John Linton ....or, if I wished to carp, a not unpleasing week.
It seems that we have been bashing our heads against the proverbial brick wall for so long without getting anywhere that any sort of glimmer of hope registers with much greater effect than it would ordinarily do. So the few slight indications of progress this week have produced the first rays of hope in the Stygian darkness that is the Australian residential ADSL marketplaces. These signs manifested themselves in a 25% increase in new ADSL2 orders for the week and a 20% increase in new ADSL1 orders - the first increase in a week on week intake for over six months.....new weekly order intakes for ADSL1 and ADSL2 services have been incrementally declining for almost a year.
We have made a series of changes to ADSL plans and pricing over 2010 without influencing the gradual decline in new orders nor arresting the gradual increase of churn away rates over the same period. For whatever reason the various changes we made over October seem to have revered those long term trends with the last two weeks showing the reversal finally in quite stark terms - especially when you consider that the last week of any month usually produces the lowest order intake of each month - this month was quite the reverse with the last week of the month being the best of the four.
I was also 'heartened' to see that the orders for the new wireless broadband plans were beginning to, very slowly, rebuild towards their pre 'price hike' volumes which may mean something or other but one thing it does mean is that we no longer have to make a loss in providing wireless services to the residential marketplace nor, and to me much more importantly, do we have to give up our independence (or ethics) by relying on some of the more odious practices that seem to becoming more prevalent in providing residential communications services.
Last week was a particularly good five days for our corporate data business as was the whole of October. One of the particularly pleasing aspects of last week was the major contribution to overall sales volumes made by our newest sales people who produced over 70% of the weeks new orders - that was truly pleasing to see. After 18 months of putting this 'program' in place there are some real signs that we will go close to or probably succeed in meeting our very ambitious targets by the end of 2011 - I hope I don't regret writing those words.....but then I'm not the slightest bit superstitious.
Our SMS and FAX and VoIP order intakes also continue to pick up after the price increases we put through in September which means the profitability for those services will also achieve a record in October. Although the total contribution from those services remains relatively low the trends are very positive and are going to be an important part of our smaller business initiatives in the new calendar year.
So, overall, it has been the best week we have had for a very long time and, personally, I am really glad to experience a week like we used to have in the 'good old days'. Life looks so much nicer when you actually see some positive results from your endless hard work - albeit it is only for one week.
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