Rivals sleep while we grow - NOW

Strong growth and slumbering incumbents have lifted NOW's (formerly Airnet) ambitions.

The Hawkes-Bay based telecommunications company's CEO Hamish White said it was very close to having 20 per cent of the business market in Hawke's Bay, having grown 150 per cent in nine months.

With profit forecasts surpassed, "the bow has risen and the mood around the boardroom table is to go bigger and faster in neighbouring provinces", he said.

"The long-term plan now is very much to to do a central lower North Island play - the whole geography - contesting 33 per cent of New Zealand. In Hawke's Bay and Tauranga it is only 4 per cent. But there is a lot of water that has to go under the bridge before we begin that."

NOW has made a "modest" entry into the Rotorua market from Hawke's Bay but is looking to appoint a senior sales manager and set up an office this year.

Mr White said with Vodafone buying out Telstra last year 78 per cent of the industry was now controlled by a duopoly, with both focused on their own organisations in the short term.

"We have lost two challengers - Vodafone and Telecom are exhibiting all the DNA you would expect from a big incumbent where they have more to lose than gain by actually being a challenger and grow in this market."

With the duopoly internally focussed, the "generational trigger"of the UFB rollout and a regulatory regime that favours competition gave "a genuinely fair playing field for retailers like ourselves".

"It is going to be the lean that are going to be the most profitable and we don't have the legacy [costs]."

NOW marketing manager Ben Deller said negative publicity around Telecom's fibre offering was because Telecom was not ready to fulfil its contract with Crown Fibre Holdings to have a commercial UFB offering in the market by April this year.

"You've got New Zealand's largest telecommunications company who can't deliver a phone line over next-generation technology," Mr White said.

"It's good for us because IT telephony is our native state - that's what we do best.

"These big incumbents are discovering they can't support things like medical alarms and faxes - we do that in our sleep."