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Hawaiian Telcom provided a big boost to parent Cincinnati Bell’s revenue, but the Ohio company reported Thursday it lost $30 million in the fourth quarter and $69.8 million for the year as the result of transaction and integration costs and interest expenses incurred in financing the acquisitions of Hawaiian Telcom and data storage and cloud services provider Onx Enterprise Solutions.
Revenue jumped 32 percent to $399 million in the fourth quarter and 29 percent to $1.38 billion for the year. Hawaiian Telcom has contributed $175 million in revenue to Cincinnati Bell since the deal closed on July 2. Cincinnati Bell projects that Hawaiian Telcom will contribute $350 million to $360 million in revenue in 2019.
Hawaiian Telcom shareholders, who received part of their acquisition payment in Cincinnati Bell stock, have seen the stock decline 44 percent since that time. The shares fell 26 cents to $8.76 Thursday but are up 12.6 percent since the start of this year.
Cincinnati Bell bought Hawaiian Telcom for $650 million and Onx for $201 million.
In the year-earlier periods, Cincinnati Bell lost $11.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2017 and earned $40 million for all of that year.
“The merger with Hawaiian Telcom was an important step towards building scale and locking in fiber density value for shareholders and customers, as we continue to anticipate and capitalize on the growing demand for speed that only a fiber network can provide,” Cincinnati Bell President and CEO Leigh Fox said on the company’s earnings conference call. “We are confident that dense fiber will increasingly be a market differ- entiator, and our continued investment in fiber networks will further differentiate us from our RLEC (rural local exchange carrier) peers. … Our fiber investments resulted in both Cincinnati and Hawaiian increasing their internet market share year over year.”
FOURTH-QUARTER LOSS
$30 million
YEAR-EARLIER LOSS
$11.9 million