Orange has reported a solid set of results, with Telco revenue and EBITDA in-line with consensus expectations; the important French SR trends are slightly weaker (but ahead of consensus expectations), but all guidance for Group and divisions (including France) has been reiterated.
Local currency growth was in the mid-30s again in Q4 and likely to accelerate driven by the 50% price increase approval, and stabilising macro. We have updated our MTN and AAF models for the Naira, diesel and mobile tariffs; our target prices go to ZAR190 and £3 from ZAR130 and £2 respectively and we maintain our Buy recommendations.
When the news of the Trump tariffs first hit the tapes, we didn’t write anything initially as a) we didn’t think we had much of value to add to the thousands of column inches already written on the topic, and b) the direct impact from the tariffs to the EU telecoms sector is minimal – resulting in relative outperformance for the group over the past few days.
It’s pretty clear that in-market M&A is a hot topic which we addressed in more detail in our recent sector M&A note. One of the reasons why speculation is rising about further deals is twofold we think: 1. Recent remedies in UK and Spain were non-intrusive in a historical context, making the deals attractive on a net basis; and 2. Politicians seem to be becoming more amenable to M&A, most notably Mario Draghi, and some are hoping that regulatory/legislative support will follow.
We were in Barcelona for the MWC this week. Please reach out if you would like to discuss any of the myriad of announcements made there. The biggest Telcos seemed to have focused their fire on in-market consolidation, with comments by the CEOs of Orange, DT and Telefonica.
February was another good month for our top EM Telcos, now up 15% YTD on average. This note also includes key news & other thoughts in order to help investors generate alpha within the EM Telco space. With performance strong so far, we make no changes to our picks.
Bharti Airtel has announced it intends to acquire 5% of Airtel Africa (which it already owns 57% of) and intends to complete this by March 31st2025. Airtel Africa are also currently in the process of executing a $100m share buyback in 2 tranches with the first $50m to be completed by April 24th 2025. AAF’s last RNS suggested the company has so far bought back $22m of this, leaving $38m still to be executed in the first tranche
Airtel Africa shares jumped by 10% today after delivering a strong beat, with reported topline and EBITDA ahead of expectations by 5%. Reported revenue growth inflected to positive territory as East Africa improved whilst both local currency revenue and EBITDA accelerated. Separately, the group has reiterated its full year guidance for continued margin improvement and capex spending between $725m and $750m. AAF is one of our NSR GEM top picks for 2025, and we are Buyers with a GBp 200 price targ...
Last week we reported in our tariff tracker, HERE, that some prices had risen in France. Since then, there have been further positive changes, including Iliad yesterday and Bouygues today, which we outline in this short report.
2024 saw the best outperformance for the telecoms sector since 2013 (and the third best since 2000) and ironically this came in a year with one of the lowest announced M&A volumes. We believe this is a testament to improved perception of the underlying fundamentals.
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