Telstra executives will face shareholders on Tuesday, three months after a major outage crippled mobile, payment and rail systems and blocked some 600 triple-0 calls.
Shares in the ASX’s 12th largest company are down 5.5 per cent since the outage on July 8 – between then and now, the telco has posted an annual profit of $2.4bn, up 2.7 per cent on last year.
The outage is set to slice $607,000 off chief executive Vicki Brady’s pay packet and cost nine other executives a collective $1.3m in bonus payments.
The Australian Shareholders Association (ASA) says ahead of Tuesday’s meeting it will vote in favour of Ms Brady’s reduced $6.8m packet.
“Telstra produced a solid financial result in FY26, with incremental increases in profit, earnings per share and dividend,” an association spokesperson said.
An external review has found the July outage was primarily caused by Telstra not treating network timing as a critical capability and not giving a planned change to a “timing chassis” the highest levels of oversight.
A senate inquiry also recommended stripping Telstra of its role in answering triple-0 calls and transferring them to local emergency services.
An ongoing review by the Australian Communications and Media Authority is bubbling away.
The ASA says the implications of the external review would be the “key issue” at the shareholder meeting.
The meeting begins in Sydney at 9.30am AEDT.
More to come