John Linton .....is not evidence of absence - as the late and unlamented Donald Rumsfeld once tried to explain the failure to find WMD in Iraq to justify the unjustifiable US/UK invasion.There are too many aspects of the current scenarios in the Australian communications businesses that I have never understood for me to be able to state that these particular times are less comprehensible than at any time in the past but it would be possible to state that the bits I am personally involved with are very difficult to begin to understand at the moment.
In operating Exetel, and quite possibly many other businesses of Exetel's size, it is essential to have very short, short, medium, longer term and very long term plans. In this context I am defining very short as things to be done this week/today that will benefit the business, short as meeting the set targets for the current month, medium plans to meet the current quarter's target, longer term as meeting the current financial year's targets and very long term as preparing for an unknown future set of market and 'product' conditions while operating the business against targets as short term as today's.
Over the past two or so years it has been difficult enough to 'survive' as can be seen from the very large number of Australian 'communications companies' that now either no longer exist at all or have been swallowed up by other companies. Nothing really new about that situation, it's pretty much what happens in every year, but the sheer numbers are quite unusually large over that period. You could pretty much say that, apart from the companies that had an 'exit strategy' of selling out at the appropriate time, almost all of those companies failed to plan beyond the very short term and became overwhelmed by the significant changes that occurred....they were the blacksmiths of the 1920s. Or, put another way, they failed to comprehend that the absence of evidence (the affect of Telstra slashing prices/spending $1 billion to take away their customers yet) was not in fact evidence of absence (that the evil empire would one day strike back).
I, of course, have no idea of what the different Australian communications companies, large and small, are planning to do over the coming 2 - 5 years. But, I am assuming, that they will have to plan to do something(s) a lot different to the things they do today because so much will change between now and then. Now, you might say - quite rightly, "what's the difference between now and any time in the past?" Quite right - insightful forward planning is always required in any business at any time. However the demise of so many 'communications companies' in Australia over the past two or so years does seem to make this particular time a little different to the last two decades. The most obvious changes are that Telstra was 'privatised', the federal government is building a Telstra replacement monopoly and wireless is changing forever the way individuals communicate. Those three situations were more than enough to 'break' everything anyone once thought they knew about delivering the required communications services in Australia and the various 'models' by which that was done over the past 20 years.
Companies of Exetel's size have very little money, time or capabilities to plan for the longer term future but at least we tend to both see and act on what the more obvious scenarios might be and make decisions accordingly - whether they have been right or wrong is another matter. The major 'long term' decisions we have made over the past three years included deciding not to build our own DLSLAM network, investing in a Sri Lankan facility to sell as well as support our future efforts and putting a lot of effort into developing a wireless capability being the most obvious. There are several other things we have invested in for the long term such as building a corporate sales and support capability to 'ensure' we could absorb the loss of revenue and profits from the residential markets. Those decisions have cost us a great deal of money over the past three years and will only begin to deliver the planned benefits some time later this year - as with all long/most long term planning - you have to invest before you can get a dividend.
Before that can happen we, and many other companies, have to get through the coming year or so and that will depend on dealing effectively with this year's version of the Telstra 'Win Back Assaults' - of which an absence of current evidence in not evidence of an absence of malicious intent from an as yet unknown source.
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