PCCW boss talks tough after disastrous year
15:34 AEST Fri 17 Aug 2001
AFP - A year on from its audacious takeover of Hong Kong's telecoms monopoly, Pacific Century CyberWorks Ltd has lost its dotcom stardom and billions of dollars off its share price.
But the youthful boss of PCCW, 34-year-old Richard Li, insists better times are ahead despite the company being forced to rethink its entire Internet strategy to concentrate on the traditional telephone business.
Li has endured personal flak too since his takeover of Cable and Wireless HKT shocked corporate observers in Asia. His upstart company beat off Singapore Telecom amid rumours of intervention from Beijing to keep Hong Kong's telephone monopoly in local hands.
His connections may have helped as the son of one of Hong Kong's biggest property tycoons, Li Ka-shing.
But there was no escaping the embarrassment when it was revealed that PCCW documents were wrongly referring to Richard Li as a graduate of the prestigious Stanford University in the United States.
Li, in an interview with today's South China Morning Post marking the first anniversary of the HKT takeover, acknowledged he had made mistakes.
"Yes, there is one thing I did regret a lot," he said when asked about the Stanford debacle.
"When I see people losing money in the stock market, I am, of course, not very happy. Reading newspapers used to be my favourite pastime, but not any more," he told the Post.
PCCW's share price has crashed in the past year from a high of 28.50 Hong Kong dollars ($US3.65 ($A6.97) to close at 1.99 dollars yesterday.
In March, the company posted a record loss of 6.9 billion Hong Kong dollars and was later forced to scrap a planned bond issue worth $US2.5 billion ($A4.78 billion)owing to the poor market climate.
While Li admitted the takeover had been much harder than he anticipated, PCCW has all but jettisoned its ambitions to become the definitive Asian multimedia company through its Network of the World (NOW) Internet channel.
"The merger itself took the management a lot of time, it's far more complicated than we thought. That's why we don't have much effort to develop the Internet business," Li said.
But he added "it was a prudent move for us to slash investment in Internet businesses ... in fact, our NOW plan (outside Hong Kong) had yet to start."
Asked about rumours that PCCW plans 3,000 job cuts out of its 14,000-strong workforce, Li said: "What I can say is we have no current plan for staff layoffs, but we need to continuously review the total cost of operations."
He struck an optimistic note on future earnings, discounting the slump in the share price as less important than projections for EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation).
"We are setting ourselves up for growth in revenue over the next few years. We aim to double EBITDA revenue, but it takes several years to achieve," Li said.
"Assume we are to grow EBITDA revenue by 11 per cent, it will take us seven years to reach this target."
©AAP 2001
c.moreover.com |
