Irish-founded telco reports €20.4m revenues


1 Mar 2005

Global Voice Group, an international telco founded in Ireland and listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, has reported Q4 revenues of €20.4m. It is also understood to be targeting a slice of the US$10bn storage service market.

Headed by former Computer Associates and Metromedia Ireland boss Noel Meaney, Global Voice achieved revenues of €20.4m and surpassed forecast revenues by more than 15pc.

Established in Dublin in early 2002, Global Voice listed on the Singapore stock exchange in October 2004 through a reverse takeover of Horizon Education & Technologies.

According to Meaney, the EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) performance of its European businesses of €6.98 million reflected a 28.3pc improvement over the forecast on the back of increased revenue and reduced operational costs.

He said: “Global Voice’s revenues were achieved following strong sales in our traditional product line, namely the leasing and sale of fibre and private fibre networks to corporate clients.

“Moving forward we will supplement this product set with our major product growth area, namely the sale of online business continuity and information management products that we began implementing across our European cities late last year using Hewlett-Packard technology,” Meaney said.

Global Voice has fibre networks across 14 European cities, which provide access to key locations within a city including business and industrial parks, educational centres, financial centres, Government buildings and Internet exchanges. The company’s European customers include many large German banks, Cable & Wireless, KLM, the City of Rotterdam, Essent, the University of Frankfurt, and in Ireland Magnet and Meteor.

Global Voice’s networks were constructed to consist of an average of six sub-ducts throughout each city and usually one sub-duct per city containing an average of 432 strands of optical fibre.

Since its foundation, Global Voice’s strategy has been to exploit the high-fibre density and prime city locations of its network assets, by capitalising on the competitiveness, security and reach that its networks can provide to its clients and partners alike.

The company’s core business is the delivery of business continuity and information management products to the regulated industries. It provides its customers with end-to-end regulatory compliant data storage solutions including online data storage, backup and restore, data archiving and content management services. The company’s European operational headquarters are located in Frankfurt, and the company has sales and engineering offices in Dublin, Amsterdam, Berlin and Stuttgart

Meaney added: “Looking ahead, our priority will be the continued execution of our strategy to exploit our strong network asset base by aggressively growing our core business and actively developing selective third party business alliances. Recent market initiatives have shown a number of new applications which require the use of fiber and which we expect will contribute to our continued growth.”

By John Kennedy