DataPro's aggressive growth strategy continues to provide returns to shareholders as the company gears up to become a fully-fledged telecommunications provider.
This morning, the company reported 234% year-on-year growth in revenue, from R78.7 million to R263 million, for the six months ended 28 February. The performance outstripped its 2006 full-year turnover of R196 million by 3.5%.
It expects the historical trend to deliver a stronger performance in the second half of the year to continue.
"These results show that we have been successful in delivering on a strategy featuring both organic and acquisitive growth. Organically, we produced very strong figures in our data segment, delivering revenue growth of almost 50%, while in our @lantic segment we saw turnover increasing by 43%, to R30 million," says DataPro executive chairman Tony van Marken.
However, it is DataPro's voice segment that provided the largest revenue contribution in the last six months, with acquisitions delivering 2 157% growth, to R158 million off R7 million, year-on-year. Of this, Orion Telecommunications delivered revenue of R76 million from one month of operations.
"Voice revenues now exceed 50% of our total and we see this rising to between 60% and 70% as the telecoms market becomes increasingly deregulated. We have also signed interconnect agreements with Telkom and Vodacom, and are working on concluding agreements with MTN and Cell C. We have been entered onto the numbering plan, but are waiting for Telkom to finish its negotiations with ICASA so that we can terminate calls on our network," explains Van Marken.
Looking forward, he says DataPro will continue to pursue strong organic and acquisitive growth. Acquisitions to be included in its next financial period include public-sector-focused Dial Telecoms and VOIP Telecoms.
"We operate in a large addressable market, valued at about R103 billion a year. The portion of that market that we can pursue has increased as we broadened our set of offerings."
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