John Linton
We have been approached by various brokers/intermediaries/some business owners over the six years of Exetel's existence to buy either all of Exetel or parts of the company - usually the ADSL business customer bases. These approaches have never been taken seriously by Exetel and never gone past the initial telephone call or email except when we have thought it worthwhile to learn somethings we didn't know about the company making the approaches...we seldom did...actually I don't think we ever did. I have lost count of such approaches but I think it's well into double figures.
So I was surprised to receive a new approach and even more surprised in the way it was made last Friday. A nice Singaporean lady arrived in our foyer accompanied by a business acquaintance and asked to see me to see if we wanted to sell Exetel. We exchanged a few pleasantries and I asked her to provide us with some details as to the background (especially the cash status) of her and her husbands company and the broad parameters of the basis of her offer and went back to my desk to finish off the work I needed to do before I left the office for a week.
There have been occasions over the past six years (almost always in the early hours of the morning during particularly demanding times) when I have thought about how nice it would be to not have to be involved in the constant challenges of operating a company of Exetel's size in the intensely competitive markets and services we involve ourselves in. But that sort of thinking lasts for a few minutes each time for what is a probable total of around 15 minutes out of the past 400,000 or whatever the actual number is over the past 6 plus years.
Personally, I think there's little point in any entity buying Exetel as Exetel is just too different to any other Australian communications company. Principally we don't operate the company to maximise its profit - we do the complete reverse - we operate the company on the basis of making as little profit as possible consistent with staying in business and paying our bills and taxes on time and being able to support endangered species at a slightly increasing level each year. Not the sort of company that any other entity would find financially attractive and certainly one where no "synergies" could be found. So the oleaginous reptiles that have approached us with their 3.5 - 4 times EBITDA and the 'multiples' for "synergy" and the rest of the financial smoke and mirrors simply isn't there....even if we bothered to do some basic numbers....which I have never bothered to have done.
I have never had any interest in money - at any stage of my business life and that clearly shows in my choice of jobs over the past 40 plus years. My one ambition when we set up Exetel was to build a 'perfect company' that was equally beneficial to its customers, its suppliers, its employees and the country in which it operated. We have a very long way to go to meet those objectives and, after all these years of trying, I don't want to leave before that objective is achieved.
I suppose we would sell Exetel for the right amount of cash on a 'hand over the keys and walk away from the business the moment the cheque clears' basis but the sort of people/companies that have approached us in the past never have the right amount of cash (in one case any cash at all) and they and their companies are the sorts of people I wouldn't want to sell anything to even if I regarded what I was selling as completely worthless. I haven't played my part in helping get Exetel where it is today to put its customers and employees in the hands of the sort of people who have approached us in the past.
Who knows - this latest approach may be the exception - oddly 'engineered' as it was? Though my experiences with Asian "business people" is such that I doubt Exetel is a suitable purchase.