Electrosmart.Net

Telecom New Zealand

Updates on the operations and performance of Telecom New Zealand Limited - including Australian subsidiary AAPT.

Feb 2008

National Fibre Broadband Rollout

TELECOM New Zealand looks like slowling its pace in 2008 as it focuses on the national rollout of a fibre based broadband network. This will finally see an international grade high-speed internet infrastructure for the country that will rival that found in Australia.

Financial Performance

Profits - down 13% $NZ397 million - 15% increase in depreciation and amortisation costs.

Earnings [EBITDA] - down 2.3% [$NZ935 million]

Sales growth - down to only 1.1% - revenues of $NZ2.83 billion.

Market share - struggling with a poor market share [26%] of new retail broadband customers and also in the mobile market ahead of its launch of a new 3G network at the end of 2008. Telecom believes its broadband market share will bounce back to 50-60 %, once the new fibre-to-the-node (or cabinet) network delivers longer term improvements.

Company - still without a finance chief [following departure of finance chief Marko Bogoievski] and a chief operating officer for the consumer business.

Outlook - The New Zealand consumer business is struggling with broadband market share falling and mobiles continuing to battle against Vodafone, now making big push into fixed-line broadband.

Telecom & Xtra To Be Prosecuted Over 'Go Large'

Telecom and subsidiary Xtra are facing prosecution for allegedly misleading the public with its Go Large broadband promotion. The 2006 nationwide advertising of broadband plan "Go Large" claiming "unlimited data usage and all the internet you can handle" and "maximum speed internet" failed to live up to expectations, causing major discontent amongst its consumer users.

Jan 2008

Billing and Customer Service Platform Pain

AAPT struggling to migrate its customers to a new 'lost cost' billing and customer service platform known as 'Hyperbaric'

Reviewing Gen-i

TNZ is reviewing its IT services business Gen-i in Australia, which earns 75 per cent of its sales from the Commonwealth Bank.

Oct 2007

Discontent Over Wholesale Plans

Internet service providers are not happy with the wholesale broadband plans.

Telecom will limit the number of Naked DSL connections, broadband connections which don’t require a landline rental, to 50 per week between all ISPs with a maximum of “five to ten” per provider.

Guidelines have finally been issued by the Commerce Commission on how ISP's can advertise their broadband offerings without falling foul of the Fair Trading Act.

Sept 2007

Separation Plans Finalised

The New Zealand Government finalised its plans for the strong internal separation of TNZ into three divisions: retail, wholesale and networks with "Separation Day” set as March 31 2008 See Full Story

Puchased Powertel

AAPT purchashed infrastructure heavy telco Powertel for $357 million in 2007. The integration of AAPT and Powertel is expected to be completed by end of financial year.

Deal Brokered To Sell Fixed Line Network

Telecom agreed a deal with the Government to sell its fixed-line telephone network, valued at more than $3 billion. See Full Story