John Linton Sales of all services continue to get stronger following the normal November pattern established over as many decades as I have been associated with commercial life in Australia. Over the last two years the November 'surge' has started later and continued well into December for most services. It is not anything dramatic but always good to see and nice that with so many changes occurring that some positive things can still be 'relied' on. We continue to grind away at making the remaining changes to the business plan for the start of 2012 and that process is always assisted by the good things that happen in November and the first half of December.
The main issue that we are faced with for this year is what 'attitude' we take to residential ADSL in 2012. Unless Telstra renews a more vigorous 'win back' campaign or TPG finds a way of offering unlimited services at a lower price and delivering a better quality then it appears, at least at the moment, that we have 'ridden out' those particular storms with net loss/net gain from those providers returning to a slight, but slightly increasing, positive return month on month. Losses to companies such as Internode/iinet/iPrimus are almost zero and have been for some time and only Dodo (with major assistance from Optus) have emerged on the 'churn away' consideration. So, after three years of ever higher rates of churn from wave after wave of Telstra 'win back' campaigns residential ADSL sales are returning to 'normal'.
Good to see, but what will happen in 2012? I haven't got any real ideas other than it is now 'calmer' than it has been since mid 2008 and there has, very definitely, been some very significant changes in the competitors in ADSL services in all market places. My views are limited by what I see happening in Exetel's 'world'. What I see is that Internode is no longer as well regarded as it was prior to the start of 2009 and iinet, apart from its ongoing purchases, is a non-event in any competitive situation. TPG has made a lot of progress over the past three years but appears to be running out of the ability to deliver on its 'marketing' promises and faces the same losses to Telstra that all other providers have been subjected to.
Perhaps it's the changes we have made to managing the ADSL residential 'marketing program' that have caused the turnaround or perhaps its that all residential suppliers are exhausted and 'punch drunk' from the unceasing Telstra onslaughts that seem to have been going on 'forever'. It's very hard to decide what to do with residential ADSL over the coming year. The best option seems to be to work more closely with Optus to try and take advantage of the 'exhaustion' of so many of previously significant competitors to slowly grow our customer base. With the Telstra/NBNCo deal due to be signed 'soon' that will mean that Telstra's residential ADSL prices to wholesale customers and Telstra Retail will be 'regularised' - that is if you are a naive moron - because, of course, that will never happen. What will happen is some pretense of that which will have to pay lip service to redressing the current massive imbalance at some future point of time.
So, our remaining decision is just how to offer residential ADSL and small business ADSL services in the new calendar year. Is it time to be more aggressive? Or is it possible to come up with some truly unique offering?
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