I'm not sure why Penn is necessarily the evil bogeyman here.
He's just playing with the crappy hand he's been dealt.
For years people (including the so-called analysts that "research" Telstra) have been singing the praise of the billions of dollars of NBN payments that Telstra is to receive.
But there was very little talk about the other side of that coin, namely the hundreds of millions of dollars of EBIT earnings that Telstra would be foregoing from reducing fixed line revenues [*].
So I'm not sure why everyone is so surprised by developments over the past 24 hours.
The NBN payments that TLS is receiving are not simply free money as part of some magic pudding; TLS has to do something for those payments, and that something is to progressively shut down a highly lucrative part of its business.
The market should have been well aware of this, as it has been articulated many times by many people on many forums.
So, while I'm certainly no apologist for Penn, but I think you are shooting the messenger.
There's isn't an executive alive that would be able to arrest the structural earnings decline that TLS is undergoing.
What we are witnessing is one of the inherent characteristics of the telecommunications industry: never-ending technological change that results in high rates of product/service obsolescence.
It's just another symptomatic reminder why this is such a lousy sector in which to invest.
[*] That analysts have been downgrading their earnings forecasts for TLS - which is, after all, an extremely visible, widely-researched and documented business - by double-digits for FY2018 and beyond, speaks volumes about the sheer level of ineptitude on the part of followers of the stock
TLS Price at posting:
$3.86 Sentiment: None Disclosure: Not Held
(20min delay)