The accounts for the year to December 31, 2024, record a loss for the period of €6.89m, down from a loss of €49.8m a year before. The company ended 2024 with net assets of a modest €500,000 having gone into the year with net liabilities of €56.5m.
The transformation of the balance sheet is part of a massive operational and financial restructuring of what had been a heavily indebted wireless broadband provider.
Imagine was acquired last December by Armenia’s Team Group, which is led by brothers Hayk and Alexandr Yesayan.
Before it was acquired, Imagine had racked up about €250m in accumulated losses.
Prior to its sale, Imagine had spent hundreds of millions of euro rolling out a fixed wireless broadband network designed to bring high-speed services to rural parts of the country, only to be overtaken by the National Broadband Plan’s high-speed fibre alternative.
Before it was acquired, Imagine had racked up about €250m in accumulated losses. It had sold its Coolwave subsidiary earlier the same year to UK-based Gamma, which Imagine said had generated “significant proceeds”.
The 2024 accounts spell out how challenged the previous business model had become. Revenues dropped from €32.5m in 2023 to €24.7m last year.
“During the year the group’s core business as a rural provider of residential broadband services using its own wireless network experienced growing competition from the continuation of the roll out of last-mile optical fibre networks direct to the home in rural areas by National Broadband Ireland, which had a significant adverse effect on customer numbers,” the accounts state.
Under its new owners the business has undergone a dramatic pivot, scrapping its wireless offer and becoming a reseller of fibre broadband products to customers under new chief executive Niall Tallon.
That included a deal this year with National Broadband Ireland itself. The 2024 accounts show the business had 135 staff at the end of last year and a wage bill of €5.7m. Staff were told at the time of the takeover that there would likely be significant job losses this year.
The price of last year’s acquisition has not been disclosed.
In 2018, Brookfield acquired a majority stake in Imagine in a deal that reportedly valued the Irish firm at more than €200m. Imagine said at the time that Brookfield was investing €120m in return for a 50.1pc indirect controlling interest.
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