Huge Group revises forecast

AltX-listed telecommunications company Huge Group has made an upward revision of the profit forecast in its prospectus, to account for recent developments.

Huge Group, which listed last month, came to the market built around wholly-owned least-cost routing firm TelePassport, and acquired rival company CentraCell just more than a week later, sparking a leap in its share price.

CentraCell was merged with TelePassport and the combined entity was renamed Huge Telecom.
 
The group issued revised forecasts this morning for the seven months to February next year and for the 12 months to February 2009.

The new figures show expected revenue of R299.21 million for the seven months to February next year, with pretax profit of R30.49 million, net profit of R21.65 million and earnings and headline earnings of 34.77c per share.

For the year to February 2009, Huge Group is forecasting revenue of R575.78 million, with pretax profit of R64.95 million, net profit of R46.11 million and earnings and headline earnings of 43.21c per share.

The group points out that the forecasts have been made on assumptions about factors that directors can influence – such as revenue mix, profit margins and operational issues – as well as outside factors over which they have no control, such as a proposed merger of Telkom and MTN, inflation, and other matters.

At the same time, Huge Group says the market has responded well to its new live data monitoring service, TMT, which monitors a company's telecommunications infrastructure using real-time data feeds from the PABX system.

Although the service was only recently launched, in conjunction with TMT partner Multimatics, there are already 300 active sites, says Huge Group CEO Anton Potgieter.

The Huge Group share closed untraded at R3.10 yesterday, off its high of R3.45.

By Iain Scott