📣 3.4M+ views · 500K investor views · Read by journalists, strategy professionals & competitors · Regulators have the file · Analysts cut TPG price targets · A CEO who reached for the telephone · Vodafone leaked records to a journalist

In 2020 a scheme booklet promised shareholders “Australia’s leading challenger full-service telecommunications company” – fixed and mobile under one roof, worth some fifteen billion dollars, built to trouble Telstra and Optus.

Six years on, the company has sold the profitable half to a rival and signed a fifteen-year lease to keep using the very fibre it just sold. It is the corporate equivalent of pawning the family silver and paying weekly to keep it on the table. It has priced its mobile plans above the network it cannot beat, and shrunk to a little over seven billion. The booklet is still on the ASX. One can read the promise and the pawn ticket side by side. They do not agree.


Every great estate in decline reaches the same quiet moment: the day the family starts selling the good things to pay for the rest, and telling itself the sale is a plan. It rarely announces itself. There is no crash, no scandal, no single bad morning – only a sequence of sensible-sounding disposals that, read backwards, describe a house being emptied one room at a time.

TPG Telecom is having that moment now, and it has the paperwork to prove it. Somewhere on the exchange, filed and dated and impossible to walk back, sits a 358-page document from 19 May 2020 in which the company told everyone what it was going to be. It is the prospectus for the dream. And the single most instructive thing an investor can do now is set that dream beside the audited accounts of what actually happened, because the company that emerges from the comparison is not the one on the cover.


The Promise, in Its Own Words

The booklet did not hedge, and it did not undersell. The merger of TPG and Vodafone Hutchison Australia would create, in a phrase it deployed and re-deployed until it wore smooth, Australia’s leading challenger full-service telecommunications company. The word doing the heavy lifting was full: fixed and mobile, side by side, a “more diverse earnings base across fixed broadband and mobile,” a “more formidable competitor against Telstra and Optus.” The entire logic rested on having both halves. Convergence was not a feature of the strategy; convergence was the strategy.

And the numbers underneath it were real. The document set out a merged group with pro forma revenue of $5,909 million and EBITDA of $1,977 million, and promised “increased financial scale” from the combination. On the day it listed, the market valued the merged enterprise at something in the order of fifteen billion dollars – a genuine third force, capitalised like one.

Hold that figure, because it is the one that convicts everything after it. Today, six years on, the same company is worth a little over seven billion. More than half the value has evaporated – not in a crash, not in a scandal that moved the stock in a morning, but slowly, structurally, one prudent-sounding decision at a time. A business does not shed eight billion dollars of value by accident. It sheds it by consistently earning less on its capital than that capital costs to hold – which is the technical definition of a company destroying value while it operates, and the precise condition TPG has occupied, on its own numbers, every year since the merger. The booklet promised scale. What it delivered was a slow-motion halving.


The Prophecy the Company Wrote Against Itself

The most extraordinary passage in the booklet is not in the reasons to vote for the merger. It is in the reasons to vote against.

Every scheme document is obliged to set out, in fairness, why a shareholder might decline. Buried in that section is a warning to anyone who might prefer the old TPG: such a shareholder, the booklet cautioned, may wish to “confine your investment and exposure to a business with TPG‘s specific characteristics including its current exposure predominantly to fixed broadband.” In other words: if you value TPG precisely because it is a fixed-broadband business, this merger will change that, and you may not want it changed.

Read in 2020, it is boilerplate risk disclosure. Read in 2026, it is a prophecy the company wrote against itself and then went out of its way to fulfil. Because the thing the booklet flagged as a reason to reject the deal – the loss of exposure to profitable fixed broadband – is not something that befell the company. It is something the company chose.

It announced the sale in October 2024 and completed it on 31 July 2025 – the fibre network infrastructure and the Enterprise, Government and Wholesale fixed business, gone to Vocus, and in doing so manufactured, deliberately, the exact outcome its own founding document had listed as grounds to vote no. The shareholders who ignored the warning and voted yes have ended up, six years later, holding precisely the diminished, mobile-only business they were warned they might.


Selling the Half That Worked

This was not a subtle strategic drift that only a hostile reader could detect. When the Vocus sale was announced in October 2024, Morgans – a broker generally sympathetic to the company – said the quiet part aloud in a client note:

the deal was, in its own word, a “reversal” of the original argument for the merger, and one that aligned TPG neatly with Vodafone Group’s global habit of splitting its infrastructure away from its consumer business.

When even the friendly analysts are calling your defining transaction a reversal of your founding thesis, the thesis is not being refined. It is being abandoned, and the sell-side has noticed.

Return to the fibre sale, because it is the hinge on which the whole decline turns. When TPG sold its fixed infrastructure to Vocus, it did not sell a marginal appendage. By the company’s own segment disclosure, the fixed business it divested represented around sixty-eight per cent of the gross margin of its entire Enterprise, Government and Wholesale division. Not the revenue – the margin, the part that actually pays for things. It took the high-quality, high-margin infrastructure earnings to market and kept the low-margin remainder, and it booked a $473 million pre-tax gain for the trouble.

Look at what remains and the shape is stark. The continuing business now runs on two strips: Consumer, and a thin line of enterprise and wholesale left standing after the fibre departed. Consumer – the mobile-heavy retail arm, the Vodafone brand and its discount cousins – is now very nearly the whole company, carrying some $4,606 million of the group’s $5,044 million in segment revenue. And here is the detail that should trouble anyone still holding the stock: on that larger consumer revenue, gross margin barely moved – from $2,402 million to $2,409 million. More revenue, the same gross profit, and a business that has quietly reverted to being what Vodafone was before the merger promised to make it something more. The convergence play has been resolved by amputation, and the surviving limb is running to stand still.


Sold Today, Rented Tomorrow

And then the sale turns from a divestment into something closer to a confession, because TPG did not actually stop using the fibre it sold. It could not – the mobile network it kept runs on the transmission it had just handed to a competitor. So, concurrently with the sale, it signed a Transmission and Wholesale Fibre Access agreement – the TAWFA – for an initial term of fifteen years, and leased the strands straight back.

The accounting is worth stating slowly, because it is exactly the sort of entry built to be read quickly and forgotten. The leaseback obliged the company to recognise a lease liability of $789 million against a right-of-use asset of $509 million – and because the liability is the larger number, the gap fell to the profit and loss as a $280 million charge on completion, softened by a modest $20 million profit on the rights transferred. Put in plain terms: the act of renting back its own former network cost the company $280 million on the day, booked against the very gain the sale had produced, and committed it to fifteen years of payments to use what it used to own outright.

Recall, too, what the 2020 booklet had promised on this exact point. The merger’s synergies, it said, would come in part from “infrastructure, network and transmission savings” – the efficiencies of owning your own transmission. Five years later that transmission is sold, and the saving has become a fifteen-year bill. The promised economy is now a line item in the lease note.

Nor is it the first time the company has performed this trick.

The mobile towers went years ago, sold and leased back.

The fibre has now followed, sold and leased back.

Even the customers’ own phone debts have been through the revolving door – the handset receivables sold off the balance sheet, bought back on to protect margin, then in the year just reported sold forward again into a Macquarie-arranged financing programme at a derecognition cost the accounts record without ceremony as some $95 million, very nearly the whole of what the continuing business earned before tax.

There is a grim bonus in the manoeuvre, too, for anyone who watches the return-on-capital line: sell the receivables and the capital base they sat on shrinks with them, so the company’s return on that capital ticks obligingly upward – not because the business earned more, but because there is less of it to measure.

A company can raise its return on capital either by earning more or by having less capital, and TPG has spent six years choosing the second. The ratio improves as the enterprise empties.

Three assets, one identical manoeuvre: turn something you own into cash today and a cost tomorrow. It is the financial equivalent of selling the furniture to a leasing company and then paying to keep sitting on it. A pawnbroker offers better terms, in truth – pay the pawnbroker back and the silver comes home; here the silver is gone for good, and the weekly ticket runs for fifteen years with nothing to redeem at the end of it. Each transaction buys a year; each year requires the next. This is what selling the silver looks like when it is dressed as capital management.


The Network It No Longer Owns

The leaseback habit does not stop at the passive steel it sold years ago to a Canadian pension fund. It reaches all the way down to the radio network that makes a mobile company a mobile company.

In early January 2025, Vodafone activated its network-sharing arrangement with Optus – the MOCN – and decommissioned 755 of its own regional sites, moving its country customers onto Optus‘s radio network. Optus kept the pick of the ground for itself; Vodafone‘s redundant sites were switched off around it. The company’s own September 2024 announcement put the total payments to Optus at approximately $1.17 billion over the eleven-year term – which it described, candidly, as around one-third of what building and running an equivalent regional network itself would cost. And a rival now holds the one thing a carrier is meant to own outright: the network its customers actually connect to.

That one-third figure deserves a closer look, because it flatters by comparison to a network TPG was never actually going to build.

The accounts had never carried the full cost of constructing, running and maintaining a genuine regional network – so the $1.17 billion is not two-thirds of a saving, it is a new recurring cost, measured against a hypothetical the company had no funded intention of pursuing.

What it did appear to have, briefly, was a smaller plan. In February 2024, while the earlier Telstra sharing deal sat rejected and the Optus arrangement was not yet certain, TPG told the market it was “assessing plans to upgrade ~250 additional sites to 5G” in its regional footprint, and warned that if network sharing did not proceed it might face “higher short-term investment” at the very sites it may have planned to decommission.

How far that 250-site upgrade got – whether it started at all before the Optus MOCN made it moot – is not on the public record. But the plethora of fringe localities still running on Vodafone’s own unimproved native network, stranded between its own coverage and the MOCN footprint, suggests the answer is: not far. The upgrade the company was “assessing” appears to have been quietly overtaken by the decision to rent Optus‘s network instead – and the regional customers in those fringe gaps are still waiting for a modernisation that never came. Cheaper, then, than a network it was never funding. Efficient, in the narrow sense.

The cost of switching off its own network, on the other hand, was real, was booked immediately, and was not small.

The same announcement flagged $230 million to $250 million of non-cash charges in FY24 to decommission the 755 sites – and the largest slice of it, $170 million to $180 million, was the impairment of right-of-use assets on what the company itself called “onerous leases.”

Read that twice, because it is the whole pattern in one line: these were the tower leases TPG took on when it sold its towers for cash and rented them back, now written off as a loss because the company is walking away from the towers to rent a competitor’s instead. The leaseback that raised the cash became the impairment that recorded the retreat. A further $25 million to $30 million impaired the network equipment itself, and $35 million to $40 million was provisioned simply to switch the sites off. The company paid, in write-downs, for the privilege of dismantling its own network.

And the returns are in. The arrangement was sold as the way to win premium regional customers; the company guided to a negative EBITDA impact of $55 million to $65 million in its first year and a hit to net profit, and told the market breakeven was some years away.

Eighteen months after activation, Vodafone postpaid net additions have gone precisely nowhere – flat through FY25, flat through the first half of FY26 despite a hundred-day half-price promotion, and guided to stay flat. What growth there is arrives through the digital brands at roughly half the ARPU, a good deal of it migrating off Vodafone’s own premium shelf rather than won from anyone else.

The most expensive strategic bet in the company’s recent history has, on the metric that was meant to justify it, delivered nobody – and left the network it was meant to compete with as the network it now depends on.

Consider where that leaves Vodafone at the end of the term. A decommissioned site is not a subscription you reinstate with a phone call. When the eleven years run out, Vodafone’s regional coverage – the “double the network” it spent forty million dollars advertising – will exist entirely at the discretion, and the future pricing, of the competitor it is meant to be fighting. It has turned a capability it owned into a service it rents, from Optus, on terms that fall to be reset precisely when its own hand is weakest.

A challenger with no independent network across a third of the country is not a challenger. It is a reseller with a licence fee.

There is a tidy irony in the arithmetic. Vodafone holds the 700MHz spectrum best suited to exactly this coverage – the frequency that travels furthest and penetrates deepest – and has licensed a slice of it to Optus rather than deploy it itself, having told the country in a national campaign that there was nothing out there worth covering. If that were true, Optus would not be paying for the spectrum, and Vodafone would not be paying Optus.


The Netflix of Nothing in Particular

Having kept the mobile business, the company needed a growth story to tell about it, and it found one in a brand called Felix – the “Netflix of telco,” a phrase deployed to investors and journalists with the confidence of a man who has examined neither term too closely.

The comparison flatters by association and collapses on contact.

Netflix is a subscription in the sense that matters: long tenure, low churn, and the happy arithmetic of a business whose cost per customer falls as it grows, because the ten-millionth stream of a film costs almost nothing to serve.

Felix is a prepaid mobile plan with auto-renewal switched on by default – which is to say it is a subscription in the sense that a parking meter is a subscription.

There is no contract, little tenure to speak of, and none of the scale economics that make the analogy work. Worse than none, in fact: Felix leans on “unlimited” data, and unlimited data on a mobile network is the exact inverse of streaming economics – the heaviest users cost the most to carry, so the product grows more expensive to serve as it succeeds.

It is Netflix with the margin curve running backwards.

But the branding is the smaller offence. The larger one is where Felix finds its customers.

A discount brand sitting on the same network as its parent’s premium product does not, in the main, summon new subscribers from the ether; it harvests them from the more expensive shelf next door.

Felix ARPU runs around $25.75, against roughly $50 for Vodafone postpaid – so every customer who wanders from one to the other is booked, on the growth slide, as a digital-first win, and recorded nowhere as the premium loss it also is.

The company counts the arrival and omits the departure, though they are frequently the same person, holding the same phone, now paying the company half as much.

This is the mechanism beneath the flat postpaid line and the swelling digital tally: not a challenger winning the market, but a business strip-mining its own margin and reporting the rubble as growth. Having sold the profitable half of the company to a rival, the mobile half that remains has been handed a tool for hollowing out its own best customers – and instructed to call the result transformation.


The Tariff of a Cornered Brand

Which brings us to the price list, where the strategy finally gives itself away.

There is a pricing convention, well understood, that the challenger undercuts the incumbent – because price is the one lever a weaker brand can always pull.

Vodafone has misplaced it entirely.

As of the time of publication, its new plans sit at $58, $68 and $78 where Optus – the stronger network, and the one Vodafone partly rides under the sharing deal – offers more data for $45, $55 and $75; the cheapest Vodafone plan asks $58 for 65GB against Optus’s 60GB for $45, rising to $60 only after a year.

The third-placed brand, fresh from a national outage and a half-price promotion that moved no one, has chosen this moment to price above the rival it cannot beat. It is the tariff of a company that has given up winning customers and started managing the ones it has left – billing the back book a premium for a network it does not run and cannot match.

And the premium buys a conspicuously un-premium experience. Anyone crossing from Telstra or Optus notices it within a day: an app that remains a disjointed thing to use, and – more tellingly – the moment they drive to the edge of the shared-network footprint and drop back onto Vodafone’s own native network, where the capacity buckles and the data slows to a memory.

The sharing deal papers over the gap only until the customer steps outside it, at which point the old network answers, and the old network has not changed.


Growth by Chequebook

Where the customers cannot be persuaded to pay more for less, they can at least be won in bulk.

This masthead has documented the wholesale manoeuvre at length elsewhere – the Lyca base of some 99,000 that arrived in a single stroke, the roughly 135,000 Moose and Swoop customers migrated onto the network without being asked, and the forums already filling with those same customers porting straight back out.

The detail belongs to its own post and will not be re-run here. The point that belongs to this one is simpler, and it is a question rather than an accusation: a company genuinely winning the market on its merits does not need to keep collecting the subscribers it cannot attract, and one is entitled to wonder what it took to prise these wholesale bases off a keen incumbent.

Whether they were won on the strength of the proposition or the sharpness of the price – whether, that is, the economics were sacrificed to buy the headline – is not on the public record, and this masthead will not pretend otherwise. It observes only that a base assembled by agreement and halfway out the door flatters the subscriber line today and asks the harder questions of the margin tomorrow.


The Owners at the Door

Which leaves the question the whole piece has been circling, and it is not whether the company is being wound down but for whom. The register answers, and the answer was written into the founding document.

When the merger was struck, the two foreign houses that took control – the Vodafone and Hutchison interests, holding the majority of the merged company between them – entered an escrow so strict it forbade them from selling a single share for twenty-four months. Teoh’s associates were permitted to sell up to a fifth of their stake in the same window; the foreign owners could sell nothing. They were, in the booklet’s framing, committed to the long haul, locked in by contract to the value they were promising to create.

The lock expired. And the commitment, on the evidence, expired with it.

Vodafone Group has spent the years since dismantling its own empire from the outside in – selling Spain, exiting Hungary and Ghana, spinning out its European towers, all beneath more than thirty-six billion euros of net debt and an openly declared policy of recycling capital wherever it can be freed.

It has been reported by the Australian Financial Review, more than once and never denied, to have been tracking TPG‘s price in preparation for an exit. The Hutchison interests, for their part, have been restructuring their global telecom holdings for years.

And the domestic anchors have already halved, or very nearly left.

Washington H. Soul Pattinson – a 120-year-old investment house that the booklet recorded at 12.61 per cent, and that had held the stock for the better part of forty years – sold it down across a rapid series of 2026 trades worth well over half a billion dollars, fell out of the substantial-holder register entirely by April, and pulled its director, Robert Millner, off the board on the way out.

Not merely selling the shares, that is, but vacating the seat – the whole of a forty-year position, equity and boardroom both, surrendered inside a single season. Teoh’s 17.12 per cent has dropped, to around thirteen and a half.

The two names the founding document leaned on to signify stability have spent 2026 heading, in lockstep, for the door.

Now the pattern extends past TPG‘s own register to the whole tier.

In July, Morgan Stanley noted that SingTelOptus‘s parent – has begun exploring a “like-minded long-term local partner” to take a meaningful minority stake in Optus, the broker suspecting SingTel views Australia as attractive but relatively mature, and would happily recycle the proceeds into faster-growing assets elsewhere.

Read the three together and the picture resolves: the sophisticated foreign owners of Australia‘s two challenger carriers – Vodafone Group and Hutchison over TPG, SingTel over Optus – are, each in its own idiom and on its own timetable, edging toward the same exit at the same time.

They are not panicking. They are doing something colder than panic. Their conduct is consistent with owners who have concluded this is not where the growth is – and who are, politely, beginning to leave.

It is worth noting, before anyone concludes that Australian mobile is simply a bad business, that the same asset in more committed hands has behaved very differently.

Across the Tasman, Infratil bought just under half of Vodafone New Zealand for a little over a billion dollars in 2022, stripped the Vodafone name off it, rebranded it One NZ, and ran it – and within three years had taken almost its entire purchase price back out in cash distributions while still owning the thing.

The payments to Infratil more than doubled in the last year alone. Same starting point, a Vodafone-branded telco in a smaller market; opposite result.

The difference was not the market and not the brand – it was an owner that turned up to run the asset rather than to sell it, and treated the Vodafone name as something to discard rather than something to keep paying rent on.

What Infratil did next door with half a telco, TPG‘s controlling shareholders appear to have no intention of doing here with all of one. They are not holders of an underperforming asset waiting for it to turn. On the public record, they look far more like sellers partway through selling than holders waiting for a turn.

A company selling its best assets, leasing them back for cash, returning the proceeds to shareholders, and cutting the capital spending that keeps a network competitive is not confused about its future. It is grooming an estate for run-off on behalf of owners who have already, in every venue but the official one, signalled they would rather be elsewhere.


The Direction of Travel

Assemble the six years and the motion runs exactly opposite to the one the booklet described.

A merger sold as convergence has divested its convergence.

The fixed business that carried the margin has gone to a rival, and the fibre beneath it is rented back for fifteen years at a nine-figure standing cost.

The towers were sold and leased back before it; the handset receivables sold, repurchased, and sold again.

The mobile business that was never reliably profitable on its own is, once more, essentially the whole company – grown, where it grows at all, by trading its premium customers down to half-price brands and buying the rest by the label, while pricing above the stronger rival it cannot match.

The proceeds have gone out the door to a register whose largest members are, on the public record, looking for their own way out. And the enterprise the market valued near fifteen billion dollars at the altar is worth a little over seven today.

None of this is collapse, and that is the thing to understand about it. A mature telco can travel a very long way down this road while remaining perfectly solvent, paying its dividend, and issuing decks with arrows that point up.

The decline of such a business is not an event but a direction – assets sold to cover the shortfall the remaining assets cannot, each sale buying a year, each year demanding the next, the whole enterprise quietly draining while the presentation insists it is filling.

The word for a company that funds itself by selling its best parts is not challenger.

Management would call it a restructure, and it has the paperwork to prove it. But a restructure that only ever subtracts – that sells, leases back, and hands out the proceeds, and never once builds – is not a restructure at all. It is a liquidation with better manners, spread thin enough over enough years that nobody has to say the word.

And the people managing it are not building it. They are cataloguing the fixtures, valuing the silver, and paying themselves handsomely to describe the auction as a strategy.

The 2020 booklet promised to turn a perennially thin mobile operator into something larger and better than itself, worth fifteen billion dollars and built to fight.

Six years and one fibre sale later, the promise has been honoured precisely in reverse: the something-larger has been sold, the something-better leased back, half the value is gone, and the perennially thin mobile operator is what remains – alone in the purple coat, marked down by more than half, waiting for its owners to finish deciding when to leave.

The document is still on the exchange. Anyone may read what was promised. The accounts record what was delivered. The gap between the two is the whole of the story, and it is not closing.


Right of Reply

TPG Telecom Limited, Vodafone Group PLC, CK Hutchison Holdings, Vocus Group, Macquarie Group, Singapore Telecommunications, Optus, Infratil Limited, One NZWashington H. Soul Pattinson and Company Limited, and any director, executive, shareholder, adviser, or entity referenced or implied in this article are warmly invited to correct, clarify, or add context to anything set out above – including the characterisation of the 2020 Scheme, the Vocus transaction and the TAWFA leaseback, the handset-receivables financing, the segment disclosures, the pricing comparison, the network-experience observations, the wholesale acquisitions, and the state and intentions of the share register. If a figure is wrong, an inference unfair, or a promise in the booklet since fulfilled after all, the author would genuinely like to know, and to say so.

Verified responses sent to vodafailed@gmail.com will be published in full and without editorial amendment, alongside the original article. This right of reply remains open indefinitely – rather longer, one notes, than the twenty-four months the founding shareholders agreed to stay.


Disclosure, Disclaimer & Legal Notice

This article is independent commentary and analysis on a matter of public interest – the pawning and silver of its title being metaphor, not allegation of any specific transaction type – drawn entirely from publicly available material: TPG Telecom’s 2020 Scheme Booklet as registered with ASIC and lodged with the ASX on 19 May 2020; TPG Telecom‘s audited full-year 2025 statutory accounts, including the segment note, the discontinued-operations note, the leases note, and the net-debt reconciliation; the company’s ASX disclosures regarding the Vocus transaction, the TAWFA agreement, and its handset-receivables financing programme; publicly available plan pricing published by the respective carriers; published broker commentary, including Morgan Stanley research concerning SingTel and Optus and Morgans research concerning the Vocus transaction; Infratil Limited‘s public results and disclosures concerning One NZ; public substantial-holder filings concerning Washington H. Soul Pattinson‘s disposals; and publicly reported coverage of the ownership intentions of Vodafone Group PLC and CK Hutchison. No confidential, privileged, or non-public information has been used in its preparation.

All views expressed are the author’s honest opinions, formed on reasonable grounds from that public material, and are published in reliance on the protections afforded to honest opinion, fair comment, and publication in the public interest under the Defamation Act 2005 (NSW).

Financial figures, shareholding percentages, escrow terms, segment data, transaction details, market-capitalisation figures, and third-party return figures are quoted or derived from public disclosures and are subject to the limitations of external estimation.

Market-capitalisation figures are approximate and drawn from public market data at the relevant dates. Plan pricing reflects rates advertised at the time of writing and is subject to change and to promotional variation; readers should confirm current pricing directly with the carriers.

The comparison drawn with Infratil‘s ownership of One NZ reflects the author’s analysis of publicly reported outcomes in a different market and is offered as commentary on ownership and intent, not as a claim of directly equivalent circumstances.

Characterisations of the merger’s strategic logic, the direction of the company’s asset base, and the intentions of its shareholders are the author’s opinion and analytical inference from disclosed facts and mainstream reporting, not statements of fact as to any person’s intentions; references to shareholder exit intentions reflect publicly reported speculation, in some cases neither confirmed nor denied by the parties, and should be weighed as such.

References to David Teoh reflect his publicly reported shareholding only; no view, statement, or intention is attributed to him, and none should be inferred. References to customer migration following the wholesale acquisitions, and to network experience at the edge of the shared-network footprint, reflect publicly available commentary and analysis and are not represented as verified figures.

This is not financial, investment, or legal advice, and nothing in it constitutes a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. TPG Telecom, Vodafone, Vocus, Optus, One NZ, and related names are trademarks of their respective owners, used here for identification, commentary, and analysis only, with no affiliation or endorsement asserted or implied. No assertion of any breach of any law, regulation, or standard is made against any person or entity.

The author has an active dispute with TPG Telecom Limited (ASX: TPG), has made protected disclosures under Part 9.4AAA of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth), and holds an immaterial shareholding in TPG Telecom Limited. These interests should be weighed when reading this commentary. All entities and individuals retain the presumption of lawful conduct unless a competent authority determines otherwise.


Previous posts in this series:

Post #65 – When The Music Stops

Post #66 – The $2B Problem TPG Can’t Afford

Post #67 – The Bonus Year: Thin Earnings, Thick Optics

Post #68 – Buying the Narrative

Post #69 – The Smart Money Just Left the Building

Post #70 – Who’s Watching the Watchers?

Post #71 – Nine Lives: The Ad Agencies Vodafone Burned Through on the Way to Zero Growth

Post #72 – Marked Safe from the Whistleblower Policy

Post #73 – The Story Nobody Will Publish

Post #74 – Nothing Out Here

Post #75 – The Gift That Keeps Giving

Post #76 – The Seat Nobody Wants

Post #77 – Houdini Never Filed a Form 605

Post #78 – Fifteen Years and a Footnote

Post #79 – Read Receipts

Post #80 – Two Companies in a Purple Coat

Post #81 – Transformational: A $7 Million Result With a $1.6 Billion Costume

Post #82 – The Cartographer’s Apology

Post #83 – Bagged a Moose

Post #84 – A Record Quarter

Post #85 – The Uninvited Guest

Post #86 – $840 and a Rolodex

Post #87 – Acting On Instructions

Post #88 – Sequins and Silence

Post #89 – A Run of Unfortunate Weather

Post #90 – Net of the Sale

Post #91 – Eighty-Eight Per Cent


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