Vonex telco user base in rapid climb

ASX listed telco upstart Vonex is reaping dividends from its focus on gaining market share as the NBN rolls out across Australia, with a 28% year-on-year gain in customers using its cloud based telephony system known as a PBX.

Its registered PBX user base is expanding at a rate of 500 per month and growing.

Vonex hit a record of 24,000 PBX users at the end of July 2018, up from 18,700 PBX users in July 2017.

The growth in users is mainly derived from Channel Partner sales according to the company.

Vonex has also started a trial marketing campaign in south-eastern Queensland for information gathering ahead of a launch across major Australian capital cities in October 2018.

In addition, clients of Vonex’s wholesale business that currently have PBX users on other platforms will be transferred to its hosted platform.

This transfer will be accelerated over the next two months as a few major wholesale clients complete their switchover to Vonex’s architecture.

Vonex’s PBX system allows for unlimited lines and telephone numbers to be created - and sometimes within just minutes.

Calls are placed over the internet instead of via costly telco fixed lines and the resultant savings are quite material.

Further growth is expected through Vonex’s recent partnership with NASDAQ listed global communications software solutions provider CounterPath.

This will allow the company to offer a Vonex branded version of Counterpath’s “Bria” softphone communications software alongside its existing suite of VoIP and hosted PBX services.

Vonex has also identified a number of enterprise clients it has not previously targeted that will benefit from the expanded service offering and capabilities.

The company had previously identified the rollout of the NBN as the perfect opportunity to pinch customers from the big telcos on a systematic basis as the old Telstra copper cabled network service is shut down town by town, suburb by suburb and business by business.

Customers  must choose to re-sign with their existing provider on the new NBN fibre network– or perhaps take the opportunity to test the market for a new supplier

Vonex has already seen some early benefits to this trend with the company’s revenues rising from $7m in FY2017 to $8.3m in FY2018.