Olive Communications talks of growth after solid fiscal year

Olive Communications has revealed that its cloud platform strategy is delivering results and it is well positioned to build on future growth in the UK and beyond.

The comms specialist has shared some details of its financial performance as it releases annual results with EBITDA improving by 43% to £2.1m on revenues down 7.6% at £28.9m for the 12 months ended January 2019.

The finger of blame for the falling revenues was pointed at a combination of factors on the mobile front, including EU roaming charges and moves by operators to optimise tarifs.

There was better news on the cloud front with the firm now getting just shy of half of uits revenues (48%) from managed and hosted services.

Some of the highlights in the last fiscal year included a major customer win with the Yorkshire Building Society and a national retailer with 800 stores looking for contact centre and unified comms services.

Olive has only recently opened an office in Australia, with similar plans to do the same in the US, and has made international growth one of the priorities for the current fiscal year.

The firm also appointed Andrew Jane a few weeks ago as CTO tasked with helping drive that exp[ansion strategy as well as helping develop the cloud platform.

Brett Morris, CFO at Olive Communications, focused on the positive: “Our cloud services are going from strength-to-strength, delivering high recurring revenues plus associated project and implementation revenues."

“This continued growth in Cloud services, supported by Vodafone encouraging mobile only users to adopt OneNet unified comms, together with a better year for mobile means we expect revenues to return to growth in the current year to January 2020. EBITDA margins are set to continue to expand, which all points to continuing EBITDA growth for the current year," he added.

His confidence was echoed by Martin Flick, CEO at Olive Communications: "With revenue rising Olive is set to embark on a period of growth in the UK and globally. We’re now in a strong position to consider further expansion opportunities and M&A activity to enhance our capabilities even more, and to develop our proposition to the benefit of our growing list of customers.”