John Linton
This financial year is drawing to a close and I read the June recurrent billing report with greater interest this morning than I usually do as I try and glean every last 'nuance' from the actual facts I have available to me before consigning next year's operating plan to other people's scrutiny.
The good news, for Exetel, is that we will slightly exceed both our revenue and profit targets for FY2008 and, in financial terms we have had another good year as well as another 'record month' in terms of recurrent revenue increasing just as it has every month since we've been in business.
The 'bad' news is that, in terms of market share, we have fallen back for the second successive year - particularly in NSW which has always been our biggest marketplace (probably because it was our only marketplace for 18 months). Our revenue growth has, to a large extent, been delivered by a higher revenue per customer rather than, as in the past, by a simple growth in the number of customers.
Another report I read this morning gave me some satisfaction that we had made a lot of progress in one area of our business on which we have been working for a very long time. It was the monthly chart of the average waiting times an Exetel customer would experience. The average for May was 59 seconds which I doubt that ANY support function in Australia could get anywhere close to that level of efficiency on a Monday to Friday, business hours, basis. Details can be found here for the last two months:
http://forum.exetel.com.au/viewtopic.php?f=324&t=27043
Our current goals are now to achieve similar results for the expanded hours of 8.30 am to 9.30 pm on weekdays (which is already being, successfully, trialed) and then to again expand the support hours to week ends and to public holidays which is scheduled to happen once the company is in operation early in the new financial year.
We have been going through the pains and dramas of upgrading our two main Sydney PoPs from mid range Cisco routing to high end Cisco routing with all the issues that brings with it in terms of short term service inconsistencies for the past six months. We are almost at the end of that program now and the new power and simplicity it will deliver will help us return to much higher end user satisfaction levels from now onwards.
Similarly the new, much lower, IP pricing comes in to effect for a substantial part of our back end connectivity starting this month and the back end IP connections will all be reduced in price, allowing them to be increased in delivery capacity more affordably, by the end of July.
We are also continuing to work on getting more bandwidth provisioned by our suppliers on
their parts of the network between our customers and their hand off points but that remains a significant difficulty.
I'd like to be as confident with our P2P control implementations and our caching service delivery but I'm not. This remains the only, major,
'uncertainty' in terms of the improvements we need to make to Exetel in the coming 12 months and we have a way to go to ensure that happens. I'm not sure why problems persist but we will continue to work through the issues as we find them with the manufacturers of the equipment and the software.
Our other major challenge, excluding making the current services and their support facilities better, remains providing HSDPA services which, despite my brief periods of optimism is proving difficult to 'nail down' in terms of executing a 'final' contract. I have little doubt that we will make the Sri Lankan company a success but their remain several major issues to be dealt with in that 'venture' and whether we do proceed with a UK based EU offering has yet to be even sensibly discussed.
So, in financial terms, FY2008 has been the most successful year in Exetel's short 'history'.
The cost of achieving financial success has come at the severe cost of much slower than desired growth and, much worse than that, we have disappointed some of our customers in ways that I never thought we would.
I need a cup of coffee - preferably with a large Scotch.