T22 was a strategy of necessity – a strategy designed to transform every aspect of Telstra – and it has. Over three years we radically simplified our product offerings, replaced a huge amount of legacy systems with digital experiences, and completely changed the way we work so we could make it easier for our people to work, improve the experience for customers and deliver value for our shareholders. We still have more to do but the finishing line is in sight.
Here’s how CEO Andy Penn explained it to investors today:
If T22 was a strategy of necessity, T25 is a strategy for growth. And in its implementation, we will be using exactly the same disciplines and governance that we used for T22 – the metrics and the milestones, the roadmaps and the scorecard which we will make transparent to you. And this is why I am confident it will be a success – why change a winning formula when you don’t need to.
T22 has been one of the largest, fastest and most ambitious transformations of a telco globally. Today we are a vastly different company, one poised for growth as our society and economy increasingly digitises and we all work, study, transact and get our entertainment online.
So T25 is our strategy for growth, which we’ve broken down into four pillars:
There’s a lot to unpack in each, but these four pillars are the core of our new strategy – with each having a number of key initiatives that we will deliver, just as we did through T22.
Focusing on our customers and improving the way we serve them is crucial to the success of T25. We’ll achieve this by providing a consistent customer experience on the phone, in store or online.
We’re on track for all small business and consumer voice calls to be answered in Australia by the middle of next year, and we’re making good progress on transitioning to full ownership of Telstra-branded licensee stores across Australia. We’re also turbocharging our loyalty program, Telstra Plus, and expanding the services we offer small business customers to grow in the digital economy.
Our Enterprise customers rely on Telstra to help them deliver business outcomes with telecommunications products, edge connectivity, cybersecurity, cloud, AI and IoT delivered by Telstra Purple.
The pervasiveness of technology in businesses today, and its ability to transform them, no longer means that one size or one solution fits all. Enterprise customers want tailored technology solutions to solve their most pressing problems and to pursue opportunities. To meet this need, we’ve structured our Enterprise business to have greater industry alignment with technology services experts in specific industries, providing scalable industry-specific solutions.
Telstra has always been at the forefront of telecommunications technology, not just in Australia but globally. Never has this been more important than today in a world of rapid digital adoption.
T25 will maintain our investment in leading networks, including our mobile network which boasts the country’s best coverage, speed, latency, resiliency and domestic core connectivity. Our customers will keep enjoying our investment in 5G, which will deliver approximately 95 per cent population coverage by FY25 – including a 100,000 square kilometre increase in our 4G and 5G network footprint, substantially increasing regional coverage.
Over the next 3-5 years, this will be supported by our continued 5G network rollout and the doubling of metro cells to increase density for greater capacity and speed. As a result, we expect 80 per cent of all mobile traffic to be on 5G by FY25.
We will have extended our 4G coverage to 100 per cent of our network by FY24, enabling us to continue to lead in composite coverage, speed and performance for 4G and 5G as we close 3G. This will set us up well for early planning on 6G, which will clearly be on the agenda by the end of T25.
As new technologies continue to evolve – including 5G, and 6G, satellite, cloud and edge compute – the traditional worlds of telecommunications and compute technology are blurring. This creates exciting opportunities and solutions that we will continue to lead in bringing to customers on Australia’s best and biggest mobile network.
As we move forward from our current period of transition to the NBN and out from under that economic headwind, the significant interventions we have made in turning our business around and taking out costs are now starting to flow through to our bottom-line performance.
T25 also aims to build financial momentum across our portfolio delivering growth, deliver $500 million of net cost reductions, focus on cash conversion and generation, active portfolio management and create shareholder value through an updated capital management framework.
We’re already a leader in offering flexibility for our employees of where and how they want to work. Our early T22 work helped us to weather the last 18 months of disruption, and industry-leading programs like our All Roles Flex policy have meant that we’ve been able to support our people to pivot to working remotely wherever suits them. We want to take this flexibility to the next level while still being a leader in doing business responsibly.
There are three ways we will do this at Telstra through T25:
While our new strategy won’t kick off until 1 July 2022, we also know that we’ve got to finish the job on T22. The hard work, tough decisions and investments that we have made in the past three years have firmly set the foundations for the next chapter of Telstra.
Thanks for being part of the journey – we can’t wait to share more of what’s coming next.
