Atturra posts 46 percent EBITDA drop in half yearly results after December contract dispute

CEO Stephen Kowal told CRN the result doesn’t affect the ongoing business.

Australian solution provider Atturra posted a nearly 50 percent plummet in EBITDA in its half year results after a contract dispute in December last year.

Its EBITDA for H1 2026 came in at $7.3m, a 46 percent drop.

In its half yearly financial results for 2026, Atturra posted a revenue of $181 million up 28 percent from the prior period.

Attura’s full financial forecast for its revenue is set between $364 million and $374 million, its underlying EBITDA forecast is to be $30-$31 million.

Before the Christmas break, Stephen Kowal, CEO at Atturra told CRN Australia he received a notification that one of their clients pulled out of their contract.

Kowal said this contract breach is seen as “incorrect termination”. He said this is a one-off event and pointed to the strong revenue growth for the business.

Since then, the CEO of the solutions provider and the unknown company have been embroiled in a contract dispute.

This contract dispute has affected some staff with Kowal telling CRN Australia that some staff were redeployed within three days and others were asked to take leave until work was found for them.

Read the full interview with CRN Australia and Kowal below.

CRN: How are you feeling post-results especially with the 46 percent drop in EBITDA? Did you expect that number?

Stephen Kowal: It all relates to that one agreement, we’ve said it's a one off, it's sitting there, we're down. We'll obviously go through recovery actions, but for the simplicity of running the business and getting out of the staff's mind, it's a line in the sand, doesn't affect the ongoing business.

Despite that we still have strong revenue growth into the half. We'll have a good second half, and we'll keep running into 2027. It’s disappointing, it has an impact, but it's luckily, a one off type event, not a reoccurring problem.

CRN: Can you give me background on the contract dispute?

Kowal: It is pretty hard, because we're in a disagreement. There's all the stuff I can't talk about. We can't even say the client or what it's about. Our position is simple. We did a contract, we did a lot of work, and you can't just stop a contract.

It's not like we didn't deliver. Incorrect termination is pretty much the way we put it in the legal paperwork. We'll go through the actions, we'll sit down with them and come to a conclusion.

I've never seen this happen in 30 years. It's not a normal process. It is an out of the blue message at 10:26pm on a Tuesday night during the last week before Christmas.

CRN: What have you learned from this?

Kowal: For us, it's interesting because it's not a commercial entity. The way we run our businesses, we allow quite a lot of WIP to accumulate in non-commercial entities.

Commercially we’ve been very strict on WIP, and we let quite a large WIP occur in this case because it was a non-commercial entity, because we've never seen this before.

You got to take full cost of that into account, which is the negative impact on our results, by the way, it's the [WIP] and the associated costs around it.

We're going to apply the same commercial rules those non-commercial entities, which will cause a bit of a challenge in terms of negotiating. This is going to cause some entities a problem because, it's not just ourselves, everyone will be saying ‘you can't do that’.

CRN: How has your staff been with all of this? Has there been any changes?

There has unfortunately, we had to do a pretty big reshuffle in December, two days before Christmas. The way we approached the shuffle, our staff know this, is that if you're a contractor, then obviously we end the contracts.

If you're a staff member, we redeploy you, we redeployed most people. Luckily, demand is high, we redeployed most people within three days.

There's a few people we asked if they can you take three weeks leave and we'll find you something to get back. There's a bit of that as well, because obviously it's hard to avoid them. But we had some big other projects, and quite frankly, we're almost perfectly timed. We didn't have to go make all the stuff redundant, or anything like that, luckily.

CRN: How are you going to make up for the lost revenue?

Kowal: The reality is we just have to continue growing, so the business will keep growing. It is like a permanent loss, which you lose a bit of revenue, you lose the revenue forever.

From our point of view, and as I've spoken to that team and staff, they’re nice and say it’s not your fault. We just got to move on, pick up, sell.

You’ve got to actually not look back. This is these things happen. I know it sounds like pretty strange message for a CEO to give to staff but my message to them is about done something wrong we’ll learn. But reality in draw a line in the sand and look forward.

Don't get upset. I know you just spend six months of your life building something you're quite proud of. You just can’t let that get you down, you got to move on. Easier to say than do.

CRN: Last year, you had an acquisition heavy year, is that the same game plan for FY26?

Kowal: There is still plan to acquire, and we'll continue to acquire for the foreseeable future. Right now, the pipe’s not as full as it normally is, but that's more because we're just not finding the right fit for us, not to the same frequencies we have.

We will still acquire. We'll continue to acquire. The activity slow down is more reflection of what we're seeing in the market versus our desire.

CRN: In the report you mentioned having an “AI first approach”, can you explain what that means?

Kowal: It's a big transformation internally as well as externally for us. We've got a big data business, we've got lots of examples where we’ve done AI or machine learning projects for clients, probably still more machine learning than AI.

We're doing a lot of that, but we've got to disrupt ourselves. We brought two external executives in because I'm a big believer, you need some that external view to challenge yourself. And an external consultant as well to push us. We're doing an AI first internal program, because I don't think in the long term, unless we all live and breathe it, that we can deliver AI perfectly externally.

CRN: What message do you have for your customers?

Kowal: You've got to understand the disruption AI is going to make but you got to understand also in the context of security, privacy and governance. As boring as that may be, if you actually want to be successful, you've got to put that governance in first. Governance is not hard, but it can't be skipped.

If you've got that governance that defines your sand pit there's a lot can do. Now there are a lot of what I call rogue operators out there, which would say governance means slowing down. Governance does not mean slowing down.

We put in governance frameworks in place for you in weeks, not months. But don't skip that step. I think all the tears are going to come from people who skip that step.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.