Macquarie Telecom takes hit from COVID-19 lockdowns

Macquarie Telecom has taken a slight hit to its bottom line with a downturn in its voice business due to COVID-19 restrictions.

The company said its voice revenue declined 3 percent from $139.6 million to $135 million in the 12 months to 30 June 2021 as a result of customers not working in the office amid the restrictions.

MacTel said the segment will continue to be impacted as long as COVID-19 restrictions are ongoing, but said demand for new technologies like SD-WAN should help partially offset the declines.

The company as a whole remained steady with growth in all the other segments, with cloud services and government revenue up from $107 million in 2020 to $130 million, while data centres remained steady at $19 million. Total revenue was $285 million, up 7 percent year over year.

EBITDA was $73.8 million, up 13 percent from 2020, marking seven consecutive years of growth.

“The 2021 full year results delivered the seventh consecutive year of EBITDA growth underpinned by our strategy of investing in data centres, cloud & cybersecurity, including the recent announcement of our new IC3 Super West development, which will provide significant customer growth opportunities in the future,” MacTel chairman Peter James said.

Chief executive David Tudehope said Phase 1 of the IC3 East data centre was successfully delivered on budget in FY21, and also announced plans for IC3 Super West during the period. “This global scale data centre campus will attract new investment into
Australia from multinationals looking to expand in the Asia Pacific region,” he said.

“We have decided to increase our investments in Cyber Security, people and technology, to benefit from the increasing demand for business and government to uplift their security defences,” Tudehope said.

“Our outstanding customer experience as measured by a Net Promoter Score of over 75 has been even more important to our customers as they rely to a greater extent on telecom and cloud services as their staff are predominantly working from home as a result of Covid-19.”

Looking ahead, the company expects to see continued EBITDA growth into FY2022 as more investments are made in data centres, as well as plans to continue developing public cloud capability and improve the hybrid cloud capability.