John Linton
Exetel has its monthly management accounts produced by an outside accounting firm for prudential and other security reasons. They, being accountants still use print and fax for providing these documents and they inevitably send through the monthly figures in the early hours of the morning - perhaps they subcontract the work to their families back in Eastern Europe? Anyway we received November's accounts today in readiness for the December board meeting to be held on Saturday and when Annette scanned them she said "what a pleasant surprise" before letting me see them. It was indeed a pleasant surprise as they showed the largest monthly profit, by far, since we have been in business although we reduced the prices in November of over half our plan prices (ADSL, SHDSL and Ethernet) - some quite significantly. So a very bright glow surrounded breakfast this morning adding to the already bright and sunny Sydney day.
One month's profit is pleasant but means nothing in terms of the full year's operation but having had a record, by far, profit result in the first quarter of this financial year (and November's month profit exceeded that three month profit) it is very encouraging as we have reduced many of our prices three times since July 1st....the third round of reductions coming over the last few days so they are not reflected in the November figures of course. It has never been our intention to aim at making as much profit as possible (at least that's one thing we have been consistently good at since we commenced operations!) as such an objective doesn't figure in our reasons for 'creating' Exetel in the first place - so it's a 'disappointment' in terms of financial planning but it's good for our other objective of increasing our support to endangered species in Australia.
We finished all of the work on adding new high end plans to the ADSL2 offerings earlier this week and completed the adding of higher end ADSL1 plans and revising the 'positioning' of the lower scale ADSL1 plans late last night. We will look at what we do with 8192/384 plans today and over the weekend but I am concerned about the performance of an increasing number of those plans in terms of speeds which, according to an increasing number of Exetel users of those speeds report a constant decrease in the top speeds achieved from over 6 mbps to a claimed 1.5 mbps - it's anecdotal but the number of complaints have increased significantly over the past three months. Personally I don't want to introduce 8192/384 plans with high downloads and then find the typical users of those plans 'barraging' us with complaints about speed issues so I am very, very hesitant about doing that until the full effects of Telstra's latest ADSL1 strategy to re-dominate the ADSL1 and ADSL2 market plays out - it has to have some effects and they look like they could be significant if Telstra is successful.
We have also done most of the work on the revised business and corporate wireless broadband plans which I think are really sensible in terms of both the pricing and the administration and control features we offer and have taken a lot of care in developing for both the customer's engineers, operations and accounting personnel. We have begun to provide our business and corporate customers with some of the automated controls and reporting that we have developed over the past 6 years which have been so effective and efficient for us. Depending on the early customers reactions (and suggestions for improvement) we will rapidly increase the facilities we offer to increase the differentiation between the services we offer and those of the companies with which we compete. Over the first six months of 2010 we aim to integrate many of our 'unique' automated processes into the various business offerings we have been slowly building for more than five years not only as a differentiator but to ensure future initiatives are better protected from being 'interfered with' in the ways that ruined at least two of our 'initiatives this year.
So a bright start to an already bright day and after completing some more pricing analysis its off to the Exetel Christmas party for cocktails, magic, fortune telling, caricaturing and top class 'finger food' and then an hour or so of craps and then roulette to lose anything I may have made from playing craps thus quickly spending my 'Christmas Bonus'.