Do telcos have pricing power; is the sector at the cusp of an upswing as it comes out of a protracted investment cycle, or just a value trap? For those despairing at the billions already being chucked at 5G licences (€6.5bn last week in Italy) before they’ve extracted much of a return from 4G, one […]
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Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary might sound pro-EU when it comes to Brexit, but his commercial approach is about as Anglo-Saxon as one can get. For the soon to be disenfranchised UK investors after Brexit, it must therefore come with a certain sense irony to see the group playing hardball with its Continental unions. While shareholders may […]
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“Accept the Recommended Comcast Offer Immediately”[!!!] If I was a Comcast shareholder I would be concerned about the apparent enthusiasm with which the Sky board were recommending that their shareholders accept their managements revised offer for Sky. Whoever was pulling the strings over at Sky (Murdoch, Disney?), they have played a blinder; extracting a 125% […]
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Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. According to the Sunday Times yesterday (23rd September 2018), a volcano in Iceland (indeed an “Icelandic giant” called Katla no less) is “about to erupt”. “The ash plume that brought European air travel to a standstill in 2010 could be dwarfed by an […]
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The commercial TV industry is littered with failed acquisitions of production companies, but that doesn’t seem to stop newcomers from falling into the same trap. New management at ITV ought to take note, given the reports that they are considering purchasing Big Brother producer, Endemol. The strategic rational of moving upstream into content origination […]
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Chasing rainbows for capital intensive businesses can be tricky, particularly if you’ve sunk a lot of capital only to find no crock of gold. This must be how Copa Holding must feel now, having thrown capital into building capacity in Argentina ahead of some particularly aggressive traffic growth forecasts. While traffic volumes has so far […]
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What is it about the warning that advertising growth was going to “come down meaningfully”, that markets didn’t understand from last year’s guidance? Perhaps it was our old friend ‘recency bias’ at work, given the sustained high rates of top line growth through both the second half of last year and into the first half […]
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A safe play would seem to be to bet on UK Sterling weakening further. What matters is not that a ‘Hard Brexit’ might turn out a lot better for the economy than portrayed by ‘Project Fear’, or that Theresa May could still manage to secure Brino, but that evidence of the former would be beyond […]
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