Bruce Whitfield:
First half results today from a fascinating company that operates at the cutting edge of 21st-century telecommunications. It is called the Datapro Group and it recently bought Orion Telecoms and amongst its better-known assets is the internet service provider @lantic.

Tony van Marken is the chairperson of Datapro and you are a fairly recent newcomer to Datapro yourself, Tony. You were looking around for an asset and apparently you went and bought three percent of the company and have subsequently become considerably more involved.

Tony van Marken:
Yes, that is right Bruce. I got involved about 12 months ago through the Metair Group and became an investor, joined the board, and what started as a part-time occupation has now become a full-time mission in my life but it has been very exciting.

Bruce Whitfield:
How do you go from occupation to mission?

Tony van Marken:
I think everyone needs a mission you know. You have got to have a goal and the mission really is to build an alternative operator in the market and that is what we try and do.

Bruce Whitfield:
An alternative operator in the market, in other words a competitor and a sustainable and a strong competitor to Telkom.

Tony van Marken:
Exactly.

Bruce Whitfield:
The past year has been something of a revolution for the company, from an ISP operating things like @lantic, a very successful business, into a broader telecommunications since the acquisition of Orion Telecom and the results reflect what, only a month of Orion's revenues in these results. Do they have a material impact on the numbers?

Tony van Marken:
Bruce, as you said, we only had one month of Orion, the numbers, which contributed 76-million but if you exclude Orion you will see that all of the businesses grew organically quite successfully. The corporate ISP business which is traditionally called just Datapro grew 50 percent, @lantic, our consumer ISP, grew almost 50 percent as well and I think we have demonstrated to the market that we can continue to experience strong organic growth combined with acquisitions that are accretive to earnings.

And I think if you look over the last two years with the impact of the acquisition of @lantic, Definity Telecom, and now Orion Telecom, I think our strategy has been quite successful.

Bruce Whitfield:
Because the lion's share of your revenues in this first half come from voice-over-IP and similar products. Those in themselves are fairly new introductions to the South African market.

Tony van Marken:
Yes, I mean voice-over-IP is not the biggest portion of that. Certainly our voice revenue has grown. You know from the comparative period it was sort of 10 percent of revenue to now 60 percent of revenue. But that is a combination of least cost routing, you know GSM traffic, international traffic, as well as voice-over-IP, but certainly the voice businesses is growing although we are still somewhat hampered by some regulatory issues in the market place.

Bruce Whitfield:
Just how hamstrung are you by regulatory issues?

Tony van Marken:
Well Bruce you know the key issue is being able to interconnect with the incumbent operators.

Bruce Whitfield:
Explain that please, sorry to interrupt but interconnect with incumbent operators terrifies me.

Tony van Marken:
Basically if you make a phone call from Telkom to one of the likes of Datapro you need to take that call and connect it to our network and vice versa. Now that has never been allowed in South Africa to date. We have now signed what are called interconnect agreements, it is a legal agreement where we can now do that with Telkom and Vodacom and MTN etc, and you have to put in place infrastructure, it is quite expensive, you have to test it, you have to make sure the core quality is there.

We have gone through that whole process; however, we are still waiting for Icasa to ratify the rate that you will pay to make a phone call from say a Telkom fixed line to a 087 number that has been given by Datapro to one of our customers. So we are still fighting with one hand tied behind the back in the voice business.

Bruce Whitfield:
So a tough battle there. Are you operating though despite the fact that you haven't been ratified by Icasa, are you able to operate? Is there any interim sort of arrangement?

Tony van Marken:
No, you can't really. I mean keep in mind though that this revenue stream has never been available to companies like us before. So this is a new revenue stream that we are pursuing.

We have been able to reroute calls through London for example which might sound ridiculous but that is one way to get around some of these issues but we believe that this will be resolved imminently and I think that will be to the benefit of the marketplace as a whole but you know notwithstanding that we are competing well in all segments of our business and the businesses are growing.

Bruce Whitfield:
It is a business we are going to keep a very close eye on, Tony van Marken thanks very much indeed, the chairperson of Datapro and he has been involved with the company for the last 12 months and there has been extraordinary growth in that business, very exciting in the telecommunications space. The goal, to become a leading telecommunications player and a thorn in the side of Telkom.