AUSTRALIA'S TELSTRA PLANS TO WIN BACK MARKET SHARE.

SYDNEY, Sept 1 Asia Pulse - Australia's biggest telco Telstra Corp Ltd (ASX:TLS) has signalled a fightback to arrest its declining market share, after last week reporting its lowest annual profit in five years.

Telstra chief executive Ziggy Switkowski said the company now held between 60 and 65 per cent of the overall market, which had been sliding at a rate of two or three percentage points a year.

"We've moved from 100 per cent of the market in 1990 as competition was introduced and we're somewhere between 60 and 65 per cent of the market now," Dr Switkowski told Channel Seven's Sunday Sunrise.

"I think at this point as we look across all of our products - fixed, wireless, broadband, directories, etc - we should be able to hold share and perhaps even recover some ground that has been ceded in the last year or two."

Dr Switkowski said that with Telstra's revenues growing by two per cent in 2002/03 while the market grew by about four per cent, the difference between holding share and losing share was two percentage points of revenue.

"I think that the stream of new products we're introducing; the position that we already enjoy in some of these high growth businesses like broadband, is likely to be sufficiently strong to help us close that revenue gap over the next two or three years," he said.

Telstra's plans forecast Sunday would likely spark a massive cut in the potential growth rates of major competitors such as Optus, Vodafone and AAPT.