Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
According to industry analyst firm Longhaus, Australia holds a key position in the manufacturing of next-generation processors, mobile phones and digital cameras.
Unfortunately for those who believe design and elaborately transformed manufactures are key to economic prosperity, that place is right at the bottom of the production pyramid.
Australia is the world's largest producer of zircon, and that mineral is the source of hafnium, which Intel, AMD and IBM will use in their next-gen chips.
Similarly, Australia is the world's largest producer of tantalum, which is used to make capacitors.
The downside is that global supplies of these elements are not tipped to last very long: a decade for hafnium, and two or three for tantalum.
"Moving forward Australia’s role in supplying critical elements into the ICT manufacturing process may have to be one not unlike OPEC... peak ICT industry bodies need to join with the Federal government and the resources sector to explore serious considerations for investment in foreign ICT policy", notes the unsigned Longhaus commentary entitled "Australia: The ICT manufacturing powerhouse."
As industry policy consultant Martin Fell pointed out in today's edition of The Age, "every quarry is ultimately an abandoned hole."
"Our position [at the bottom of the list of trading nations] is a consequence of our failure to add value to our resources", observes Fell.
For what seems like a decade, Australian politicians have preferred to point to the country's 'success' in adopting overseas designed and manufactured products to improve the efficiency of other industries, rather than worrying about the state of the indigenous IT industry.
Sure, there are some success stories such as Mincom (ironically, it specialises in software for asset-intensive organisations such as miners), but all too often 'success' seems to be measured in terms of becoming an acquisition target for larger foreign companies. Just last week we saw what this can lead to, when Compuware announced that it was retrenching its entire Sydney development team (which it gained as part of an acquisition) and transferring the product's further development to its home base in the US.
David Bass
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