"I know the pain. I learned a lot of lessons. It was a tough time at the old Telecom, dealing with problems with both technology being transformed and regulation."
He said the rebrand to Spark - Moutter's defining early move as boss - meant the company was now free of the latter problem and able to focus on adapting to the former.
He said the company's transformation from a "slow, conservative infrastructure company" to a "competitive retailer of digital services" is complete, ahead of schedule, and flagged an early completion of its "turnaround" cost-cutting drives and a moratorium on risky startups to focus on paying out dividends to shareholders.
The result was well received with the company's share price rising 9.42 per cent yesterday to close at $3.02, increasing its market valuation by more than $400 million.
Annual profits declined 19 per cent to $375 million, reflecting last year's one-off booking of proceeds from the sale of its Australian mobile business AAPT, but underlying earnings beat analyst estimates to increase by one-fifth as the company reshaped its business around data and mobile services.
The company added 172,000 mobile connections, helping to narrow the lead held by rival Vodafone to 150,000. The gap between the two companies had stood at 600,000 in 2012, Moutter said.
The board, chaired by Mark Verbiest, declared a final dividend of 11c a share, payable October 9. This takes the annual return to 20c a share, up from 17c the year prior. The upbeat results led to Moutter flagging a special dividend next year.
Significantly, the results also showed the company earned only 49.4 per cent of its $3.52 billion in operating revenue from the provision of fixed services - for decades Telecom's only real service - marking the first time the segment hadn't been a majority. Last year the fixed share stood at 52.4 per cent. The decline of fixed revenue (down 9.3 per cent in the year) wasn't entirely offset by by rises in revenue from mobile (up 4.4 per cent) and IT (up 5.2 per cent), but the trend was positive enough for the results to beat Forsyth Barr estimates.
Moutter said former Telecom employees returning now would struggle to recognise it as the same company, and the same could be said of those who are now characterised as their competition: From the expected Vodafone and M2 networks, to IT providers, Spark is now also sizing up TVNZ, MediaWorks and SkyTV as possible rivals for content provision.
This play isn't entirely new. Former Telecom chairman Rod McGeoch last year said that during the mid-2000s the company was spitballing fairly visionary ideas about being not only transmitters of content, but also getting a piece of the action.
"I walked out of one of those board meetings saying 'We should buy the rights to the All Blacks'. Because we had the money then," he said. McGeoch said the idea went nowhere and concedes he probably let the company down.
"We probably weren't strong enough on that board in terms of thinking about the future."
Moutter said McGeoch was ahead of his time, and it was only in the past couple of years that bandwidth had developed to the point where video can be economically streamed, allowing broadcasters to break free of old-style transmitters and satellites. With Lightbox in play, Moutter said the platform was now in place to take advantage of such opportunities.
"Now we could go to a major content provider and buy some shows," he said. Pressed on whether such moves were afoot Moutter would only laugh and say: "We could!"
He won't rule such a move out, just as he won't describe the expensive collapse of online retailer Ferrit - founded on his watch - as a mistake. "Ferrit was an idea before its time. If the alternative is just to be a commodified provider of data piping - that sounds like Chorus to me."
Moutter's optimistic pitch to investors and the market was only slowed down yesterday by the results of ankle surgery intended to provide running repairs following a nasty break some years ago. Pointing to his black moonboot he said: "This is testimony to a 50-year-old man showing off to his teenage son on an off-road motorbike in a 'who can jump the highest' competition."
As chief executive he's juggling the demands of risk-averse shareholders with the commercial imperative to push ahead with inevitably risky new ventures and said in his formal presentation he wouldn't be launching any startups in the coming year.
Explaining later what lies behind his apparent conservatism, Moutter appears torn. Earlier forays into streaming television (Lightbox), home security services (Morepork) or data analytics (Qrious) were still young startups and likely to make "substantial losses" until maturation, he said.
"Investors are worried we'll keep betting more and more. We won't be doubling up for the coming year."
But despite the pledge to hold fire for the next 12 months, he struggles to suppress his own inner risk-taker.
The busted ankle kept him off motorbikes, but Moutter doesn't regret the stunt: on the jumping stakes, he says his son was beaten into second place.
"It was worth it though, because I beat him."
