John Linton
...has only just occurred to me.
Following Steve's recent visit Annette and me are in the process of completing the review of the current situation of Exetel Communications (Pvt) Ltd which is a larger company (in terms of employees) than Exetel Australia is and that has been in existence for less than two years. It has been operating in Sri Lanka for a little over 18 months but currently out performs the Australian company in almost every respect in terms of international standards of operation. It has an amazing track record of being profitable from the first month of its existence and completely complies with every regulation and country edict regarding operating in Sri Lanka and has surpassed all of those requirements in every aspect.
Having completed the first two days of the scheduled three day review we are yet to find any anomaly in the Sri Lankan company's operations. We will meet with the company's accountants and auditors tomorrow to discuss all aspects of legal and statutory compliance but we don't expect those meetings will 'turn up' any 'problems'....as the previous meetings have failed to do. For anyone who has ever set up a business in a foreign country perhaps this realisation is 'chicken feed': and in general business terms this is probably the case. For Annette and I it is a sudden surprise that without really thinking through what we were doing we have created a bigger company than Exetel Australia in a third world county in a very short space of time that is, in some ways, better than the company we have struggled to create over the last six years in Australia.
You may very well think that this situation is mundane and not worth commenting upon. I mean, what's so difficult about establishing and growing a company in a third world country 10,000 kms from Sydney? Absolutely nothing because it's done all the time by companies all over the world. Undoubtedly that's true in many respects for many people and entities. Until a few minutes ago I didn't think of what we may have accomplished in Colombo as very different or in any way exceptional either. But now I do. It actually is exceptional that we have established a company bigger than Exetel Australia that delivers a wide range of services to Exetel's Australian customers better, and 'nicer' and much more efficiently than we ever managed to do from Australia. I'm sure many other Australian companies have achieved far more than we have achieved in understanding how the 'global economy' can make the delivery of products and services in a particular country more efficient. All I can say is that Exetel had no previous experience of making that happen and I am now amazed at how well we have achieved whatever it is we have achieved and how quickly we have put that in place.
Exetel in Sri Lanka has more employees than Exetel in Australia and makes a month on month profit while contributing to both the 'human' well being of Sri Lanka (paying its employees far above the 'standard rates') as well as endowing scholarships at a major university, providing funding for a 'chair' to develop AI and providing major funding to protect the Sri Lankan Elephant as well as reducing Sri Lanka's dependence on foreign imports of milk products. All of this has been brought into being over a period of less than two years. From the view of a commercial company that's a pretty impressive achievement in any terms....let alone doing it in tandem with building an Australian company in a very tough set of Australian marketplaces.
So what does it mean? Not a lot to the people who look at Exetel as a company that doesn't do much and that has survived longer than it should have. What does it mean to the people who have invested their personal time in being an Exetel employee or director? It means that they have contributed to a pretty unique 'corporate' development that has been immensely beneficial to two countries and almost 120,000 service end users and to their own personal and professional development. Until today I, who should know better than anyone else, hadn't realised just how much our tiny company has contributed to the economies of two different countries.