David Tudehope (Macquarie Telecom)
Macquarie Telecom has witnessed its half year profit slide by 48 per cent for the period ended 31 December 2021.
The publicly listed company still generated a net profit after tax of $3.7 million, but this was almost half of that from the previous corresponding period of $7 million.
Macquarie Telecom attributed this drop to their capital expenditure of $68.9 million, a 10 per cent fall on the same time last year of $77.3 million.
The bulk of this, according to Macquarie Telecom, was for its "growth capex" which now stands at $46 million. These funds are largely directed at the fit out of its Intellicentre 3 East data centre.
Based at Macquarie Park, the $80-million Intellicentre 3 East was held up by significant delays and was originally marked for completion at the end of calendar year 2019. The exterior of the building was only completed by October 2020.
The investment in the data centre infrastructure taps into the wider hybrid cloud IT mega trend, which was reflected in Macquarie Telecom's half year 2022 revenue.
Continuing last year's trend of cloud growth, Macquarie Telecom saw its cloud services and government business finally outstrip its traditional telecom services.
Broken down, the cloud services and government unit grew 18.8 per cent from $64 million to $76.4 million in revenue, more than 50 per cent of Macquarie Telecom's total revenue of $149 million.
In contrast, the telecom business fell from $68.8 million in half year 2021 to $64 million this year.
Meanwhile, Macquarie Telecom's data centre unit posted a marginal growth of 8 per cent to $21 million. However, its intersegment elimination continued to run at a loss, which increased from $9.5 million to $12.1 million year-to-year.
At the same time, its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) for the first half ending December 31 2021 grew from $36.4 million to $40 million.
“Strong demand for cyber security, private and public cloud has driven our investment in our government and cloud services businesses," said David Tudehope, Macquarie Telecom CEO.
"Continued demand from our federal government agencies for cybersecurity and secure cloud, including tier 1 agencies such as [the] ATO [Australian Tax Office], gives high confidence for future growth in the government business."
Tudehope also said its Intellicentre 3 East data centre fit out was completed and has started generating revenue in company's most recent quarter.
