John Linton We had our best ever corporate 'December sales day' yesterday with 20 new corporate data link orders; it was actually the second best corporate sales day 'ever'. Residential service orders were also well above this day last December and the forecasts for the remaining, usually 'very quiet' remaining days of December, are surprisingly strong. The 'dog days' have, apparently, not yet arrived for Exetel.
Our announcement yesterday of our partnership with AAPT to sell their business services via a greatly expanded sales and support operation in Sri Lanka 'triggered' a surprising number of xenophobic responses which I find very strange in the 'globally integrated' world of late 2011. Apparently it has escaped the uninformed people who wrote to me yesterday that Australians, and residents of all 'developed' countries gain enormous benefits from the globalisation of world commerce. To make this, bleedingly obvious point, the fact that Japan has to 'export' automotive manufacturing jobs to the USA to save money sums up the issues in today's commercial world:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577110773296061352.html?mod=WSJAsia_hpp_LEFTTopStories
In today's commercial world many changes are required that would have been 'unthinkable' in past decades....who could have imagined that the richest country, by a country mile, of the 1980s would be viewed as a cheap labour source in the 2000s?
I responded to several of the people who accused Exetel of being part of the "bankrupting of Australia by 'off shoring' Australian jobs" by sending them that article and also pointing out that Exetel was in the process of increasing the number of corporate sales and engineering positions in Australia by 30% over the next 2 - 3 months as a result of it. There are no such things as 'Australian jobs' unless they are jobs that physically need someone in Australia to do them - dig things out of the ground, grow things in the ground, build things over the ground or provide services to people and infrastructures located on the ground (hotels, office buildings, residences, roads, rail links, airports). Everything else becomes a matter of cost effectiveness and skill availability and investment returns....and the willingness of people to do the required work - something 'Australians' are very 'picky' about.
If our partnership with AAPT is successful then we will double the number of personnel in Sri Lanka over the next 12 - 15 months to around 200 professional employees - something that will be very good for a country that struggles to emply its university graduates in meaningful positions at reasonable salaries. AAPT will increase the number of Australian personnel employed because of the work being done in Sri Lanka as will Exetel in Australia. Would these additional people have been hired if the Sri Lankan venture did not happen and was successful? No. So the money invested in the Sri Lankan operation produces new jobs in Australia - apart from the fact that it also allows Exetel to continue to exist and allows AAPT in Australia to consolidate its Australian operations doing the things it is good at - employing more Australians to build new telecommunications infrastructures and providing telecommunications services that allow Australian businesses to reduce their communications costs. It's all very basic and very simple and it surprises me that such issues are even raised by anyone today.
I must find a way of communicating simple facts better than I have done to date - but then I am continually surprised that people who comment on such issues have so little understanding of what they attempt to criticise. 'Old' jobs will continue to disappear from Australia (and every other country in the 'developed world') as new technologies make it more efficient to do the work in other locations - you wouldn't want to buy a flat screen TV or mobile telephone hand set made in Australia would you?
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