They counted the wildebeest standing on the far bank. Swoop Holdings has published one number from its crossing, a hundred thousand services onto Vodafone, dated the day before results, and set it against a base dated nine weeks earlier, which cannot be made into a percentage of anything and was never meant to be. Thirty-three… — read more

Two subsidiaries of the same parent, carrying the same brand and the same grudge. One was sold in 2019 to infrastructure investors, under whom the business fixed the network, fixed the service, fixed the price, stopped paying Vodafone Group for a name its own chief executive had put on a screen in front of his… — read more

Post #100 read the half. This post reads the ladder they propose to climb out on – and prices the rungs. Four definitions of profit for one six-month period. A cash flow statement that does not care which one you prefer. A network-sharing bill currently running at the fixed floor of an agreement contracted to… — read more

TPG’s half-year landed on Friday with a headline of 275 per cent profit growth, which on the statutory numbers is three million dollars. The interest saving from selling the fibre network finally arrived – and was eaten, three-quarters of it, by the rent on the fibre and the fees to Macquarie. The tax shield the… — read more

Two telco boards reached for the same lever within a season of each other, and wrote almost the identical sentence describing what they did with it. Telstra’s pulled it down – $607,000 off its chief executive for an outage that happened eight days after the year had closed, before its own expert had reported. TPG‘s… — read more

For nine years Moose Mobile was the answer to a question Australians asked each other constantly: who is actually good, and cheap, and won’t mess you around. It ran on the Optus network. It answered its telephone. It held a reputation on the consumer forums that no marketing budget can manufacture. Almost five thousand people… — read more

A company may sell its customers’ phone debts, or it may keep them. TPG Telecom has now done both, and then both again, in the space of a decade – and has never once told its shareholders who was buying. The last reversal cost $95 million, which is very nearly everything the continuing business earned… — read more

For more than nine years, Moose Mobile was one of the quietly beloved names on the Optus network – a challenger with cheap plans, a good reputation on the forums, and a base loyal enough to refer their friends. “You used to be great,” a customer wrote last month, on his way out the door. Whatever goodwill nine years… — read more

There is a number on the third page of Vodafone‘s new report the company would like the market to notice: $1.1 billion, the modelled benefit of its regional network expansion, rendered in the confident blue of a firm paid to be confident. There is a second number, on page fifty-six, it would prefer nobody noticed.… — read more

Open Vodafone‘s website this morning and one finds two companies arguing. The first asks fifty-eight dollars a month. The second, sitting directly beside it, asks forty-five – and offers more. Both are Vodafone. Both are live. Both are today. Four moves in a fortnight, on a price list the company spent months preparing and held,… — read more