A month ago, in Bagged a Moose, we watched TPG win the wholesale contract to carry Moose Mobile‘s customers and herd them off the Optus network they’d chosen onto the Vodafone network they’d spent years avoiding. We predicted they’d notice, and leave. It was not a daring forecast; it was arithmetic. A month on, the… — read more

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… — read more

Last year, less than one per cent of TPG’s shareholders objected to how it pays its executives. This year, twelve per cent did. In between, the company earned one per cent on its continuing business, handed shareholders back $2.8 billion it got from selling the fibre network, and paid its chief executive eighty-eight per cent… — read more

Three documents, one company, filed weeks apart. The survey said the customers were staying; the guidance said the premium base wouldn’t grow; the accounts said the half-billion-dollar profit was a fibre network sold and gone by next year. Two of the three were marketing. The third was audited – and it did not agree with… — read more

A workplace keeps its own weather. For most of a season the needle sat where needles like to sit – the man was good at his job, and the glass read fair. Then, across a single week in spring, it dropped. The drop is never the surprise. The surprise is how calm the sky looks… — read more

A man who sat, for the better part of a decade, at a remarkable set of seams: a shareholder of the man’s employer; a director of the telco’s charitable foundation; a near quarter-century partner at the firm that acted for the telco in its merger. Then a whistle is blown, a telephone rings, and –… — read more

Hold the collector’s letter to the light and the watermarks rise: an independent solicitor who only ever had one client, billing you to settle that client’s debt by paying the client’s mercantile agent – which is to say, the client, in a hat. The debts, the ACCC now alleges, were frequently paid, settled, or long dead. TPG Telecom is among the bespoke few; Vodafone rides… — read more

A charity is meant to keep its money and spend its connections sparingly. This one does the reverse, with gusto. The contributions lurch about on the donor’s whim – $2.5 million one year, barely one the next, $3.3 million in the year just lodged – while the reserves sit at a sum you’d struggle to… — read more

Two years of admiring the slide; one morning with a calculator. TPG closed down about ~8% on Investor Day – the market having finally totalled a $2.1 billion spectrum bill, a flat premium base, and a return on capital below its cost. The deeper story is a company quietly rewriting its own scoreboard: merging premium… — read more

Vodafone had a record quarter – of complaints. The spike that hit late last year hasn’t receded, its rivals’ numbers are falling while its own won’t, and the brand that once led this scoreboard now trails it per customer. It reports the family across three separate lines so nobody totals them. We totalled them. There… — read more