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...
Nigerian Telcos continued to perform very well from a top line perspective despite the absence of price increases and the macro pressures. This suggests as we wrote HERE, that devaluations tend to spur ARPU increases in local currency, and a “catch back” of lost hard $ revenue.
Following similar efforts in Europe and LatAm we are launching coverage on the HY Telcos & Towers in EMEA & Africa. New names under coverage include Helios (also initiated on equity, pt GBp140), Axian Telecom and Liquid Intelligent. We also address IHS Towers (pt cut to US$ 6), VEON and Helios’ bonds.
Q1 was a solid quarter for the Sub-Saharan African operators, especially from a top line perspective. Airtel Africa continued to outperform peers overall. We continue to think that fundamentals for AAF and MTN are strong and deserve more attention. Valuations are compelling too.
Nigerian Telcos continue to perform well from a top line perspective. Market service revenue growth accelerated (again) in Q1 with both MTN Nigeria and Airtel Africa growing underlying service revenue by ~33% YoY. As expected, EBITDA and profit metrics were weaker (especially for MTN) because of the Naira devaluation in Q1
Bharti crossing $100bn market cap makes us address the question of which parts of the Bharti/Singtel/Airtel Africa capital structure are most attractive. Bharti has the momentum, but the valuation gap is now extreme. Reversion to the mean will likely happen at some point which means sensible investors in Bharti should now be switching into Singtel (for yield) or Airtel Africa (for growth).
In this note we revisit and update our thesis that Enterprise in EM is following an S-Curve, using 2023 reported figures. Enterprise customer growth continues to exhibit an S-Curve, and absolute Enterprise revenues added remains very strong in many EMs despite a slowdown in growth rates. We remain bullish on this space.
Airtel Africa has published a decent set of Q4 results. Top line performance remained strong, service revenue growth in local currency came in above consensus expectations and above our expectations. EBITDA trends slowed (but remained decent given the macro context in Q1) and margins came in 1pp below consensus and us.
MTN Nigeria has reported a mixed set of results. Top line was quite strong, but EBITDA and the bottom line came in under pressure (as expected), driven mainly by the Naira devaluation in Q1. The company is cutting capex for this year.
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