Empired thanks digital transformation initiatives for AU$15.4m FY17 EBITDA
For the 2017 financial year, Australian IT services provider Empired has reported AU$15.4 million in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation (EBITDA), on revenue of AU$168 million.
Yearly operating cash flow for the Perth-based company was AU$9.6 million, up 36 percent over the corresponding period last year.
During the 12 months to June 30, 2017, the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX)-listed company said it experienced strong demand for digital transformation services, which it said included data analytics, "modern" applications, and cloud.
Empired managing director Russell Baskerville said underpinning the company's growth was its recurring revenue base, as well as growing revenue from its multi-year contract wins.
Earlier this year, Empired was awarded a contract worth AU$15 million to provide the Western Australian government with cloud services as part of the state's GovNext-ICT project.
Empired will provide the WA government with centralised directory services, centralised identity services, and certificate authority under a consumption-based model, with the potential to scale beyond 140,000 government users based on agency take-up of the GovNext-ICT platform.
The five-year contract, with options to extend for a further five years, will see Empired act as a subcontractor to Japanese IT giant NEC.
NEC's contract includes datacentre co-location services, private cloud services, public cloud integration, network and communication services, and identity management, in addition to general IT-related operations.
NEC, by way of Empired, will also implement a cloud brokerage service that it expects will enable government agencies to use Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) under a utility model.
In March, Empired raised AU$16 million following the issuance of 36.3 million new ordinary shares.
At the time, the company said the funds would be used to reduce its net debt -- which came in at $13.8 million at the end of the 2017 financial year -- as well as to use for working capital and to provide certainty of funding for deferred vendor payments.
For the first half of the 2017 financial year, Empired reported AU$6.4 million in EBITDA on revenue of AU$84 million.