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.
Swings observed in the last 10 days has been second to none. The Great Financial Crisis and Covid didn’t get us in a worst spot. Make no mistake: The markets are panicking today even more than when the world came to a COVID standstill, with the individual contributors to the vast majority of the world’s GDP locked down. How reasonable is that? Very little, in our view. The polarization of the political landscape has created a global brain freeze. Few analyses calmly assess the U.S. administrati...
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.
In this quarterly strategy report, we look to evaluate where we are with regards the bull market conditions, and where those indicators might be headed, factoring in the downside risks, from Trump tariffs and the US economy, BoJ actions, Japanese earnings and valuations.
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.
Millicom has reported a slower set of Q4 results and both service revenue and EBITDA came in a shade below consensus expectations. However, the EFCF performance was strong, well above expectations in Q4 and the guide for 2025 EFCF of ~$750m is also above consensus (in line with us).
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
Although growth is slowing, cash flow trends continue to improve on greater discipline on opex and capex. The industry is increasingly giving this back in the form of higher dividends or buybacks which KT has already instituted and LG guided buybacks of up to 20% of net profits .
Aggregate service revenue trended better on higher contribution from non-mobile, coupled with mobile improvement. Industry mobile was primarily driven by Softbank’s outperformance. Q3 EBITDA dropped on higher mobile marketing costs at NTT which the company seeks to offset through cost efficiencies. DOCOMO is the clear mobile underperformer, but we believe expectations for Fixed recovery is still low, plus there is IOWN optionality. NTT remains our preferred pick.
KT reported a decent set of underlying results if excluding the one-off costs related to its early retirement programme which was well flagged earlier. Service revenue also recovered back to growth as Enterprise accelerated even despite the ongoing restructuring of less profitable business
We update the NSR GEM Top Picks list. No stocks are dropped, and we add LILAC and TIM Brasil to our list, extending it to a Top-10 list from Top-8. Our picks had a good start, up 12% on average since the start of the year. This note also includes key news & other thoughts in order to help investors generate alpha within the EM Telco space.
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