Billionaires compared Is it right that Xavier Niel businesses have tighter spreads?

The European Telco landscape is dominated by three high profile billionaires. Patrick Drahi, John Malone, and Xavier Niel. They all have multiple debt silos, and large empires, but the bonds trade at very different spreads. In this note, we look at why that might be the case, and in particular, if the Niel businesses deserve to trade at tighter spreads. We think they do, which means that Xavier Niel should be able to continue to raise funds cheaply (albeit the Iliad spreads widened after the Tele2 deal was announced), which means more M&A we think. In this report we highlight which assets we t...

Tele2 (Neutral, TP: SEK110, +17%) Iliad Iliad/NJJ buys Kinnevik stake in Tele2 - implications for Iliad and the Swedish market

Iliad has announced that it is buying Kinnevik’s 19.8% stake in Tele2. In this report, we look at the implications for Iliad and the Swedish market ,drawing on our knowledge of other Iliad/NJJ owned-assets (Salt/eir/Play etc).

Vodafone (Buy, 140p, +109%) Iliad deal rejection - can they salvage a better alternative?

After much hope back in 2021/2022 that Vodafone would be directly involved in a consolidation deal in Spain, that opportunity slipped away and they ended up selling the asset to Zegona.

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Mitratel reported a solid start to the year. Top line trends decelerated (last year’s Indosat towers acquisition has lapped) but remain solid.

Elisa (Neutral, TP: €54, +27%) Q1 24: EBITDA growth better than SR growth, but B2B EBITDA still negative y/y

Elisa reported good results, with stable service revenue growth (+3% YoY) but importantly an acceleration in clean EBITDA (to +6% y/y from +4% y/y in Q4). EBITDA growth was better than SR growth for the first time since Q3 2021. This is what the market wanted to see, as concerns have been around operational leverage;

Mobileye pre 1Q24 model update