John Linton ....which means the second quarter of the year will be gone in the blink of an eye.
October has been a better month than September and the observable 'slowing' has either flattened out or turned upwards in most areas of Exetel's business - though not 'dramatically' by any means. The early successes of the newly trained Sri Lankan business teams in the first week of their actual selling activities were a very encouraging indication of things to come and we will be sending more Australian based resources to Colombo over the last two months of the calendar year to continue the sales training and the technical understanding of EOC services (this being done by one of our carrier suppliers who is quite enthusiastic about supporting this 'venture'). So, in almost every respect the week was very positive and sales were the best they have been for the month.....
.....which are very positive indications for November - itself almost always the best month of the year in terms of new customer acquisition. From what I can see in a 'forecasting sense' we have very good prospects for a record November by some considerable margin and that will be a heartening result in this toughest of years we have experienced to date. This, if it in fact happens, will be mostly because we are finally seeing some of the benefits from the investments of time and money we have put into our corporate and voip businesses which are now providing solid growth that has more than compensated for the Telstra depredations in the residential ADSL markets we once relied on for our revenues and growth. That turnaround is also helped by Optus in the residential ADSL area of our business whose assistance has finally slowed the Telstra attrition and turned that part of the business to positive growth.
What we do about the Telstra ADSL business remains unresolved. The ACCC is making some noises and Telstra is also making some veiled threats concerning a post wholesale/retail separation which remain to be actually put in to effect but it seems unlikely that they will do anything to change the current position. Almost two thirds of our Telstra based residential ADSL customers are in Telstra zones two and three where neither Optus nor AAPT can offer residential ADSL services. So we have zero 'room to manouvre' in providing services to those customers and even providing ADSL2 service at a fraction above break in those areas is not good enough to prevent Telstra Retail offering the same service at a lower price. It seems that only a long ingrained hatred of all things Telstra keeps those customers with Exetel....we certainly don't offer a better price. A conundrum we have never been able to solve but we do need to do something before the new calendar year.
We did decide at our board meeting last week that we would decide what we did to resolve the ongoing Telstra problems which have basically just got worse each year since the TexMex invasion and, if anything, have continued to get worse under the Thodey 'reign'. I really detest people who just talk and talk about how bad things are and don't fix them and I am now realising I am becoming one of those useless people. The problem is, at least for me, that there simply is no solution other than to stop dealing with Telstra and I am finding that hard to find a sensible time frame in which to make that happen. The NBN2 seemed to provide some sort of alternative to an in non capital city ares but God knows what sort of time frame that will be - in the event that it happens at all. (I have just about given up on wireless broadband providing a sensible solution in rural Australia, or even the larger country towns).
We need to find a sensible future residential customer strategy that uses completely different bases than those we have relied upon for the past eight years. I wish I had an inkling of what those may be. In the meantime we will continue to expand the business offerings and increase the sales and support resources allocated to them.
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