, consisting of 25,700 residential services, 5,750 business services, and a tripling in wholesale connections to 6,000.

Continuing its streak of EBITDA growth, Macquarie Telecom saw a 4% increase in revenue to AU$149 million, an 11% increase in EBITDA to AU$40.5 million, and a 48% drop in net profit to AU$3.7 million that was due to increased capital expenditure.

The telco recently said it would spend AU$78 million to build out its 32-megawatt Intellicentre 3 Super West facility.

While MacTel’s cloud services and government, and data centre arms tracked as having 25% and 8.4% EBITDA growth over the past two years respectively, its telecom arm has been contracting at a rate of 3.4% over the past three years.

“Telecom revenue and EBITDA will continue to be affected by COVID lockdowns, which is partially offset by demand for new technologies including SD-WAN,” the company said.

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