John Linton .........can't say the same for the outlook between now and Christmas.
Yesterday was an interesting day with the monthly board presentations by the 'department' managers. Exetel has come a long way since it consisted of one person in a small back room of our house and two 7206's and four IBM servers in the Powertel Data Centre in Clarence Street. I would have thought that any relatively competent 'senior manager' who listened to those presentations and asked whatever questions they wished to do based on a pretty good understanding of the overall Exetel business (as I do and did) would have formed the conclusion that Exetel's issues/problems/opportunities are being dealt with by thoroughly experienced, highly competent and skillful people who have a detailed grasp of the responsibilities and enough and competent enough personnel under their charge to meet this years very aggressively difficult targets. Then again it might well be my lack of acuity.
We are now almost one month in to our FY2011 business plan and, on balance, all the key trends are positive with revenue slightly exceeding the first month's estimates in all but one of ten product 'sectors' and ADSL1, perversely, actually making net gains and well exceeding our initial forecasts.....this despite Telstra Retails huge new cash giveaways to make current ADSL1 users of other ISPs move to BigPond. So, as you tend to do when you have run the same business for a while, you tick off four more weeks in which you have grown your company, if not by very much then at least achieved growth rather than decline, and you start worrying about the following month.
I obviously don't know how other company's are 'seeing' their first month of the new financial year. The impression I get from my two long term acquaintances in the Australian communications industry is that July is not going to be any sort of month to write home about and that, like Exetel, they have gone into the new financial year with very conservative expectations. From what I can gather from our suppliers - most of them are not seeing anything very positive and even our main bank manager is trying to lend us money which is some sort of sign that the overall business 'climate' is not as good as he/his bank would like it to be. Perhaps I am reading too much in to too little information.
A great deal about the start of FY2011 has been disrupted by the recently called Federal Election. My observation, since I grew old enough to notice, is that a Federal election always seems to produce reasons for a wide range of businesses (business managers) to "wait and see what happens". Why? I have no idea at all - it isn't as if an election has ever changed a single thing in the overall operation of the country - even/especially when some big change is 'promised'. (Remember "Work Choices" and how Rudd/Gillard were going to "sweep them away" at the last election? - notice any difference now? - of course not). Notwithstanding the reality - several significant decisions we were expecting to happen in August are now on hold until "after the election". It's as if senior decision makers are capable of only pursuing one thought at a time and a Federal election precludes anything else being considered for 6 weeks or so.
So, it appears that August is going to be a more difficult month than July is turning out to be following the previously established results of elections being called. I wonder how many more 'negative' things can effect business results - there never seem to any positive influences like mining companies get from building booms around the world every few years. Probably the real benefits of having a global business instead of a small sector in a small country's economy with massive competitors.
Still, we can continue to do the best we can and, hopefully, by the time August starts we will have recovered our long held position of offering the most for the least in all of our residential services which will be a great achievement after the continual issues with which we have had to contend over the past four or five months. If we can in fact achieve that I, personally, will be happy to deal with whatever Telstra next throws at our (and I'm sure other ISP's) customer base - completely free services with $1,000 'cash back'?
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