Empired MD, Russell Baskerville
The CFO of ASX-listed Empired (ASX:EPD), Mark Waller, has resigned from the company and will be replaced by David Hinton.
Hinton starts his new role on May 2 and prior to joining Empired, he was the CFO and company secretary for Amcom Telecommunications.
“I am confident that David’s extensive experience, particularly the relevance of his Amcom experience to Empired, will be of great value to the company,” Empired managing director, Russell Baskerville, said.
Waller has clocked up more than 11 years at the company. From the time he started at Empired, it had 15 full time staff and a services revenue of about $2 million. Since then he has seen through the company’s ASX listing, grown revenues to between $159 million and $169 million, with staff numbers nearing 1000 across 11 offices in four countries.
Waller has no plans to enter full time work in the near term, but will commit to overseeing the transition of his role, and working across the organisation on the integration and improvement of its business processes and systems.
In January, Empired was questioned by the ASX about its share price drop from $0.77 to $0.50, before announcing a downward revision in its performance figures.
During the first half of FY16, Empired’s net profit plunged $3.7 million into the red with a $2.3 million one off, non-cash fixed assets write off also impacting results.
EBITDA was down to $900,000 from $3.9 million and revenue was $79 million up from $50 million at the same time last year.
The company said EBITDA was impacted by the transition of the Australian sales organisation into a single integrated portfolio sales team resulting in a lag to sales orders, which impacted utilisation across the east coast.
The company expects strong growth in revenue from multi-year contracts in the second half following $32 million of strategic contracts secured in the first half.
Empired was trading at $0.35 at the time of publication.
