Oh no! That's another year you didn't grow, KCOM

Brit telco KCOM Group has reported top line shrinkage for the seventh consecutive year, this time blaming problems on “legacy activities” while unsurprisingly pinning its future on cloud services glory.

The tech integrator/ comms provider reported a 6.1 per cent fall in revenues to £347m for the year ended 31 March - the last time KCOM revealed an expanding waistline was fiscal ’08, sales peaked at £518.3m

The KC division came in flat at £348m: the unit provides comms including broadband for consumers and small businesses in the Hull and East Yorkshire locale and this area made small gains that were then unpicked by the contact centre and publishing services segments.

But it was the Kcom wing where the declines happened; the tech integration element declined from £214.3m a year ago to £188m; Eclipse (biz connectivity) grew by £3m to £29.6m; Smart 421 (consultancy/ service management) was flat at £30.2m.

It was here that the group said “revenue and profit” was “impacted by continued decline in legacy activities”. Specifically, it was linked to lower demand for products resold and deployed in the traditional way.

Operating expenses were up by £10.5m to £325.5m and a series of costs for restructuring (job cuts) and impairment of goodwill didn’t aid bottom line goodness. Operating profit was £22.4m, down from £55.6m.

Finance costs and tax (albeit less than half the tax paid a year ago) caused net profit to drop for £12.54m, down from £38.7m.

KCOM said it is shifting business away from traditional “declining voice and volume-based connectivity services” in the enterprise sector to annuity based revenues (cloud and managed services). It has also seen rising demand for cloud services from SMBs. ®