Summary Task of Telematics Entrepreneurship Subject

R. M. Ansett was born in 1909 in northern Victoria. His father ran a small bicycle repair business until he enlisted in the First AIF for service in France. Ansett like machinery at least as well as he liked people, and had a particular fascination with aircraft and flying. Money that other young men might have spent in other ways went towards flying lessons, and in 1929 he gained a civil pilot’s licence.
Victoria, in 1930, had one of the most extensive railway system, whether measured per head or per hectare, in the developed world. The system had ben largely built, and was wholly owned and operated, by the state government. Successive Victorian Governments had seen the railway as a tool of government policy, opening up the country to agriculture and the country towns to decentralised industry. The network was, accordingly, design to bring freight to the ports of Melbourne and Geelong efficiently; it provided reasonably frequent, if not very fast, passenger service between the main centres, and an infrequent and very slow passenger servive to most of the minor towns.
Ansett had some money in his pocket from his work in the Nothern Territory, and laid out £50 to buy a secondhand Studebaker car. He then offered a hybrid taxi/bus service, based on Hamilton, taking graziers an other affluent men and their families between their homes and the main railway centres of Hamilton and Ballarat. Ansett’s business grew, and he bought more vehicles, engaged more drivers, and opened a maintenance workshop in Hamilton.
In 1935 Ansett extended his service through Ballarat to Melbourne, parallelling one of the rail system’s busiest and most lucrative passenger routes, and the government acted to preserve this revenue, effectively banning the operation of private buses or taxis between Melbourne and Ballarat.
Even in 1930s the government was looking for ways to reduce the losses on branch line passenger services without antagonising elector by cutting off their public transport service entirely. Ansett did continue to develop his bus routes, and his Pioneer coach lines eventuallybecame Australia’s long-distance road operator. He also dusted off his pilot license, spent most of his business’s cash on an aeroplane paying £1000 for the aircraft and £250 for a spare engine, and began an air service between Hamilton and Essendon, a northern suburb of Melbourne.
Ansett’s network expanded, after a successful stock market float in 1936 enabled him to buy three twin-engine, ten-passenger Lockheed 10B aircraft, and by the outbreak of the Second World War Ansett services were linking Narrandera, Mildura and Broken Hill to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide.
When the war ended, Ansett owned world-class airframe, engine, and instrument maintenance and testing facilities, but no aircraft and no route licences.
After the 1949 elections the Menzies Liberal (conservative) government replaced Chifley, and Ansett approach Menzies, offering to buy TAA and free the government from the taint socialism. The government passed the Two Airlines Act, with Ansett tolerated rather than encouraged, and used their import licensing power to make sure that no intruder should upset the balance. The balance was upset, nevertheless, by two major purchasing errors by ANA’s management. When TAA and ANA had to upgrade their fleets in the early 1950s, TAA went for pressuriesd Convair 340 aircraft while ANA choose un-pressurised Douglas DC4 ‘Skymaster’ aircraft. ANA compunded this error in the mid 1950s by buying Douglas DC6 aircraft while TAA bought the smaller, but faster and more comfortable, Vickers Viscount
Menzies agreed to revise the two-airlines agreement and Act, and ordered TAA to agree to lease three of their precious Viscounts to ANA, soon to become Ansett-ANA, and to lease two of ANA’s unwanted DC6s in return. The two airlines were, from then forward, legally bound to consult each other on fleet selection, an arrangement that was formalised into a common fleet purchasing policy between 1960 and 1977.
In the years following his capture of ANA, Ansett moved vigorously to prevent any other regional operators from following his example, buying Butler Airlines (now Ansett NSW) in a fiercely contested takeover in 1958, and mopping up most of the rest in the following few years. When the government decided to make additional TV channels available in 1964 Ansed secured two licensed and later purchased a third: this may have reflected a sudden interest in entertainment, but the fact that, as a TV licensee ownership of Ansett shares was no subject to sharp limits may have also interest Ansett.
Ansett himself was ambushed in 1979, when a joint bid from TNT and News Limited succeeded in a contestant takeover. He was promoted to non-voting Chairman, and allowed to retain 0,5 per cent of the common shares (but not to vote them) during his lifetime. He died in 1982, but Ansett Airlines continued to thrive; in 1995 TNT’s half share in the airline was sold to Air New Zealand for $450 million. Ansett’s original $50 had grown at an average annual rate of over 28 per cent, through good times and bad, war and peace, for over sixty years.
An entrepreneurial concept can only succeed in a window of opportunity, or more properly, when a series of windows coincide. The entrepreneur must be able to acces an appropriate level of technology, and the market must be capable of absorbing a sufficient of quantity of product. These two factors are not entirely independent: the market’s capacity to absorb product will be affected by the price, which will in turn be affected by the state of the available technology.
Excellent technology may fail in the market if the older technology it must compete with has sufficient remaining development potential and a well-established position in the market.
Above all, invention is not innovation. Just because something can be made does not mean that people are prepared to pay for it.


1. Fachry.R (064.06.012)
2. Dina.F (064.06.018)
3. M.Ridwan Arifin (064.06.021)
4. Muchtar Hanafi (065.07.006)
5. Nur Khandra Bunawan (064.07.037)

SUMBER