Colt Telecom Share Discussion Threads

[dickbush] 31/7/2014 07:46

EBITDA Euro 71.3 in the second qtr, down 8% y/y, a decline EXACTLY the same as for the first qtr. Nothing suspicious there, of course.

Total non-voice revenue DOWN 0.3% y/y. Isn't this supposed to be the growth side?

[dickbush] 28/7/2014 22:40

Usual outpouring of news prior to the results:

[dickbush] 21/7/2014 11:10

buywell2

Capex past four years: Euro 1145 million (£1 a share). Depreciation: Euro 1072 million over the same period.

Normal valuation methodology for this sector is EV/EBITDA which for Colt at current prices is 4.2 times, about 2/3rds of the valuation of its peers. However, unlike its peers, it does not have a yield to support its price and the company is having another clear out this year, depressing EBITDA.

Probably a good time to short the shares but bear in mind that the CEO has a very attractive bonus package which suggest to me that he's throwing the kitchen sink at this year's EBITDA in order to bounce back strongly in 2015 and walk away with a big bonus in early 2016.

[robwt] 20/7/2014 18:44

Why would their equipment be past it's sell by date, they have spent billions on their infrastructure to date. In fact they have spent about five times more than the Mkt Cap of the company.

hxxp://www.cfoworld.co.uk/cfo-interviews/financial-planning/3491767/earning-his-spurs-colt-cfo-on-corporate-evolution/

[buywell2] 18/7/2014 13:44

P/E too high now

Plus a lot of their equipment must be well past it's sell by date

[dickbush] 18/7/2014 13:09

Gartner:

Colt is a Pan-European network and IT service provider that provides hosting services focused on major European countries (the U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and the Netherlands), with a presence in the U.S. and Asia. Colt is evolving from a country-focused model to one that is more customer-focused, serviced through direct (Optimum) and indirect (Ceano) product lines, and supported from shared-service centers in India and Barcelona.

Strengths
By investing in enterprise application capabilities, Colt is further deepening the range of requirements it could already address with its network, colocation, hosting and cloud services.
The vendor is leveraging its infrastructure and Internet Protocol (IP) investments by serving both direct (enterprise) and indirect (small or midsize business [SMB]) markets through two separate portfolio offerings (Optimum and Ceano), giving it a larger addressable market.
To further strengthen its growth in IT services, Colt has been putting significant positioning and sales enablement efforts into segments beyond its established verticals, such as financials.
The vendor's strong Pan-European presence of both data centers and sales offices puts it ahead for customers concerned with data sovereignty in individual European countries.

Cautions
There will be increased competition from VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) for Colt's sizable vCloud Data Centre Service business. Colt is taking a proactive approach by reselling vCHS with its own value-added services and offering its customers direct connect access to vCHS in the U.K.; however, these two platforms will not be integrating any further than at the base networking layer.
Colt's promising early-mover activities in the very new and still unpredictable market for indirect cloud services with its Ceano portfolio may - besides the described scale and synergy advantages - compete for resources internally, along with its other portfolio products.
While ownership of its own network can strengthen Colt's Pan-European hosting proposition, as a communications service provider, Colt is also impacted by the industrywide decline in fixed data and voice revenue, for which its significantly growing IT service revenue may not be able to compensate.
There have been a few cases of negative Gartner customer feedback regarding Colt's service management in 2014, highlighting the challenges for communications service providers to be more accommodating and flexible, in comparison with pure-play managed hosting companies. Colt has reorganized into service lines in order to address this, although it is too early to tell if this will have the desired impact.

[robwt] 17/7/2014 12:29

SFR's CEO Jean-Yves Charlier says Numericable merge will create powerful competitor to Orange

Jean-Yves Charlier, CEO of French mobile company SFR, expects to be in charge of a powerful competitor to the incumbent, Orange, by the end of the year -- thanks to SFR's impending takeover by cable operator Numericable.

The deal is going through the French competition regulator at the moment -- because neither SFR nor Numericable have business outside France, the European Commission is not involved.

Charlier will be CEO of the expanded venture, which will continue to use the SFR brand. He explains the logic of the deal to Global Telecoms Business here.

Our next interview will be with Sandip Das, the CEO of Reliance Jio, the Indian 4G operator. Watch out for it soon.

Alan Burkitt-Gray, editor
[e-mail]

[robwt] 17/7/2014 11:31

hxxp://www.billingworld.com/news/2014/03/wireline-and-wireless-voice-revenues-to-continue.aspx

[marjam] 15/7/2014 22:11

look on the bright side Colt named a Leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Enabled European Managed Hosting, that should push the stock price north !!!!

[mirko] 15/7/2014 15:29

Katastrophe

[robwt] 12/7/2014 21:58

hxxp://www.telecomramblings.com/2014/04/colt-sale/

I wonder if there could be a little truth in it.

[robwt] 09/7/2014 18:30

It falls like an anvil whatever happens.

[robwt] 08/7/2014 12:39

When do Colt next report, is it end of this month.

[robwt] 17/6/2014 17:09

100% agree!

[dickbush] 17/6/2014 09:39

"MarketPrizm was fully acquired by Colt in 2013."

Of course, it was 90% owned a couple years earlier.

This is just a puff piece for the re-launch of a, so far, total waste of money acquisition.

[dickbush] 12/6/2014 11:35

Note the EV/EBITDA multiples paid for acquisitions.

[chrisanderton] 11/6/2014 22:19

I think most people have tucked these in the 'don't look' drawer - i know i have - i hope one day to be pleasantly surprised, but as with most, regret not selling about 10 years ago when i was showing a profit! Nice to see you're sticking it out too!