00:00 It's focused on what Telstra calls its enterprise business, which is basically its services
00:06 to big corporations.
00:09 And a lot of these it sounds like it's decided it's not competitive with some of the tech
00:14 giants out there that are providing similar IT services, potentially at a lower cost,
00:20 and has said in its statements and in the press conference that Vicky Brady held that
00:26 a lot of, you know, will work with partners to shift some of these big business customers
00:31 away from Telstra and onto different providers of the services.
00:35 She did emphasise that these won't affect, you know, in-store service.
00:40 Telstra is still buying back a lot of its retail outlets and bringing them in-house,
00:44 and she said it's still continuing with its on-shoring of call centre operations.
00:50 From the market analysts, it was pretty expected because Telstra's had this multi-year plan
00:56 and Telstra 2025 to reduce costs by the end of the coming financial year.
01:02 This was sort of in the mid-range of cost cutting they expected, and jobs are obviously
01:07 one of the big ways companies can cut costs.
01:10 But politically, it's obviously bad news.
01:12 So we're seeing the employment market deteriorate, unemployment ticking back above 4%, and Treasurer
01:19 Jim Chalmers said the federal government will be watching Telstra very closely to see how
01:24 these changes are implemented.
01:27 I think this is a very distressing day for a lot of people who've received this bad news
01:32 today from Telstra.
01:34 And we're thinking of all of the families who are impacted by these big job cuts at
01:40 a major Australian employer.
01:43 We need to make sure that the services don't suffer as a consequence of these changes,
01:50 and we will be seeking advice from the ACCC about some of the claims that Telstra is making
01:56 about their new pricing strategy and the role of the NBN.
02:01 Many Telstra customers would remember a 7% roughly increase in line with the CPI, the
02:07 inflation measure that got passed through last year.
02:10 Well Telstra's now announced that it's de-linking its post-paid mobile pricing from the Consumer
02:16 Price Index.
02:17 Of course, the Consumer Price Index is now about half of what it was last year.
02:21 So again, a lot of the Telco analysts that are looking at this say even though Telstra's
02:26 committed, Vicky Brady said expressly, there will be no price increase in July this year,
02:31 but the Telco analysts are expecting that Telstra will put through a price increase
02:35 later this year, or perhaps early next year, and that it may be much higher than the Consumer
02:40 Price Index, and that's why they've chosen to de-link the two.
02:44 [BLANK_AUDIO]
