TORONTO and MONTREAL – Fixed wireless company Look Communications appears on the road to recovery and says it’s looking forward to the new year and becoming not-so-fixed with its upcoming mobile multimedia network.
Look and its parent company, Unique Broadband Systems, Inc., have changed their respective year-ends to August 31 in order to standardize their financial reporting periods, so the comparisons below might look a little different than most quarterly reports.
Revenues for year ended August 31, 2005 were $38 million and for last year’s eight month period, revenue was $28.6 million. Gross margins remained stable at 49.5%. High speed Internet subscribers increased by 20.4% to 13,021 while high speed revenues increased by 25.8% to $6.8 million on an annualized basis.
High Speed revenues are 18% of total service revenues in 2005, compared to 13% in 2004.
EBITDA (earnings before interest, financing charges, income taxes, depreciation and amortization) for the twelve months of came in at negative-$900,000 compared to the negative EBITDA of $2.6 million for the eight months of 2004, “a major improvement of $1.7 million,” says the press release. “This decrease was primarily attributable to reduction in our operating expenses associated with management changes in the company since June 2004.”
EBITDA was positive for the last five months of the 2005 fiscal year, signaling the turnaround of the company, added the release. The net loss for the twelve months of 2005 was $7.8 million, compared to a net loss of $7.3 million for just eight months of 2004.
"It has been a very good year for the company," said Gerald McGoey, chairman and CEO. "We have continued with the restructuring of our existing operations to improve efficiencies and reduce costs. At the same time, we continue to work on our exciting new strategy of building a mobile multimedia network. A beta test site will be completed in early 2006 while new handheld devices, the size of a normal PDA, are being developed and will be available in 2006.
"We believe we are ideally positioned to make the successful transition to mobile multimedia. Interest in these services is gathering momentum in North America and other parts of the world," McGoey added. "With our large spectrum holding, our broadcast license, our programming contracts and our technological intellectual property, our company is ideally positioned to offer these exciting new mobile multimedia services, which allows us to provide extensive content on news, sports, finance, weather and other programming."
The company, which launched as a wireless digital television competitor against cable and satellite companies, did not release its current subscriber numbers.
