Datacom, Australasia’s leading IT services organisation, delivered a strong year’s trading for the year ended 31st March 2016 with an increase in revenue on the previous year of 13.0%, to NZ$1.058 billion. The Group profit after tax for the year was NZ$27.2m, up 11.9% on the previous year.
Craig Boyce, Chairman, Datacom Group Board says: “This is an excellent result for Datacom. The company continues to deliver on a progressive and sustainable business strategy. The Datacom Group Board is pleased with the strong revenue growth, which increased the 10 year compound annual growth rate for revenue to 11.5%, up from 11.2% on the previous year.”
“The Group profit before tax was $41.2m, which is an increase of 16.7% on last year, and along with the revenue growth this represents a very positive performance from the business.”
Datacom in Australia and Asia delivered a revenue increase of 12.9% over the previous year. In the New Zealand operation revenue increased by 13.1%, continuing the trend of continuous growth observed over the last decade.
Capital expenditure increased by 35% over the prior year to $40.6m, reinforcing Datacom’s ongoing work to standardise and rapidly enhance all infrastructure, security and business services to support coordinated Australia and New Zealand growth.
Operating expenditure on new investment lines of business was $17.9m, up 58.4% over the 2014-2015 year. Datacom continues an investment programme of operational expenditure into business enhancement and the evolution of new products and services, predominantly in Datacom’s own intellectual property and vertical markets specialisation.
Jonathan Ladd, CEO, Datacom Group says, “We’ve expanded significantly to ensure that we can bring to market the benefits of new technologies, combined with our geographic and infrastructure reach which complements our local touchpoints.”
Datacom opened four new offices over the year and now operates from 29 locations across New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Philippines, the UK and the USA.
Australia Systems delivered growth driven by customer demand for hybrid cloud services and new software offerings, and by a number of significant wins with medium to large enterprises and across State and Federal Government. Third-party products sales have continued to perform well over the year.
The push of Datacom’s software development operations into the Australian market continued, with increased delivery capabilities in both Melbourne and Sydney. This produced a number of new customer wins, providing Datacom with real growth opportunities in the wider Australian market.
Jonathan Ladd says, “IT is in a phase of hyper-change. Any success is built via agility, and for Datacom this means utilising the deep infrastructure management expertise of our people coupled with our unique ability to be able to deploy a near thousand-strong software development workforce to enhance any environment.”
Expanding expertise in the transformational digital practices, data analytics, enterprise, and industrial mobility offerings are also driving multiple new consultancy engagements across Australia and New Zealand for Datacom.
“We’re also seeing sharp growth for cloud applications transformation services and demand for WAN, LAN and wireless networks,” says Ladd.
The uplift within the cyber security market is significant, with Datacom’s specialist cyber practice delivering excellent growth on the back of its investment in a purpose-built Cyber Security Incident Response Centre (CSIRC) located in Canberra.
Datacom’s network of 12 data centres across Australasia continues to perform to an exceptional standard. In March, Datacom installed its 1460th rack into its New Zealand network, more than tripling the number of racks the company had when the Orbit Data Centre in Auckland opened in 2009.
Datacom Connect expanded on its traditional contact centre activities by providing customer experience consulting services to current and new customers, increasing revenue by 60% on last year. The division operates across Australia and New Zealand and also provides contact centre as-a-service technology solutions for Enterprise and Government.
The Datacom Solutions stable of businesses targeting the specialised provision of solutions and services to payroll, local government, education and healthcare sectors in Australia and New Zealand also closed out the year out strongly.
Datacom Kuala Lumpur and Manila reported solid results for the year delivering multilingual managed services, complex cloud platform management and a wide range of project services to both global and Asian organisations.
Datacom won multiple vendor partner awards this year securing Partner of the Year 2016 for both Cisco and Microsoft, EMC’s Solution Partner of the Year and Dell’s Internet of Things Solution Win of the Year among many others.
During the 2016 year Datacom across Group contributed NZ$1m in financial donations, grants, in-kind and campaign support and volunteer work to many not-for-profit initiatives across Asia-Pacific, focusing on initiatives that enable higher achievement in the communities in which it operates, with particular emphasis on online security, ICT education and positive impacts to the environment.
The attraction and retention of the most talented ICT professionals in market is a constant area of focus at a time of industry-wide skills shortages. In the year ending March 2016, employee numbers totaled 4,661, an increase of 13.8%, with 2,729 in New Zealand and 1,932 across Australia and Asia.
Key Points in summary for 2015-2016 – NZ$
- Total operating revenue was NZ$1,058m, up 13.0%
- Profit before tax was NZ$41.2m
- Profit after tax was NZ$27.2m
- Staff numbers up 13.8% to 4,661
- NZ$40.6m capital expenditure
- NZ$17.9m operating expenditure investment
Key Points in summary for 2015-2016 – A$
- Total operating revenue was A$955m, up 13.0%
- Profit before tax was A$37.2m
- Profit after tax was A$24.5m
- Staff numbers up 13.8% to 4,661
- A$36.6m capital expenditure
- A$16.1m operating expenditure investment