Stuart Corner
Monday, 10 November 2008 09:08
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo was telling investors last week that high speed broadband is central to his strategy, while claiming there is every possibility that Telstra won't be part of the Government's planned National Broadband Network. Interesting!
Close listeners to Telstra's day long investor briefing last Thursday, 6 November would have detected some interesting contradictions in key messages coming from Sol Trujillo and his team amid the deluge of data designed to convince them of Telstra's stellar performance in just about every aspect of its business.
Message number one, which has been repeated endlessly by senior Telstra executives in recent months, is that Telstra will not bid to build the national broadband network if there is even a hint of structural separation.
And COO Greg Winn used the platform provided by the day to launch a blistering attack on the idea of structural separation, throwing in a few furphies for good measure, like: "What are you going to do about Triple 0 services?" Funny that, no-one seems to worry to much about them working from several different mobile networks into the PSTN, or across the various circuit-switched networks operated by Telstra's competitors, or even from VoIP services.
Message number two was that Telstra's whole strategy is centred around high speed broadband networks. As Trujillo said in his introduction: "We have architected our business for the future. We have architected our business for a high speed broadband world...This is not the old narrowband world, this is not the old model. It is not the same comparable variables...It's about fast, or translated, it means real-time. It's about unlimited capabilities, it's about any device, it's about any place, anywhere..."
He then went to explain that the strategies that he and his team have spelt out at each of these events every November since he became CEO of Telstra in 2005 have now changed. "For the first three years we have been very focused on driving productivities, driving change, building networks, changing systems, doing all that sort of thing, and that intensity does not change. It continues."
This, he explained, was merely the prelude: "You are going to hear now, and hopefully you are going to start getting a preview of the rest of the story, which is about the media portion of a media comms company. And you will hear from Justin [Milne, head of Telstra Media] today, you will hear from Bruce [Akhurst head of Sensis] today, and you will hear from [Foxtel CEO] Kim Williams today, talking about what I call 'the rest of the story' that will begin unfolding over the next year or two as we continue to execute our strategy."
CONTINUED
