This was a quiet week for the Fab Five (-$75 billion, $2.14 trillion gained YTD) but was strong for the Telco Top Five (+$17 billion, $102 billion gained YTD). With markets at highly valued levels, investors are turning their attention to growth and income. Verizon and AT&T (and, to a lesser extent, T-Mobile) are beneficiaries of this trend.
The big news this week was the disclosure that Spectrum and Liberty Broadband have been talking about merging the two entities (Variety article here). Per their website, Liberty Broadband is made up of Charter stock, but also includes a stake in advertising analytics company Comscore, and Alaskan telecom/ cable provider GCI. In Charter’s counteroffer to Liberty (SEC disclosure here), they are warming up to the idea of absorbing GCI. More to come as the transaction progresses, but we think that taking out their largest shareholder makes a lot of sense, especially if the end result is a sale or merger with another telecommunications firm.
Google CEO Sundar Pachai went on David Rubenstein’s show on Bloomberg TV last week to describe the lengthy process of both European and US anti-trust and tax-related court proceedings (article here – video here). Google’s latest win in Europe avoided a $1.7 billion payment for thwarting competition for online ads. With the second US antitrust trial coming to a close (see this New York Times synopsis of the company’s closing arguments for more details), many analysts see a different remedy then was proposed with the loss in the search anti-trust trial.
Finally, be on the lookout later tonight for the latest Apple iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max backlog charts. As many other news outlets have portrayed, this year’s availability is better than previous years. We don’t believe that this necessarily indicates weak sales, however, and will explain more when we look at the latest backlog.
File is included below. We have started an earnings release tab but only three of the ten companies we track have posted their 3Q conference call details.
