KEY POINTS:
It was a subdued Theresa Gattung that took to the stage at the TUANZ telecommunications summit in Wellington this morning for her last speech to the annual conference. There were no flashy suits or any of her characteristically blunt one-liners.
Theresa wore brown and kept it brief.
She used her
speech to plug, for one last time, her counter-proposal for a structural separation of Telecom, which she said was "... worth considering because it seeks to promote certainty and investment.
"Making things overly complex and costly will not help deliver better broadband," she added.
But it was a fairly half-hearted attempt to convince her audience, which was largely made up of her competitors. Instead, Gattung chose a fairly populist issue to push - exporting. She said the industry had to develop a stronger "export culture" particularly in the internet economy where there were huge export opportunities
"No one organisation can do it on its own," she said.
She listed what she considers to be her successes in the job of CEO including taking Telecom into the IT services market through the acquisition of Gen-i, investing in the Southern Cross Cable, taking Xtra to number one in the internet market and rolling out Telecom's 3G mobile services.
She also praised herself for having the "courage to invest in PowerTel" and recommit to the Australian market.
She said Telecom was no longer a verticvally integrated telco and that Vodafone was probably the last telco of that kind in the world. Telecom had already separated its divisions, had separate managing teams running them and was committed to wholesaling its services.
But she said Telecom's $700 - $800 million in annual capital expenditure wouldn't be enough to meet the goals of the Government's Digital Strategy, namely delivering broadband of at least 5Mbps (megabits per second) to 90 per cent of the country by 2010.
"If Telecom won't invest, who will?", she asked, assuming even if other investors chip in to upgrade the country's infrastructure, there will still be a shortfall in the investment required.
At last year's conference, she vowed to take Telecom in a new direction and play ball with the regulator, something she acknowledged it may have appeared she hadn't exactly done.
There were no promises this time, no big partling statements, just the lasting impression that Theresa is leaving Telecom with fundamental issues to sort out on all fronts.
