CRUNCH TIME
IT’S MARCH 2019, the date we are
supposed to be leaving the EU as a
result of our voting preference in the
June 23 2016 Referendum – or is it?
Quite frankly who knows but the
world is still spinning, FTSE is on the up
as I write and Sterling has inched up a
bit against the US$. Vodafone is down
10% over the last couple of months and
TalkTalk is trading in double fi gures - the
lowest it’s been since the start of my
records in March 2010 and long way off
its peak during that period of 403p in
May 2015.
Smarter people than myself will
give you a more complete story of that
decline but the latest fall of some 10%
in value was triggered by the company’s
Q3FY19 trading update issued at right at
the end of January.
I wrote on 4 February that to my
untrained eye the results looked
promising: TalkTalk had grown their
customer base – double digits in both
consumer and B2B, had net broadband
adds of around 150k, an accelerating
fi bre uptake, low churn rates and an
increase in headline revenue of almost
3%.
However, within minutes of the market
opening shares had dropped by 10%.
The culprit was in the small print – the
rising cost of customer acquisition was
set to lower full year earnings. Darn .
Pre & Post EU Referendum Vote
KEY CHANNEL INDICATORS
www.commsbusiness.co.uk
COMMS NEWS
Indicator 23 Jun 15 Feb 19 Change Change %
FTSE 100 6,338 7341.00 1003.00 15.83%
FTSE 250 17,333 19006.00 1673.00 9.65%
BT 439.70 232.55 207.15 -47.11%
Vodafone 217.90 140.78 77.12 -35.39%
TalkTalk 226.60 98.90 127.70 -56.35%
Gamma 440.50 833.29 392.79 89.17%
£/$ 1.487 1.281 0.206 -13.85%
£/€ 1.307 1.137 0.170 -13.01%
CITY TALK
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