Aussie Broadband has revised its strategic ambition for 2028 upward to have 1.5 million NBN broadband customers, half a million more than initially projected.
This would translate into a 17 percent share of the NBN market.
It also tracks against a matching ambition to lift group revenue from $1.6 billion to $2 billion and to boost earnings-per-share from a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent to more than 30 percent.
The upgraded ambition targets follow a busy first half of the fiscal year for Aussie Broadband’s mergers and acquisitions team, which continued into this year.
It started last August when Aussie executed series of complicated transactions to divest its budget brand telco, Buddy, to Tangerine Telecom.
Tangerine and its sister brand, More, then entered a wholesale agreement with Aussie Broadband for their 290,000 customers.
Aussie Broadband's customer acquisition strategy resumed early this month when it agreed to buy AGL's retail telco arm in a scrip deal that values the energy provider’s broadband business at up to $125 million.
After that deal is complete Aussie expects the AGL buyout to grow its broadband customer base to more than 1.25 million connections and its mobile services to almost 400,000 devices.
The deal will see a combined total of 350,000 customers of AGL’s mobile and broadband business, AGL Telco, moved to Aussie Broadband’s network.
The acquisitions continued Monday, with the telco announcing it had agreed to buy specialist SME communications provider Nexgen for $44.1 million,
The Nexgen acquisition will see Aussie grow its base of small and medium-size business NBN customers by 6000 to add $8.1 million in EBITDA to in FY26, with expected savings from removing duplicate costs expected to be between $2 million and $4 million.
Though smaller than the AGL deal, chief executive Brian Maher said that folding Nexgen’s sales operation into its business division could boost its ability to land larger but sub-enterprise-scale deals.
“Aussie's strengths to date have been in the smaller end of the SME market with single site operations, maybe up to five employees and enterprise and then enterprise and government takes over around 50 [employees] and above.
“Where we've got a little bit softer is in that five to 50 seat range and that's where Nexgen is really, really strong. We see that as a really complementary go-to-market strategy.
"We have a lot of leads, they're very, very good at converting leads and particularly in that group. We have a lot of length that we don't do particularly well on converting that we think we can divert into Nextgen and get a really good return on it,” Maher said.
Analysts questioned Maher closely on how the company intended to meet its upgraded three-year strategic ambitions, particular its revenue goal and whether it could be achieved without further acquisitions.
“It’s an ambition and there are many paths to an ambition. If you [calculate the compound annual growth rate of] existing revenue, you add in More [and] Tangerine, you add in AGL, you add in Nextgen, you allow some growth in those businesses as well, you get pretty close to number we’re talking about based on our recent history.
“But we're not, we're not saying that it absolutely all be done organically. There may be some M&A opportunity to help us get there as well,” Maher said.
The choice of targets, however, appears be narrowing. Late Last week, Aussie Broadband’s rival and former acquisition target, Superloop, announced plans to acquire fibre-to-the-premise (FTTP) network wholesaler, Lightning Broadband, for $165 million after upgrading its full-year earnings guidance.
The cash deal, which is subject to approvals, will see Superloop take a 100 percent stake in the multi-dwelling unit specialist’s owner, Lynham Networks, to expand its built and contracted FTTP footprint to 170,000 lots.
In its first half for FY2026, Superloop grew its customer base by 74,000 services to 805,000, a 21 percent over the previous corresponding period.
In February 2024, Aussie offered to buy Superloop for $466 million. Howeve, Superloop’s investors accepted advice that the bid undervalued the company and rejected.
At the time, however, the investors also agreed that combining the companies was strategically sound.
During the half, Aussie Broadband grew its on-net subscriber base by 39,000 to reach 827,700 at the end of December 31, 2025.
Agentic offering
The Nexgen deal, expected to be completed by the end of next month, will also see the company add a new agentic AI offering targeted at SMEs to its capabilities.
Aussie Broadband did not provide details of the agentic AI system at its earnings presentation.
However, Nexgen late last week published in-depth marketing material exploring trends on the topic of integrating VoIP with AI.
AI capabilities the material covered included intelligent call-routing, automated transcription and analytics.
By the numbers
Aussie Broadband yesterday also revealed that it was exiting the enterprise cloud market to focus on it core telco business, selling Digital Sense Hosting to managed infrastructure provider 11:11 for a total consideration of $18 million.
In a statement, Aussie said the divestment transaction “created a one-off non-cash impairment to goodwill of $14.8 million”.
Aussie today reported a net profit after tax and amortisation (NPATA) of $31.3 for million for its first half to December 31, 2025 on group revenue of $637.8 million – that represented a 24.5 percent increase in profit over the previous corresponding period.
Its group revenue result represented an 8.4 percent increase over the previous corresponding half. Its underlying EBITDA reached $74.7 million, a 13.5 percent increase over the previous corresponding period.
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