"We are ready to deliver VOIP solutions that make business sense," said James Herbst, Financial Director of telecommunications company, DataPro, which listed on the AltX bourse last September.
"Our ability to immediately offer VOIP solutions via our data network as well as our ability to save businesses substantial amounts on business calls, will be the key to our successful capitalisation of the telecoms deregulation."
The big bang deregulation of the telecommunications sector has ushered in "high levels of activity" in the telco sector and in telco stocks.
"We are very encouraged with the progress of the roll-out of our VOIP solutions and, indeed, we believe we are one of the few ISPs to manage this important strategic step. Thanks to the sudden deregulation of the industry on 1 February, one of the major themes of this year is going to be `speed to market`. Delivery is going to be another. For the first time making sales will not be an issue. The sales will come relatively easily; the challenge facing companies will be time to market and delivery. There will be no bottleneck in the sales pipeline and this changes the business canvas 360-degrees. We are ready to move fast in this market and have already launched our service provider network. We have, to date, lined-up more than 80 service providers that are in a position to sell and support our product and service range. In fact, 80% of our revenue in the near future will be generated via our channel.
"We were first to market with our business ADSL solution, which has really sold well over the last six months, and this is indicative of our ability to act quickly and decisively with a product such as VOIP."
Herbst said because the liberalisation of the telecommunications market is "so aggressive" that traditional business models need to be reassessed. "We don`t believe it is advisable to adopt a purely direct sales approach. Companies will require far more foot soldiers, so to speak, to cope with the demand. That is why we have spent the past few months fine-tuning our billing system, our partnership relationships and our overall technology offerings."
Commenting further, he said consolidation in the industry is "inevitable". "Naturally we would like to be the consolidator, but if this is not the situation, we will still benefit. We believe this year is going to be a `land grab` year. A number of players are going to be merged or gobbled up and this new entity will become the next de facto network operator offering competition to Telkom."
Management currently holds a 30% stake in the newly-listed DataPro Group, with Herbst believing the "young but veteran management team has the ideal blood and experience" to steer the company to further future growth.
"We have a 3 000-strong customer base and we have annuity income that covers our running costs. It is not a high-risk formula and we will, within the next three years, fulfil our goal of having the most emerging and small and medium corporates connecting to, and making use of, our networks."
According to a new year article published in Business Day (4 January), the value of shares traded on the JSE was R1 trillion last year, up from R752 billion in 2003 - while the net purchase of shares by foreign investors increased to R32.8 billion from a negative outflow of R429 million in 2003.
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