John Linton ....... as yet another reminder that time continues to defy the laws of physics and continue to go faster and you never have enough of it to complete all the things you really need to do.
I have a particularly busy week as we will go to Sri Lanka to do the quarterly business and personnel reviews at the end of this week as it seems that 'going away' generates more need to do more 'just in case'. Perhaps it yet another difficulty imposed by advancing age that there seem to be more things to do each day or perhaps its simply that it takes an aging mind longer to do things than it has in the past.....but I seem to be viewing the work to be done in any given day with less enthusiasm than in the past perhaps because as Exetel has continued to grow there are just too many things to do in any 'working day'. Even though I have 'off loaded' a considerable amount of things I used to do over the past year or so I have not seemed to have any more time than in the past. Whinging about it, either here or anywhere else, isn't going to do anything positive so I apologise for that.
I think my feelings have a very 'concrete' grounding in current market conditions that are affecting me just as I think they would be affecting many other people in this business.
In terms of actually operating a business like Exetel in the current conditions that seem to permeate the industry there has been a sense of uncertainty for so long that I actually can't remember a time when conditions seemed to be so difficult over such a long time. I think this is being compounded by the fact that almost all the companies that operate in this industry have ever only known 'good times'. If you think about it this current phase of the communications 'industry' has only been in existence for less than 20 years. In 1990, basically only Telecom Australia offered communication services and the internet existed for a very few people in terms of 'bulletin boards'. The fact that there was only Telecom as a provider of communications services meant there were no other options and until the Telecommunications Act was actually passed the companies that currently offer telecommunications services, with the exception of Optus, did not exist.
So the current telecommunications companies only began to 'appear' in the early 1990s and almost all of those 'start ups' have long disappeared. However a fortunate few have survived and prospered via a roseate business climate that has seen only 'limitless' growth. First in dial up internet which was followed by the transition to ADSL concurrent with the phenomenal growth of mobile services and then VoIP - 15 years of ever expanding markets and huge revenue growth year after year. It was an industry that just grew and grew with an, apparently, ever more rosy future....until quite recently when everything changed.
Three things happened. Firstly, Telstra 'changed the rules' by no longer providing sky high priced services that allowed every other provider to use their pricing as an umbrella under which they were content to make their own huge mark ups and therefore disproportionate profits for very little effort, or more importantly, any level of real management skills. Secondly the federal government announced it would create a new monopoly. The third event was that the booming growth in new ADSL services came to a screeching halt as market saturation arrived. So now the 'managements' of today's Australian communication companies are confronted, for the first time, with markets that are no longer growing and with a current dominant competitor that no longer provides a pricing umbrella (quite the reverse) and a future dominant monopoly supplier that completely changes the 'competitive' landscape now even though it will not be deliverable in any quantity for some unknown length of time.
These changes will need to be dealt with by company managements that have never operated in any markets other than ones that expand rapidly and with a dominant supplier that, because of its market share, chose to make it easy for any market enterer to establish and grow a viable business. Today the requirements to succeed are very, very different and the degree of difficulty of operating a telecommunications company in Australia has become at least a magnitude harder....and the management of the current communications company have never experienced such conditions. If this jaundiced view point is even partly correct it would explain many of the actions currently being seen if you are inclined to look at the various scenarios that have developed over the past two plus years.
I am getting the feeling that 2011 will see more changes than the past two years combined and none of them are positive.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2011
ABN 350 979 865 46