John Linton
....when you read absolute rubbish jazzed up with super hype (not that anyone other than diligent industry followers, such as me, would ever read the c***).
I'm referring to an ASX announcement yesterday by one of the WA penny dreadfuls:
http://www.asx.com.au/asx/statistics/announcementSearch.do?method=searchByCode&issuerCode=eft&timeFrameSearchType=D&releasedDuringCode=W
which contained nothing but amazingly ridiculous statements that must have brought bright red flushes to the cheeks of whoever wrote it.
Eftel, a company with a track record of the over use of hyperbole (if that isn't tautological) really excelled itself with its announcement that it had "bought" the "Concept Group Of Companies" (a group of companies with an annual turnover of $A4 million? A pretty grandiose description of an operation with one Australian employee). What it meant was that in exchange for being given a tiny ISP based in Perth (itself an agglomeration of other previously failed tiny ISPs) it had issued the previous owner some 8 million of its almost worthless shares (oh, and it had also made arrangements to pay some real cash in the event that the company ever made any money from the customer base it had bought - something the previous owner apparently had been unable to do).
There was the usual incorrect use of words like "synergies" and "period of strong growth" (in stark contradiction of EFTel's announcement of less than 2 weeks ago where it reported no growth for 12 months) and a 'breathless' comment that the wholesale arrangement that Concept had with Optus to resell the Optus ADSL2 ports (should it still exist) would be important to EFTel (again in stark contradiction of their statement of less than two weeks ago that only by using their own ADSL2 DSLAM deployment could they make realistic money out of ADSL).
It's just so inconvenient for people who make such announcements as the one referenced here that it is so simple for anyone with the slightest interest to look up their previous announcements - oh dear - 'what a tangled web........'
As someone who writes, in my minor way, quite regularly and therefore tends to use quotes from other people I've always been taught that the minimum courtesy (and legal requirement) when using other people's statements is to ascribe them to the source. Perhaps you have to be as old as I am (and have a trivial, jackdaw memory system) to remember that:
"I was so impressed - I bought the company"
was the key closing phrase of a television advertising campaign, world wide, for the Remington electric razor featuring it's president - Victor Kiam.
Very tacky.
I have commented before that I can't rmember a single instance where the 'purchaser' (I'm not sure this transaction actually counts as a purchase) of a failed/failing tiny ISP ever got any financial benefit from doing so. However it seems that, despite that pretty correct view, people still base their working life on the triumph of hope over experience.(Samuel Johnson on second marriages). I received another two 'offers' to purchase small ISPs, one on Friday and one yesterday, so whatever is causing the failure of whatever 'business models' are being used is continuing and it will be interested to see the ABS statistics when they next become available.
The other 'news item' pointed out to me from the ASX yesterday was the sale by Michael Malone of 3 million iiNet shares.
http://www.asx.com.au/asx/statistics/announcementSearch.do?method=searchByCode&issuerCode=iin&timeFrameSearchType=D&releasedDuringCode=W
The reason given was sensible and unremarkable but the timing was, perhaps, not so sensible - coming after the unseemly haste of the divestment of Amcom/iinet shares by Futuris last week.What is it about shares in Amcom and iiNet that makes people with a great deal of 'inside' knowledge not want to hold on to them at the moment? Just unfortunate timing and the desire to take a profit from a fortuitous buy is/are the most likely reason(s) - but then again.......
I don't know what it is that I'm not seeing about the current communications market but I am getting the very definite feeling that I'm missing something of some importance. Perhaps I'm getting too far away from the basic requirements of running a business in a challenging environment by becoming buried in too much detail as the sheer volume of transactions increases as time goes by?
Time to call it quits? Maybe it's moving towards that time as there are so many things that now take me much longer than they used to understand and find useful answers/processes/procedures/other actions to deal with. It's not the 'major' things but the myriad of smaller issues that take me so much time these days. Perhaps it's old age or perhaps the communications business, at least as I understand it, has become too diverse for me to wholly grasp any more.