ASX hosting business still paying dividends

The Australian Securities Exchange's (ASX) $36.5 million investment in its data centre is continuing to pay off, with the group’s technical services division outperforming other business units with growth of 9.9 percent last financial year.

But customer growth in its Australian Liquidity Centre appears to have stalled, with occupied racks growing from 111 to 117 in the six months to June 30, 2013. The ASX reported it now has 74 clients hosted in the centre, up from 59 at June 30, 2012.

Revenue from its hosing business was up 24 percent, delivering $5 million of the technical service division’s $49.8 million in revenue for the year.

The ASX leases out entire co-location racks to high-frequency trading firms, retail and investment banks, and managed service providers, among others.

“We continue to see good revenue growth across the businesses that are not directly linked to the equity markets,” ASX chief Elmer Funke Kupper told investors, after the group posted a full-year profit of $348.2 million.

“Technical services revenue continues to grow strongly on the back of the investment we’ve made in our technology,” Kupper said.

In April the ASX said it had leased two-thirds of the co-location racks in its $36.5 million Gore Hill data centre, 14 months after the high-speed facility was launched.

Kupper today said the speed and ways in which ASX clients consumed data was changing as the market evolved, meaning the ASX also needed to evolve.

The group’s low latency networking solution, called ASX Net Global, was launched in February, and the ASX said it would connect Australian customers to markets in London, Chicago, and Singapore via the service “later this year”.