Broadband Infraco's new company structure will come into effect on 1 October.
Speaking at the company's annual general meeting yesterday, acting CEO Andrew Shaw said the new corporate plan has three primary focus areas and four enhanced value propositions.
Infraco generated lower than expected turnover of R297 million for the 2010/11 financial year, generated a net loss of R207 million, and an external audit revealed irregular expenditure of R151 million and wasteful expenditure of R1.9 million.
Part of this poor performance was attributed to a lack of internal controls.
“While we were rolling out aggressively... there was a lapse in compliance to policies and procedures in the company,” said chairperson Andrew Mthembu.
“Unfortunately, what came out of the audit was very scary stuff.” He added that the company is taking steps to put in the relevant controls now.
Shaw said the internal control weaknesses were identified and the majority have been addressed.
Left behind
He added that the three primary focus areas for the company going forward are financial, services and internal processes.
In terms of financial improvements, Infraco wants to retain existing customers and attract new clients through enhanced service.
The company's anchor client is Neotel. Other clients include MTN and Seacom. Shaw said Infraco is in the process of signing up other clients and all major telecoms players are trialling its network. He added that the company wants to gain some traffic from players like the State IT Agency.
Infraco also wants to improve its EBITDA margin and enhance capital programme rollout.
“When WACS comes into play, we can service the rollout not only to the SADC [Southern African Development Community], but to countries further north as well,” said the acting CEO.
The cable landed in SA in April, at the country's third international fibre gateway, in Yzerfontein. It will link Southern Africa and Europe, and has a capacity of 5.12Tbps, making it Africa's largest-capacity cable.
Infraco is part of the consortium that is funding the cable.
“We hope this will come on stream in the early part of 2012 and we believe this will be a huge addition to our terrestrial network,” added Shaw.
For internal process improvement, Infraco will improve compliance to Treasury regulations, focus on human capital development, and strategically re-align the organisation to the changing needs of the market.
“This is a very dynamic market. It's very clear that this market changes very rapidly. If we don't adjust to the market, the market will leave us behind,” said Shaw.
African hub
Shaw said the newly developed corporate plan provides for an additional four enhanced value propositions.
The first is backhaul to provide fibre connectivity from mobile operator switching centres and under-serviced areas. Projects will be developed either on a co-build or paid-for basis.
Metro presence will see partnerships for integration with metro fibre networks, providing of backbone connectivity to metros as customers, and using metro fibre to provide a complete wholesale network solution.
The third proposition is to connect neighbouring African countries to SA and to alternative submarine cables for redundancy.
The final value proposition is for engineering services, where there will be active collaboration on fibre construction projects, leveraging rail and power line servitudes, and developing projects on a paid-for basis only.
The company will also improve its existing backbone by increasing the number of POP sites and expanding the existing service offering of providing managed services on main routes.
“In the future, several routes may be expanded in order to provide Dark Fibre or Lambdas,” said Shaw.
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