Reaching the turning point
prepay customers, and it is part of the Rural Connectivity Group delivering the government’s RBI2 network. Its founder Rod Drury showed he had the executive skills to go global, said judge Sandy Maier.
At the end of the March 2017 financial year, Xero had just over 1 million paying subscribers in 180 countries and its revenue was $295.4 million.
The net loss was $69m but this was reduced to $21.1 million six months later. For the half year ending September 30 Xero added 160,000 net new subscribers and peaking at 1.2 million.
A total of 1500 updates were delivered this year, and Xero is concentrating on adding more services.
Drury told the New Zealand Herald: “We know that small business hate doing accounting, and they’re not trained in it, so we’re well on the journey now to small businesses not having to worry about the technical parts of accounting.
“If we can get their documents into the system, then we can do their accounting for them.” Datacom, founded in Christchurch, has been around the information technology scene for 50 years and it has moved with the times to produce impressive results.
One of the leading IT service providers in Asia Pacific, Datacom went through a transformation by expanding into digital and Cloudbased services, and increasing its wide and local area networks.
Datacom completed a national network in Australia to connect its interstate data centres and allow access to digital assets and public Cloud resources, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Datacom is spending $45 million upgrading its four data centres in New Zealand, adding more than 2MW of power capacity nationally.
Datacom Data Centres Director Tom Jacob said “we are looking forward to further enabling our customers’ digital transformational op- portunities through the Cloud so they can best take advantage of core emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Internet of Things and hybrid cloud solutions.”
Judge Sandy Maier said Datacom was a long-haul story with 50 years of continuous growth.
It has had a 10-year compound growth rate of 11.3 per cent — “that’s a good number.”
Datacom reported a 61 per cent increase in net profit to $43.7m for the year ending March 31, 2017. Revenue rose 9.5 per cent to $1.16b.
The group employs more than 4880 people in 30 offices in New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Vietnam, United States and Britain.
Maier said Datacom contributes 3.7 per cent of its net profit after tax to charitable contributions.
“That’s a very big number for these types of companies and I’ve never seen that before.”