Birch Follows Strong First Quarter with Best Quarterly Sales Ever in Second Quarter

Birch Communications announced recently that the recently-ended second quarter was its best ever in terms of sales. The totals were 112 percent greater than the same quarter one year ago and follow a strong first quarter when the company had record organic sales. Sales of advanced services and the addition of several large customers were the two biggest factors contributing to the increased sales totals.

Atlanta-based Birch Communications, Inc. offers voice, cloud, data, IT, Internet, and mobile services, and also sells phones. It offers referral and channel partnerships to businesses in an effort to incentivize the promotion and distribution of its products and services. The company was founded in 1996 and claims on its website that it serves 200,000 customers, mostly made up of SMBs.

In the first quarter of 2015, Birch had record-setting totals in organic sales, a 113 percent improvement over the same quarter in 2014. This came after it had expanded its Metro-Fiber service in heavily-populated areas like Los Angeles and Houston.

Much of the company’s growth the past decade has come from acquisitions. Since 2006, Birch has acquired 25 companies; the most recent one being OrbitCom a telecom based in South Dakota, which finally it completed last month. Prior to that Birch had acquired Globalinx, a Rochester, New York-based telecom.

As a result of these acquisitions, Birch has a nationwide presence in all 50 U.S. states plus Washington, D.C., Canada, and Puerto Rico. Its network covers 31,000 fiber miles and serves 40 major metro areas across the U.S.

What can we conclude from the sales reports from the last two quarters? Not much, other than Birch is serious about becoming the go-to communications provider for SMBs in North America.

Of course, the acquisitions alone say that much, so the latest news, in one sense, is no news at all. Triple-digit growth is exciting, but it’s also unsustainable for more than a few periods.

This may be more a sign of a smaller company going through early phases of growth where huge gains are typical, than a company that revolutionized an industry like Apple did with the iPhone. While Birch is off to a good start, it won’t prove industry skeptics wrong until it shows that it can handle all these acquisitions and remain profitable for years to come.