Telstra CEO David Thodey has said that he wants to see a third of Telstra’s revenues coming from outside Australia by 2020.
The chief focus will be on Asia and on enterprise markets in particular, with cloud-based and network managed services as the company’s key product offerings.
Telstra has been building capacity in this area for some time.
The last few years have seen the development of the Network Assisted Services (NAS) division, the creation of cloud-based capacities in its data centres in Hong Kong, Singapore and the UK and the parallel creation of an integrated enterprise billing system for Telstra Global to support secure billing of multiple countries on a single platform.
Telstra has a chequered history when it comes to overseas expansion. Under both Frank Blount and Ziggy Switkowski billions of dollars went down the drain through failed ventures, most notoriously through Reach, Telstra’s underwater cable joint venture with Hong Kong-based PCCW.
At a time when Telstra faces not only regional competitors such as SingTel but global competition from Over-The-Top (OTT) provides such as Google and Amazon, few analysts query the need for Telstra to establish its own regional presence.
Those with long memories, though, have expressed concerns that the company now focus on getting utilisation of its existing regional infrastructure rather than run the risk of overinvestment in capacity