Until now, I didn't actually realise that you had to hold a position in a stock in order to be qualified to comment upon that stock.
As I have stated previously, I do not hold UEC but have previously held UEC.
I did so back in 2001, at the time of McGrath's appointment as COO. I continued to hold at the time when I was being considered for the CEO's job, and I continued to hold until mid-2002. I have not, however, held since that time.
At the time of my candidacy, I sought to achieve several things, including a range of shareholder initiatives, involving separating out, and separately addressing the large shareholders, from the institutional shareholders, from the small /mum & dad shareholders.
I was favouring a form of representative shareholder forum which would have given extra voice to all those shareholders who fall outside the top 20 -100 shareholders.
I also favoured having my direct and open communication through to the CEO's office, including transparency of information, feedback and direction.
It was understood back in 2001 that UEC may well have been a short term tenure, depending upon the stance taken by the then majority shareholder.
It was also understood that without bringing back effective investor /analyst communications /interaction, UEC would continue to be marginalised as a business opportunity going forward. And, in this regard, I do not mean the occasional Open Briefings given through the ASX platform.
At the time, I supported and wanted to focus on 3 things: 1) cost consolidation (ie: elimination of duplicated /dependent costs, and the variablisation of other costs so that they rose in tandem with business /revenue growth, and not ahead of the revenue curve); 2) alliance management (ie: the formation of strong and effective alliances from within and outside of the industry using, however, the utilities backdrop as the launching platform); 3) segment concentration (ie: involving writing down the fixed asset base by a much larger margin than has occurred to date); 4) an early exit from niche businesses, including People Telecom, UNITE, and the Perth and QLD businesses; 5) a partial capitalisation of the UEL loan facility (or, at least the ability for this to be capitalised in the future); and 6) industry consolidation amongst the Tier 3 players in order to bring about an effective and lasting competitor (with the industry depth, customer patronage, and installed infrastructure in place) to compete with the major telcos).
Several of these have now come to pass. Others, however, are still waiting (at least in my estimation) to be done.
And, from a potential acquisition perspective, I would not be looking to Optus or to TEL. I already have my own thoughts in mind and they begin with a certain CEO based in Adelaide.
