Inabox shows signs of turnaround, cracks $100 million

Inabox has marked the first signs of a business turnaround by cracking the $100 million revenue milestone, despite incurring a $13 million loss.

The company reported revenue of $101.1 million for the financial year ending 30 June 2018, an increase of 12 percent.

Underlying EBITDA was down 16 percent to $5.1 million, while net profit was down from a $100,000 profit last year to a $12.9 million loss this year. The loss included an $11.9 million impairment from its beleaguered direct business plus another $400,000 in redundancy costs and $500,000 from legal, tax and other costs.

Inabox sold its direct business to 5G Networks this month for $5.7 million after struggling to grow the business. The direct business, which traded under the Anittel and Hostworks brands, provided managed IT, hosting and communications and raked in $48 million in revenue in FY18, but still had a negative impact on profitability and cashflow.

The direct business started showing signs of problems in November last year when Inabox said Hostwork's poor performance would severely impact its performance just nine months after acquiring the business for $7 million. This resulted in Inabox being forced to cut 10 percent of its workforce.

Inabox used the proceeds from the direct business sale to reduce its debt, and said it could now focus on its two core business segments: indirect and enablement.

The indirect business, which supplies wholesale telco services to partners, is the biggest source of revenue for Inabox, generating $45 million in FY18, up 6 percent compared to last year.

The enablement business provides networks, systems, operational support, billing services and software development to large retail partners, and increased its revenue by 61 percent to $7.9 percent in FY18.

Inabox said the growth was mostly driven by its new three-year partnership with Telstra Wholesale, which will see the company offer its white-label products to Telstra partners, allowing them to quickly spin-up their own mass-market telco services.

Inabox said it was also in confidential discussions over a possible sale of the indirect business as well, which isn't guaranteed to result in a sale, but the company said it was confident in continuing to run the business regardless.