John Linton's Personal Musings

John Linton

......according to some people I have spoken to recently.

It always seems to depend on who you talk to as to how your own views of the current and immediate future residential marketplaces are 'performing' get validated or invalidated. Over the last few days I have had more than the usual number of contacts with people who either run other communications companies or who 'act on behalf of' people who are either seeking to buy or sell communications companies. Interestingly those people were exactly evenly divided between people who had an upbeat view of the immediate future and people who had a neutral or down beat view.

We have no stand point on whether we would ever 'sell' Exetel remaining of the view that unless someone rocked up with a cash offer of a lot of money we just couldn't bring ourselves to go through the process of listening to some slimy piece of **** telling us all the reasons they saw for Exetel being worth less than nothing and how generous they were being for offering to take it off our hands for a small payment by us to them (a small exaggeration of commercial attitudes but you get the point).

However, and only sparked by a couple of tentative approaches we have received in the past few days, we have started to consider whether we would consider some sort of 'merger' with a smaller company that had solid financial backing but had not made the progress hoped for by the financial backers. I very much doubt such a scenario would actually work out in practice but it is a more interesting concept than any other we have been 'offered'. It was also interesting that having been offered one such approach it was followed a few days later by a second such approach. What was of significantly different interest to us was that the financial backers in both cases were substantial. I doubt that these 'offers' will become anything more than 'initial interest' but it did jog my mind out of it's rote way of dealing with approaches to buy Exetel. If there are ever future offers of this kind, or if one of the current 'opportunities' actually turns out to be 'real' I think we could be interested in that sort of 'merger' particularly if it provided a 'listed' result for Exetel.

Irrespective of that sort of detail, it was interesting to listen to the different views being expressed about the current and future status of today's residential and small business marketplaces....which as I said earlier were exactly evenly divided about whether current 'conditions' were too tough or represented 'great opportunities. I always listen to what other heavily involved people have to say about the communications business as it is the primary source of 'real' facts as opposed to public statements that always have some sort of 'agenda'. People trying to buy or sell companies have no leeway for 'agenda' speaking because the facts will quickly become apparent in either scenario.

The only common opinion was that the key growth opportunity was VoIP in both residential and small business but the ability to deliver VoIP without a compelling broad band supply ability was not going to work. Fibre was regarded by each of the people with whom I spoke as a distraction at the moment but would probably become increasingly important with wireless broadband being regarded as a know nothing about it/can't see how it's relevant particularly to small business non-issue. As usual when you listen to other people's opinions you find yourself agreeing with what coincides with your own views and not accepting what differs - at least to a great extent. I offered some contrary views and they generally were rejected with some attempt at factual rebuttal and I will have to check out the 'facts' that were provided - I could easily be wrong in my views - I often am.

Normally I would take more interest in approaches  such as the ones we have received ver the past week or so but a combination of approaching annual leave and all of the things that I, personally, have to do and finish over the next ten days just doesn't leave any time for future speculation - we have too many issues to address as it stands without putting non existent time in to new discussions and analyses.

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