KUALA LUMPUR (April 26): Kronologi Asia Bhd is optimistic on a better FY17, as it looks to deepen its penetration of the Indian market and widen its presence in Southeast Asia (SEA).

It revealed this in an announcement on its new three-pronged growth strategy on Bursa Malaysia today, after acquiring full control of Quantum Storage (India) Pte Ltd (QSI) last October, which comes with an annual profit guarantee of US$1 million in FY16 and FY17.

QSI contributed three months of the group's revenue and profit in FY16 and was a factor for the 32.5% increase in total revenue that year to RM81.3 million and the 172% increase in profit before tax to RM7.8 million, it noted.

"The financial performance of FY17 is expected to be more optimistic than FY16, in view of the full consolidation of revenue and profit of QSI," it said, adding the size and expansion rate of India's economy will continue to offer healthy growth potential for the group.

Beyond the demand from SMEs for dedicated storage solutions, two sub-sectors, namely the development of smart cities and the management of media content in India, have and will continue to propel Kronologi Asia's growth in the country, it said.

The two other parts to its new growth strategy are the development of a transnational infrastructure across Asia for storage solutions and increase in emphasis on managed services and dedicated storage back-up across multiple locations.

"The group will explore options to fund the capital expenditure needed for the establishment of this transnational infrastructure which it intends to roll out over the medium term," it added.

The group now has operation centres operating out of Singapore and Malaysia, and plans to add Hong Kong as a third physical point of presence soon. It intends to make Malaysia the main operations hub for the region eventually.

The establishment of the transnational infrastructure will also accelerate the group's higher-margin managed services business. The group intends to double this business' contribution to group revenue, which is currently less than 10%, in the mid-term.

"The enhanced infrastructure will position the group to tap the growing shift towards platform-as-a-service whereby payment modes by enterprise customers are based on pay-per-use operating expenditure instead of previously incurring fixed capital expenditure," it said.

Besides offering data protection as a service, the group will look at expanding its offering to include enterprise file sharing-as-a-service, archive-as-a-service, disaster recovery-as-a-service and e-vaulting, which will allow customers to store their tape backups within Kronicle's infrastructure and allow for quicker restoration of the data, it added.

Kronologi Asia's share price has been on an upward trend in the past year and gained 90% since. At 4pm today, the counter was trading at 37.5 sen, up half sen or 1.35% from yesterday's close, valuing it at RM102.7 million.