Broad Investments offloads Shiftreload

Stuart Corner
Monday, 25 September 2006 14:06

IT Industry - Deals

After its brief, fruitless flirtation with voice over IP, Broad Investments (ASX: BRO) has sold its recently acquired broadband ISP, Shiftreload, which is now operating as a privately owned company under its own name.

• Announcements

The company, which touted grand ambitions for its VoIP plans, bought Shiftreload in April to launch its VoIP business.  Broad Investments paid $100,000 in cash for ShiftReload, which at the time had about 2000 residential broadband customers. The CEO Michael Anderson, joined BroadIP as its CTO. The price also included 4000,000 of Broad Investment shares at 10 cents each. They are now worth only 0.6 cents.

After Shiftreload was mentioned in another, unrelated press release and described simply as an "Australian owned company" iTWire queried the company on its relationship with Broad Investments. Amber Anderson told iTWire that ShiftReload was no longer part of Broad Investments "due to a company restructure". She said: "Shiftreload is once again a privately owned company," but gave no other details.

Broad Investments announced on September 9 that it was abandoning its VoIP ambitions  to focus on its mobile applications subsidiaries and last week it sold all its VoIP customers, about 500, to another VoIP provider, My Net Fone (ASX: MNF). However, the company does not seem to be particularly diligent in telling shareholders about its disposal of their assets. It was left to My Net Fone to inform the ASX of the deal. Similarly there has been no announcement of the sale of ShiftReload.