Following the Competition authorities’ approval of Nashua’s acquisition of ECN in mid-2011, teams from Nashua Mobile were deployed to ECN’s offices to assist with the swift and efficient conversion of the Nashua LCR base onto the ECN VoIP platform, a process which continues.
To date this acquisition has been extremely successful, with ECN contributing R136,3 million to revenue in the four months it was part of the Nashua group.
The number of BusinessCall voice minutes made by ECN customers, among them several blue-chip corporates, currently exceeds 2,5 million minutes per day. We endeavour to convert an average of 100 existing Nashua Mobile LCR customers per month to ECN’s VoIP service through the collaboration of the two businesses’ sales teams, while continuing to add new clients at historical take-on rates. The issuing of ECN telephone numbers and the opportunity for inbound call traffic growth is a key project for the coming year.
With LCR steadily becoming an unfeasible source of revenue, ECN’s role within the broader Nashua value offering is critical. The ability to provide IP connections at customers’ sites will enable us to deliver a host of value-added products and services. With these services increasingly hosted online in the so-called “cloud”, and with companies becoming more comfortable with the concept of accessing software and hardware as a service as opposed to outright purchase, ECN’s network has the reach to grow its share of the market for converged voice and data services. Projections for ECN’s minute growth are in the order of 40% to 50% for next year, while the new next-generation product set will ensure substantial additional revenue growth well into the coming years.
While ECN’s physical network has proven its robustness, the business envisages continuing to lease rather than build, except where there is sufficient critical mass or the nature of traffic requires that network infrastructure be owned. Similarly, any participation in the envisaged unbundling of South Africa’s local loop, as well as other deregulation opportunities, will be reviewed as these unfold. |
