John Linton
It's the last day of the financial year which means, no sh** Sherlock, that the new financial year begins in less than 16 hours time. As someone who is largely responsible for planning Exetel's activities and therefore am entrusted by the shareholders to make enough correct decisions on how to spend their money to:
a) Not lose it
b) Make a commercial return on it
I can be happy enough that Exetel is still in business and has pretty much achieved each of the targets that were set this time last year. While the audited results won't be available for 10 - 12 weeks our management reports are complete up to 31st May and this month has been a record month in all areas of our business and, with the daily reports we have access to we pretty much know the year end result now within a few thousand dollars.
However, in this or any other business, there nothing quite as 'so yesterday' as whatever you managed to achieve (or not achieve) in the past. So I reviewed the Exetel business plans for tomorrow on onwards over the weekend and made no changes - a few more hours thinking about things were never going to produce anything startling - if they did then it would just be a clear indication that the person doing the planning was not the right person for the job.
However I did look at the base statistics on how the internet delivery marketplace had changed over the past year using some of the published information and some of the 'gleaned' information it's sensible to attempt to pick up through various business dealings in a commercial company. The base movement statistics can be obtained from the public companies annual reports or periodic announcements and can be, broadly, validated against the statistics published by the ABS here:
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/e8ae5488b598839cca25682000131612/6445f12663006b83ca256a150079564d!OpenDocument
The trouble with the statistics from the ABS, apart from them always by definition reporting on events that are in the past, is that their collection methodology is to ask the ISPs themselves to provide the base data on number of connections/gigabytes switched etc.
So the statistics obtained from the very small companies are almost certainly worthless. This doesn't really matter (because the 90% of the total number of companies they represent only account for less than 10% - maybe less than 5% of the total anyway) and Telstra and Optus account for over 70% of the total internet marketplace and they would, in statistically meaningful terms, report correctly; and in any case a lot of the base data about their ISP operations are available from their annual reports and from their employees and suppliers.
Two parts of the general report are quite interesting though.
1) The growth in ADSL users by 33% over the 15 month period
2) The growth of ADSL2 to be almost 25% of the total ADSL customer base.
Possibly another interesting statistic is that the only sector of the marketplace (by size of customer base) that grew was the slight increase in those ISPs who grew from less than 10,000 customers to more than 10,000 during the reporting period.
1 - 100 users 124 to 108
101 - 1,000 users 199 to 179
1,001 - 10,000 users 112 to 96
10,001 - 100,000 users 22 to 28
100,001+ users 10 to 10
This is almost certainly explained by small ISPs continually buying up even smaller ISPs.
Generally, I can't see anything in the ABS figures that's of any assistance to Exetel. All they seem to show is that Telstra continues to increase its market share by offering low cost ADSL2 deals to competitors ADSL1 customers.
A growth of 33% in a market is more than sufficient for Exetel to achieve its modest ADSL1 and ADSL2 growth objectives in 2009 and the majority of Exetel's planned growth over the coming twelve months will be from other products/services - assuming the planning is roughly correct in what will continue to happen over the coming twelve months. The rapid uptake of ADSL2, which is not as dramatic in the ABS reports as it has been in the first six months of this year, is also helping Exetel is some ways and the last week of the 'old' financial year was a new record week for ADSL applications and was helped by strong growth in ADSL2 applications though the ongoing loss of ADSL1 customers to Telstra remains something we have not been able to find an answer to.
It will all begin to become much clearer in a few hours time.