John Linton .......than ever before when the day of your work Christmas Party rolls around and you realise that another year has truly flashed by.....so tonight we hold the Exetel Christmas party. As we have for the past five years we have booked the usual room at the Casino and have hired a bus to make the journey from North Sydney a painless one. The 'entertainment' Annette has booked is a mixture of the old and new and the food 'package' is the 'premium' version that has always been very nice and more than enough - same with the beverages. The casino has always been a popular 'after event' venue as we give each person some gambling chips (amount depending on length of service) to go with the optimism that as much alcohol as possible crammed down your throat in the shortest possible time tends to induce.
I think that one sign of how difficult the current year has been in the residential ADSL market is the, at least as yet, the complete absence of "Christmas Specials" - from Telstra Retail and every other provider. Maybe I have missed them in the blur of days passing ever more quickly but I did look over the past few days and I couldn't find any. Is this a sign of discount exhaustion by Telstra Retail et alia? Has "gaining market share" for Telstra Retail come at the enormous cost to profit that it appeared to be doing? Or am I like Larry of the old games simply "looking in all the wrong places"? It will be interesting to see what now eventuates.Perhaps they are waiting to bring out New Year specials? In any event it is, in my opinion based on no knowledge of any other company's abilities and costs, going to be very, very difficult to operate at the current price points for very much longer for all but the 'wealthiest' of companies.
We continue to make some progress towards completing the 2011 operating plan and have basically done all of the hardest work. With a bit of luck we will complete the other work over the coming week and will then be able to do the documentation for individual personnel in the remaining week before Christmas. This will allow us to then do the really hard and very, very complex work involved with tidying up the current 'old' ADSL plans that have grown to be far too many as we have tried to maintain our customer base in the ever more difficult conditions presented by Telstra Retail and, to a lesser extent, by TPG. This has become necessary as, although the past year has "flashed by", it will have "flashed by" because we have never worked so hard for so little 'reward' - and when the reward you are working for is as low as Exetel's targets are that is something you simply don't want to repeat for a third year. Apart from any other reason, there is very little energy of mind or body left to allocate to such mind numbing levels of exertions.
It will be interesting to see what the new year brings in these interesting times......I think it will be very much a case of adhering to the old adage of "hope for the best but plan for the worst". It seems likely that there is, possibly, some way to go in the discount ADSL markets for Telstra and there are more and more signs of the same happening in the small/medium markets - at least the ones that Exetel addresses. Whether the same is going to happen in the larger sized corporate markets remains to be investigated.
Time for new strategies and new directions - there is no sinew, let alone meat, left on the old carcasses.
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