Aussie Broadband's growing pains
The ISP should have foreseen its scam problem after acquiring Symbio in 2023
Aussie Broadband founder Phillip Britt had plenty of nice things to say after striking a $262 million cash and scrip deal to buy communications-as-a-service company Symbio in November 2023.
"We have been impressed by the Symbio story, its team and its culture, which we think is well aligned with ours," Britt said, promising the acquisition would be earnings-per-share accretive in year one and help diversify Aussie away from being just a reseller of the National Broadband Network.[[Britt stood down from the Aussie board in March, ending his association with the company he founded with John Reisinger in 2003.]]
Aussie doesn't break out Symbio's exact contribution to the business anymore, but past disclosures suggest it brought in close to $220 million a year in revenue at a gross margin – the company's preferred measure – of a little under 50 per cent in financial 2026.[[Aussie uses gross margin as its key management measure of divisional performance. It is calculated by subtracting network and hardware expenses from revenue. It does not include staff costs and other corporate expenses. Rampart has used the same method to calculate gross margin from the figures provided in the scheme booklet provided to shareholders before the takeover.]] That's about 17 per cent of Aussie's $1.3 billion in total revenue for the year.
Symbio specialises in hosting phone services for wholesalers and large businesses, including providing phone numbers for legitimate uses such as dialling into a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting as an alternative to clicking on a web link. Enterprise customers can buy thousands of numbers at a time – Aussie hosts more than 8.3 million of them through Symbio and another similar but far smaller business it owns, Netsip.
This should be the end of the Symbio story; an unremarkable acquisition made by the country's third-largest internet service provider wanting to grow beyond its core NBN offering into a "diversified telecommunications and technology company."
But last month rival Vodafone put the company in the spotlight when it accused Symbio of being responsible for 98 per cent of the 24.8 million scam calls made to its customers over 12 months.
