That sum plus capex contributed to a 39 per cent increase in EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) loss to $1.57 billion.
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And, as Morrow also said, revenue was more than doubled over the 12 months with a “reported $421 million”.
NBN Co states that it grew its active NBN home and business services from 486,000 to the 1.1 million total over the course of the year, with the number of premises able to order an NBN service growing from 1.2 million to 2.9 million. Just under 120,000 active end users are on the fibre-to-the-node network that went live at the end of a year ago, and just 10 were on the budding hybrid-fibre coaxial network as at June 30.
Issues over the NBN, its technology mix, speed and quality of broadband delivery and the negative politics of the massive project were momentarily cast aside today when CEO Bill Morrow said, “During the year we doubled our Ready for Service footprint to 2.9 million premises, and at the same time, we doubled the amount of end users connected hitting a record high of 1.1 million”. The FTTN network represented the highest portion of that spend, with $1.7 billion.
Morrow was buoyant but measured about the performance for the full year, acknowledging that although NBN Co had exceeded its core FY2016 targets, more needed to be done to retain momentum of the business.
Fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) capex started its slide towards zero, falling more than $600 million to $1.08 billion. Unless the extra 20 devices in the next 4 years are all lightbulbs, this should be ringing alarm bells for nbn given many users on the FTTN, fixed wireless and satellite NBN connections, are already reporting poor connection speeds. The average revenue per user [ARPU] has increased from $40 per month to $43 per month, according to Mr Rue.
The $8.8 billion will be the last payment under the government’s $29.5 billion funding cap for the project, leaving NBN with a shortfall of between $16.5 billion and $26.5 billion which it is expected to seek from the private sector to complete the rollout.
For the first time, the company has broken out its subscriber costs, which it say were $193 million in financial year 2015, but rose to $582 million in 2016. He said the Finance department was now investigating options.
NBN Co had its ninth consecutive quarter of growth and the company has “met or exceeded every target the Board set for financial year 2016”, according to Mr Morrow.
“We are now evaluating longer-term funding options, in order to fund the business through to the time when sufficient cash flows are generated to run the business in a self-sustaining way”, Mr Rue said on Tuesday as NBN reported its full-year results.
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Almost two thirds of the nation’s premises were now in design, construction or had access to the NBN, he said.
