M2 Group

» see m2.com.au as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Hundreds of thousands of Australians paid this company every month without ever seeing its name on anything. What they saw was Dodo on a shopping center kiosk, or iPrimus printed at the top of a bill. M2 Group was the holding company above all of it, run out of Melbourne and listed on the ASX as MTU. To the people whose broadband it carried it was close to invisible.

Vaughan Bowen founded it in 1999 and ran it for about twelve years before moving to an executive director seat at the October 2011 annual meeting, with Geoff Horth taking over as chief executive. The company's own description of what it did kept widening: a provider of communication and utility services to Australian households and small businesses, insurance included, with more than 3,000 employees across Australia and New Zealand, plus an operation in the Philippines. At the 2013 annual meeting shareholders voted to drop the word Telecommunications from the name, which tells you how far the thing had drifted from being a phone company.

It grew by acquisition at a pace that put it on the BRW fastest-growing hundred five separate times between 2003 and 2008, and in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 eight times between 2004 and 2013. Then in September 2015 it agreed to merge with Vocus Communications, and five months later the name came off the register.

~ the case file ~

~ bought, not built ~

The acquisition list is the company. Protel in 2005, a small broadband and telephony operator. Wholesale Communications Group, Tenex, Southern Cross Telecommunications and Orion Telecommunications across 2007. Unitel in 2008, with People Telecom agreed in the same year. In 2009 it took selected assets out of Commander Communications, a name that had sat on office handsets around the country for decades.

Then the big ones. Primus Telecommunications for 192 million dollars in 2012. Dodo for 204 million and Eftel for 44 million in 2013, the Eftel deal bringing aaNet and Engin along with it, plus ClubTelco. CallPlus and 2Talk in New Zealand for 250 million New Zealand dollars in 2015. Six years of that and the company had assembled a national consumer telco without ever building one.

~ the date that is wrong in most places ~

The merger with Vocus was announced on 28 September 2015 and the usual Australian scheme machinery took five months to run. The Supreme Court of Victoria approved it on 5 February 2016, which was the last approval needed. The court orders were lodged with the regulator on 8 February and MTU was suspended from trading at the close that day. New Vocus shares started trading on a deferred basis on 9 February. The scheme itself was implemented on 22 February, when the shares actually transferred and the consideration was issued.

Wikipedia and most of the coverage that followed it settled on 5 February as the date M2 merged with Vocus, because that is the day the headlines ran. Vocus lodged a presentation with the ASX for its 2016 annual meeting that puts it in one bullet: 22 February 2016, scheme of arrangement with M2 implemented. The company stopped being a company on 22 February 2016, and the fortnight between the two dates is the ordinary gap between a court saying yes and a share register being rewritten.

~ what the pipe did next ~

M2 holders ended up with 56 percent of the combined group, Geoff Horth stayed on to run it, and the surviving name was Vocus. On paper that is M2 buying Vocus with its own shares and then taking the smaller party's name, which happens more often in telecom than anyone outside it would guess.

Eftel, which M2 had bought in 2013, had already stopped selling to anyone by 2022 and sits in this graveyard under its own slug. Dodo is still trading. Commander is still trading. The holding company that briefly owned them both has one surviving trace on the public internet: m2.com.au, which no longer serves a page of its own and forwards you straight to Vocus.

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