This time tomorrow it will all be over. The small shareholders will have had their say, Mr Ray MacSharry will have broken his self-imposed vow of silence and answered questions about bonuses and the big shareholders will have voted. Unless the unthinkable happens, Mr Alfie Kane will be re-elected a director of Eircom and, along with the company's 400 other senior managers, he will get his share option scheme.

And shareholders might get more than a free drink and a cocktail sausage or two. They should go away a little more enlightened, courtesy of Mr MacSharry's speech, on how the board and management plan to revive the company's share price.

The chairman's statement, and Mr Kane's if he makes one, will be Eircom's first opportunity since the publication of the annual report and accounts to tell shareholders they have a coherent strategy to restore the firm's value.

The highly competitive nature of the telecommunications business means there is little incentive for any company to be too open about its plans but most analysts are baffled about where Eircom is going. "Our strategic objective is to enhance our position as Ireland's leading communications company and to expand our business internationally," says the chairman's statement in the annual report and accounts to be voted on today.

To date, Eircom's attempts to expand internationally have focused on Britain - and not overly successfully. Earlier this year Eircom failed to secure one of the third generation mobile phone licences being auctioned in Britain. It withdrew from the bidding at £2.1 billion sterling (€3.4 billion) and the money the company was prepared to commit to the project indicates the central importance of winning one of licences to its global ambitions.

Failure to win a licence has raised questions about Eircom's international plans. The company has now turned to the less expensive broadband fixed wireless access licences, to be auctioned next month. This technology allows companies to offer Internet and multimedia services without having to put in expensive fixed lines.

The extent to which Eircom has enhanced its position as Ireland's leading communications company is hard to assess as it is on the defensive in both the fixed line and mobile sectors. It remains the dominant player in the fixed line business with 90 per cent of the market - very lucrative by international standards.

According to the OECD, the Republic is the 15th most expensive of the leading developed nations for national calls. The fixed line business contributed €1.6 billion (£1.25 billion) in revenue and €660 million in profits last year. Most of the remainder of the €754 million in profits and €1.9 billion in revenue reported last year came from the mobile business.

The figure for residential calls is not broken down, but Eircom faces competition in this area on several fronts having faced competition for international and long distance calls for some years. NTL and Irish Multichannel, the two largest cable companies, plan to introduce residential telephone services and other multimedia products soon.

At present, Eircom does not have to allow other phone companies full access to the local network that connects customers to the local exchange. Customers can chose to use another phone company for local calls but Eircom still administers the billing of the calls and rents the line.

The EU has signalled that rival operators, such as Spirit, should have access to the local loop, which may happen as soon as next year.

Full competition in the fixed-line market is inevitable and will come down to price in the end. Eircom plans to shed 3,500 jobs to reduce its cost base and remain competitive.

Eircom also dominates the mobile market, where its Eircell subsidiary has 62 per cent of the market. It has only one competitor - Esat Digifone - but a third operator Meteor plans to be operating by Christmas.

Four third generation licences will be awarded next year, one of which is reserved for a new entrant. Although Eircom is likely to get one of the new licences, there is no guarantee that it will.

The one area where Eircom is not defending a long held dominant position and has the scope for imaginative and exciting action is multimedia and the Internet. The company's performance here has been less than stellar. Tentative plans to float off its Internet and related business, mooted at the time of the annual results, appear to have died a death, but might be revived at today's meeting.

Mr Kane restated his ambition to seek a separate listing for the Internet-related business in the last quarter of the year in the annual report. Eircom has 60 per cent of the Internet service provider market through its two subsidiaries, Eircom.net and Indigo, which focus on the business and consumer markets respectively.

It has been criticised for failing to capitalise on the business-to-business Internet market, seen as the one most likely to generate significant returns in the future. The company would claim to have taken several initiatives in this area such as buying a stake in Ebeon, the e-business consultant, and Nua, an online publisher.

Eircom is also talking of splitting off its directory inquiries and operator services division along with maintenance. This again is a strategy that baffles the market, given the unappealing nature of the business.

Fund managers are impressed with Mr Kane's determination to return Eircom to something approaching its former value. But, as Mr Kane knows, there is more to success in business than sheer determination; there is also what former US president George Bush called "the vision thing". Shareholders in Eircom who go along to the a.g.m. will judge for themselves today if Eircom's management has it.