John Linton
.....but this year there is very little sign of the "Christmas Slowdown".
In 'the good old days' Christmas in the communications industry started in late November and by "Christmas Week" the office was characterised by emptiness caused by people either formally away on leave or by 'running late' due to hangover recovery or shopping and other more important activities. In fact in the "bad old days" few people seemed to turn up at the office until well after 11 am and then only because they were arranging where to have lunch or escaping from wife driven home related tasks. Definitely not the case this year and, as my memory is increasingly unreliable, it may well not have been the case for many years.
Exetel has always been a far more dedicated company than the multinationals I have worked for where those memories of Christmas Past come from and, personally, I always found the December 'slow down' a period where you could take advantage of your competitor's slackness to make more sales because you had much less competition and if you put more effort in the rewards were greater than in other months simply because prospective buyers weren't getting any response from your competitors. I think it must be some measure of the tougher economic times, irrespective of what any 'financial expert' might be saying, that there are more people still trying to 'close deals' than in years past - or at least that's the feeling I am getting with even the larger of our 'prospective customers' still asking for meetings and, joyfully, still placing orders for business services at a 'normal' monthly rate. Our business sales teams having smashed the sales records for October and November are now within sight of doing the same for December by selling more than quadruple the number of business connections we sold last December - a great achievement if they make it.
Even more unusually I am still getting requests for 'meetings' from major suppliers who want to provide details of offers they are sure I will find attractive and it is absolutely in Exetel's best interests to consider what they will be able to tell us. So I met with one supplier yesterday and, surprisingly, I was very interested in what they had to offer to the point that we will almost certainly take advantage of what they are prepared to do for us in the new year. That 'result' encouraged me to arrange two more of such meetings today out of curiosity to see if similar benefits can be achieved. Perhaps things are much tougher than I had originally thought?....at least in some sectors of the communications marketplaces.
Our burning need, which yesterday's meeting partially addressed in an indirect way, is offering better wireless pricing to a number of different market sectors which we are having trouble achieving because we are not meeting our wireless service take up targets due to all sorts of reasons I never expected to encounter and therefore have not been able to achieve lower buy prices. We set the objective of modifying our wireless offerings by 1st January 2010 to 're-launch' our wireless marketing programs which will be based on much more effort in the corporate sectors, new 'country' pricing via our better country agents and a revamp of our 'city' offerings. We haven't made as much progress as we need to for these new targets to become a reality but at least, based on yesterday's meeting, we have a glimmer of hope in now improving our offerings by the 20% that we think is the minimum required for us to have a better chance this time around than the last time (when I made so many basic errors).
The other 'negotiations' which have 'sprung to life' are on international IP pricing which appear to be driven by the new/newer market entrants trying to establish a presence here. We are not a big enough buyer of IP to be of great interest but, for whatever reasons best known to themselves, at least two new suppliers are trying very hard to get us to buy from them.....I have no idea why. IP pricing now seems to be falling each quarter rather than the 6 - 9 monthly we have experienced in the past and this, while being very, very welcome, makes planning future IP purchases more complicated than at any previous time. We currently buy around 5 gbps of IP and we always thought that at some future time we might get to 10 gbps which would make it cost/effective for us to buy directly from SX and run our own end to end service across the Pacific. With the sort of pricing being hinted at now, that option seems to be receding in to the far rather than medium term future. However it does no harm to discuss such options.
So an unusually busy 'Christmas' week and it shows no sign of 'slowing down' with requests for meetings now extending right through next week. Something is different this year.