John Linton There are many aspects of operating a start up business through the various stages of its existence - bearing in mind that 50% of start ups don't make it past 18 months and only a very tiny percentage of start up companies ever make it past their 5th year of existence. I read this yesterday:
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/business/internodes-hell-of-a-ride/story-e6frede3-1226053623272
as an example of one company that has grown and prospered over the past twenty years and is one of only three Australian communications companies that existed 15 years ago (in some form) that has survived and grown over that period (the others being TPG and iinet). It simply confirms that the Australian communications industry is no different to any other industry in Australia or, almost certainly, any other country. Operating any business is seldom (if ever) easy and the factors that affect ongoing success are numerous and sometimes uncontrollable. There are a tiny number of companies that have lasted 100 years and those that have, with a few obvious exceptions, are in businesses today that bear little or no resemblance to their origins (banks, automotive manufacturers and base metal refiners or resource prospectors being the major exceptions that spring to mind).
However the information delivery and processing industry has a higher percentage of long term companies than any other industry sector with the possible exception of banking although, of course, it is an industry with, at the most generous of interpretations, has only existed for some 210 years. No company in the communications industry can claim to have been in existence for the whole 210 or so years and with the possible exception of AT&T and C and W (if they really stretch their claims to their origins) or IBM and NCR can really claim real ties to existence in the 1800s. So communications companies, with the obvious exceptions of national carriers in the EU and the US and much of the old Empire and Commonwealth are pretty 'new'.
The obvious conclusion to draw is....well....not so very obvious; at least not obvious to me who has been in this strange industry since his late teens. So, in beginning to try and 'design' a sensible financial and operating plan for Exetel's eighth year of existence I am finding it a quite different experience to past years. This is partly because after two of the hardest years of my, and doubtless a significant number of other people's, commercial lives it is harder than it used to be to 'predict' just what will now happen over the coming years. The reason I mentioned the Simon Hackett article was the quoted statement:
"He (Simon Hackett) said Internode was placing "two bets on two possible futures" for the
National Broadband Network project - being a player in the NBN or
making plans for no network at all."
While this may well be just some off the cuff/spur of the moment comment it does serve to illustrate (if it's even vaguely true) the sort of changes that many companies now have to contemplate in this industry. Internode, like almost all/all current companies that grew and prospered while Telstra watched its market share drop like a stone in ADSL services now have to contemplate a future where Telstra has changed the 'landscape' and the 'NBN2' if it actually continues to exist will change it even further.
So, like the fictional Dorothy, the present is very strange and very different and she made that observation before she met her weird co-travelers. Just how very, very different will the future actually be?
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