John Linton
Like a lot of other people, it seems to me that this year has passed in a flash with almost no remembrance of what we were doing last January and with very little memory of what happened in the other months of 2009. I spent some time yesterday completing the final changes to the business plan for the last six months of the current financial year and have only got some minor details to complete. I, of course, don't have the final figures for December but we had already set new records in almost every aspect of our activities well before Christmas so the final figures will come as no surprise when we get them in mid-January. Both calendar year 2009 and the first half of financial year 2010 have been exceptional for Exetel and, though it might sound self congratulatory, we have managed a difficult twelve months very well both from our customers view points (we have lowered most service prices quite substantially) and we have made enough profit to increase our donations to endangered species by almost 50%. Achieving those two objectives for a sixth successive year is very satisfying - the fact that the business has continued to grow at a faster rate than that of the companies with which we compete in quite difficult times is also pleasing.
Looking at the 'master plan' that extends over a much longer period than twelve months we accomplished three of the major aspects of that 'wish list' which is more than we have ever managed to achieve before which is some sort of indication that the company is 'maturing'.
Possibly the most difficult achievement and certainly the longest time frame was the completion (as far as such a thing can ever be completed) of the transformation of the National network from a 'star' topology hubbed out of Sydney to a 'meshed' network of 8 'independent' PoPs with standalone capacities to connect both Telstra and Optus wire line and wireless customers (it is not yet possible to connect AAPT ADSL2 services 'locally'. This was accomplished late December and over the two and a half years it has taken us to make these changes the network has grown, in terms of bandwidth and routing power, by almost 300%. It has been a considerable engineering achievement over that time.
The second major long term achievement has been the establishment of Exetel Sri Lanka to handle all of Exetel's back end processes. This has taken us the best part of four years (counting our timid beginnings) but it has mainly been accomplished over the past two years and has involved almost everyone in the Australian company. By every sensible measurement Exetel now provides better provisioning, billing resolution, technical support, residential sales and programming services than we have done at any time of our existence. As we had zero knowledge or expertise in setting up such operations in a third world country when we decided to do it this is a particularly pleasing achievement.
The third major long term change has not been fully accomplished but 'all' of the difficult 'bits' were successfully put in place in 2009. This was the setting up of a corporate sales and support operation that would build exponentially on the painstaking and patient work we had put in over the previous five years in creating all the required back ground services required to build a business service revenue that would grow to be larger than our residential revenue over a two year period. In 2009 we hired the first 12 of the planned 48 sales people we plan to 'put in place' by December 2010 to provide services to medium/large to large business organisations. So far each one of the sales people we have hired have got through their very tough probationary period very quickly and have begun, jointly, to develop into a formidable sales force - as AAPT made the point to them - "in November you sold more services than AAPT Corporate in house sales teams and all AAPT's wholesale customers put together." Not bad for a group of people in their early 20s whose average experience of communications technologies was less than 4 months.
So, Exetel has accomplished a great deal in 2009 which was not the easiest year we have experienced. Looking forward I think 2010 will be a lot more 'difficult' than 2009 in several ways.....and we will have to change Exetel even more next year than we did over the past 12 months - we will finish the details on how we plan to that by the end of the week.