Richard Long Quotations

I would be surprised if the Government does intervene next week, as would a lot of others.

It happened several times ... the company is called Reliable and if we don't show up then we can't have that. The day he was fired we went down to his house and grabbed our van and the credit card and thought that was that.

I think this could perhaps be the first quarter in quite a considerable time that the domestic NZ business shows signs of EBITDA growth, or at least if it's down it's only going to be down fractionally.

Over the medium term, though, they're going to have to rely on increased investment in the next generation network (voice over Internet protocol) in order to rip out costs out of the old business platforms, otherwise earnings are going to come under pressure. But that's planned for, and that investment will come.

That would be a big block in terms of the way Telstra looks at this. But I wouldn't expect the board to dismiss it out of hand. They will at least look at it.

There is some uncertainty about what costs are actually going to come through in the first half in relation to the depreciation charges, redundancies etcetera because there has been pretty big material changes since September.

Reading between the lines, assuming the sale is still on, it looks like this is a prelude to a break up as part of that sale process.

You wouldn't change the song yet, because all of the regulatory outcomes are yet to come.

There was lots of red ink, but that was to be expected.

It's quite likely, considering their revised guidance for the year, that the second quarter for AAPT was a bit of a shocker, really due to the fact that it looks like Telstra's been pretty belligerent in back-dating contracts on rather nasty terms.

The numbers weren't too dissimilar to what the market expected.

It was pretty much in line with what we were looking for.

I'm expecting more of a progress (report) rather than a completion.