John Linton ....But really glad to have come back again.
We completed the last of the ‘tasks’ we set out to accomplish in Sri Lanka by midday yesterday which was a sensible amount of time to have allowed. I feel happier about our ‘legalities’ now and while the new accountants may well prove to be as disappointing as their predecessors at least I feel more confident that they understand what we want them to do and they are competent to do it.
I am more than happy with the new Sri Lankan employees competencies and skills and I was impressed with just how much they knew given the relatively short times they have been with us. I was also very happy with their spoken English language skills which are equal to or better than those people we employ in Australia who are not Australian born and educated. We have a very long way to go to make the Sri Lankan company deliver everything we could ever hope it could do but there has been nothing I’ve seen on this trip that would suggest that we couldn’t actually make that happen over a reasonable space of time.
I’m glad we took the ‘gamble’ of leasing far more space than we needed and then fitted all of it out as if we would have 50 people working for us ‘tomorrow’ as I can see now that we may well end up with something like that number of personnel in Sri Lanka in the not far distant future. Of course, all these optimistic views need an unbelievable amount of hard and innovative future work (and quite probably more than a little good luck) to make them a reality but, in many ways, we have begun those tasks already in the best possible way – and in these early stages – with the best possible results.
So the ‘warm glow’ continues for a little while longer.
Later this morning we will begin the messy, in terms of timing and connections, flight back to Australia with the gloomy predictions of the $A falling from approaching parity only two months ago to around 50 cents to the $US within a few months and the ASX following the Dow , Nikkei and the FTSE etc ever downwards. So much for my hope that the ASX had ‘bottomed’ and I could safely re-invest our superannuation in at least the four major banks now their ridiculously high prices had been reduced to something approaching reality.
In scanning the ‘industry media’ I see that iBurst has finally ‘turned up its toes’ adding to the ongoing ‘ranks’ of failed attempts to provide wireless broadband services in Australia – goodness knows how many of them have now failed inconveniencing their customers and taking hundreds of millions (or has it exceeded a billion by now?) of Federal funding with them down the plug hole. Personally, I can’t see how any wifi/wimax solution is going to compete with the major mobile carriers in the future, however it appears that Channel 7 will pour more hundreds of millions into the remains of Unwired so there are obviously other very different views to mine.
I see the index of listed communications companies continued to move South over the week with iinet now re-approaching the $A1.00 ‘floor’ through which it fell so steeply only 18 months or so ago requiring the re-capitalization of the company (by Amcom/Futuris and Powertel/AAPT ) at that time to keep it operating.
On a positive note – Exetel has had a really good week in my absence (surprising how often that happens) with new applications for every service registering strong gains – particularly business SHDSL and Ethernet services – always really good to see. It was also good to see that the removal of the ADSL1 (256/64) services has had no negative effect on ADSL1 applications which, I suppose, means overall ADSL1 applications actually increased more strongly than the figures demonstrate. Churns to Exetel have also been even stronger in the first four days of this week.
I will wait until I return to Australia, but I am going to recommend that in addition to the removal of offering the 256/64 ADSL1 plans from Telstra we also cease offering the 8192/384 plans from Telstra to new users. They are ridiculously overpriced (to us – probably not to other ISPs) and I doubt whether we make any money at all on them. We will continue to provide them to customers who already have them for the foreseeable future.
I talked with our principal UK HSPA contact late yesterday who is having a pretty tough time along with the general slide in business confidence in the UK. Depending on how serious he really is about the suggestions he made during his telephone call it may be an opportunity for Exetel to test our new ideas for HSPA services in the UK in partnership with them as they have no good/workable strategy to move from their current services in terms of marketing positioning. I really like the idea of trying out some of our ideas in a much bigger market than Australia (especially with a ‘free entry ticket’) and maybe, depending on how things turn out in Australia between now and February, we could pursue our ‘grandiose’ plans for a more international Exetel presence.
Then again – maybe times are going to get really tough in Australia too and we need to become even more conservative than we are already planning to be and put in even more hours to just survive what looks like becoming a major down turn with Krudd continuing to make it worse with his stupid “me too” follow the leader actions taken without any knowledge or thought:
http://business.smh.com.au/business/perpetual-backlash-for-rudd-20081023-577y.html
What a total f***wit that man is.
I have a lot of travel time to think about all these things – and, on a brighter note, a lot of good new liquor to sample.