John Linton .....as that previous crazed socialist Gavrilo Princip.
It is almost mid way through the month and the 'slowness' evident in the first half of September is evident in the first half of October and although September finished up OK I think the trend is not as positive as was the case in both July and August....at least for us. In some ways things are much better for Exetel than they have been for some time but that is more to do with the 'desperation' of our suppliers than general market conditions. I suppose the two can't be separated - slowing market conditions generate 'desperation' in suppliers and someone benefits but seldom companies like Exetel.....but this time we seem to be at least one of the beneficiaries which is a very welcome situation and more than mitigates the effects of a slowing set of residential market places.
What is going to happen over the coming months is uncertain but what looks like happening is that a significant number of chickens are going to come home to roost (though in this monstrous period of "battery hen farming" that aphorism is probably no longer relevant). In a period where carriers are having to write off tens of millions to prop up some of their wholesale customer's ludicrous and commercially suicidal adventurism it is certain that many of the current crazier 'promotions' are going to end in tears. If you read David Thodey's comments in the latest BRW (and were capable of interpreting what was reported as being said in terms what was actually meant) you would have seen the 'final admission' of just how drastic the Labor government's intervention in the communications actually is. So the verdict is in; from Telstra on down no-one really knows how to address the communications markets from now until some future certainty is established.
So many communications services suppliers have built their businesses on supply scenarios that will not exist for much longer and even now are being cannibalised that it's hard to see which of them will survive....at least in their current form. Exetel is by no means immune to the negative results of these massive changes but, in our own limited ways, we have been planning, and executing that planning, to protect ourselves from the inevitable results of them for more than three years....while it seems that so many other suppliers have simply continued on apparently expecting nothing to change very much. I have no knowledge whatsoever of any other company's future planning but it is possible to deduce likely future actions from self evident current actions. At the risk of being melodramatic the current time appears to share much of the characteristics that Barbara Tuchman described so vividly in the opening chapters of "The Guns Of August"....a way of life and an expectation of longevity was about to be 'blown away', literally, for ever in a matter of months and by the end of four years almost no trace of those previous century old expectations remained.
Irrespective of what may, or may not, be happening around the industry there remains the prosaic day to day actions of managing changing circumstances to optimise the chances of continuing to have a viable future. One key objective for Exetel is to change our support processes and Annette and I will be going to Colombo on the weekend to put in place the next part of that radical program as well as reviewing the progress we are making in scaling up the business and corporate sales programs in Sri Lanka. Those are the twin 'planks' for ensuring Exetel is best able to meet the rapid changes in today's communications business and to ensure we can improve our abilities to handle the new 'world' that has so carelessly and thoughtlessly been brought in to being. However much planning is done, the problem remains that the inevitable changes now occurring are causing more and more unknowns as the larger influences that have not made the correct 'calls' seek to catch up with those that have - in the mean time companies of Exetel's size have to avoid the tumbling building blocks or get flattened.
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