Carving out a position in South Africa’s fibre race and bolstering growth through suitable acquisitions looks to be the theme of the new financial year, as pan-African telecommunications firm Seacom reports another year of solid progress.

Acquisitions and partnerships are expected to continue during 2018 to gain scale and expedite growth, Seacom CEO Byron Clatterbuck told media during a business update on Thursday.

Other key focus areas for the next 12 months include enterprise service expansion into well-known markets, investments in fibre deployment and the leveraging of submarine capacity encircling Africa, for expansion into West Africa.

This follows a successful prior 12 months for Seacom.

During the business update at Seacom’s headquarters, in Fourways, business head Grant Parker indicated that the aggressive targets previously set for the company have been surpassed.

Over the past year the company has seen a 30% growth in sales, an increase in the number of channel partners to 225 – with ten new applications received a week – and the more than doubling of its rapidly growing direct and indirect client base to around 2 500 customers – 90% of whom are in South Africa and 650 of which were added through the acquisition of MacroLan.

Seacom acquired Cape Town-based Internet service provider and managed services provider MacroLan in August to extend the reach of its fibre network to more metropolitan areas across South Africa, and to bolster its managed services capability for business customers.

At the time, Clatterbuck said that the acquisition was a continuation of Seacom’s significant growth after the launch of the business unit, which focuses on bringing broadband and cloud services directly to commercial business users.

While best known for its 17 000 km undersea network along the eastern and southern coastlines, the group also stepped into the field of fibre in July with its “pilot” self-deployment of a 7.3 km network to business and home users in Meyersdal, Alberton.

The last-mile fibre network passes several businesses, residential developments and retail properties in the area, in line with the group’s ambitions of extending its fibre reach.

This formed the first phase of Seacom’s strategy to roll out high-speed fibre services in the greater Johannesburg area, noted chief commercial officer Steve Briggs, pointing out that the company was making the key investments necessary to play its part in the fibre “land grab”.

Clatterback indicated that, over the next year, Seacom planned to triple or quadruple the company’s amount of self-deployed fibre.