CloudCoCo Regulatory News (CLCO)

29 March 2012

Pinnacle Telecom Group plc

("Pinnacle" or the "Company")

AGM Statement and Trading Update

Pinnacle Telecom Group plc, (AIM: PINN) the AIM listed provider of converged managed services, will be holding its Annual General Meeting today at 11:30am. At the meeting, Alan Bonner, Chief Executive of the Group will make the following statement on the Group's progress in the year ending 30 September 2012:

Pinnacle continues to make significant progress on the delivery of its converged managed services strategy, with an increasing proportion of revenues being generated from our suite of cloud, IT security, mobility, data and IP solutions.

We are benefiting from the growth in demand from the UK SME market for next generation communication solutions, either delivered on premise or in the cloud. Companies that have not yet migrated to cloud computing and virtualization are feeling pressure to do so and those who have already switched are seeing the benefits. A recent study by Merrill Lynch predicts the cloud computing market to be worth $160 Billion by 2013, Gartner predicts the size of the Cloud Computing Market will be $150 Billion by the same year and also predicts that 60% of server workloads will be virtualized by 2014.

Trading in the first quarter of the year has been strong, with revenues 175% ahead of the same period last year. 80% of our turnover is now recurring and we are starting to see the success of our strategy taking effect. Our focus on fully integrating the four acquisitions we completed last year has gone well, and whilst we won't see the full financial benefits in this year's results, due to one-off acquisition and re-organisation costs, the integration has already resulted in future annualised cost savings, achieved through synergies, in excess of £600k per annum. This represents a 32% reduction in the acquired cost base when compared to the date of acquisition

Our customer retention rates have remained high throughout the year at 95% and our customer base has grown 250% over the last twelve months, to 3,056 customers, achieved through a combination of both organic and acquired growth. With this enlarged customer base comes the opportunity to cross-sell new products and services and provides us with a solid foundation from which to grow the business in 2012.

We are particularly pleased to have been awarded McAfee UK & Ireland Partner of the year for our work in the IT Security Sector in 2011. In January this year we kicked off our Public Sector initiative, which we are hopeful will lead to a valuable source of new business.

Our preparations for Pinnacle's involvement in the Olympic and Paralympic Games are well underway. Pinnacle will provide data, connectivity and voice services to BBC International and its world media partners, enabling worldwide broadcast coverage of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We will supply BBC International with the resilient fibre connections; microwave back-up links, analogue and ISDN connectivity. Pinnacle will also supply IP telephone switchboards, telephone handsets and data connections to Stratford Broadcast Tower's offices, studios and production crews for the world's media.

The Group's cross-selling strategy continues to improve and our business now enjoys high levels of recurring turnover, which provides us with good visibility of future revenues. We have strong momentum within the group, our pipeline of opportunities is growing and we look forward with confidence to significant growth in the current financial year.

All Company announcements & news can be found on http://www.pinnacletelecomgroup.co.uk

Pinnacle Telecom Group plc (AIM: PINN) Pinnacle Telecom Group plc focuses on the business market across the UK. Driven by leveraging organic opportunities as well as through targeted acquisitions, we provide a wide range of converged managed solutions including Managed Support Services, Unified Communications and Collaboration, Communications and Mobility, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure services.

Pinnacle is a fully licensed Public Telephone Operator, has its own telephone network and interconnects with BT, Virgin Media and THUS. It has its own hosted voice (VoIP) platforms and engineers and its own ISP operating from its data centres in Glasgow, London and Brighton. 

The Group has grown revenues 740% since 2007 and aims to build a £50m business, by leveraging organic opportunities as well as through targeted acquisitions. We create solutions that join together a company's three core networks (IT network, telephony network and mobile network). Our strategy of cross-selling the five elements of our converged managed services offering is now delivering positive results.