MILANO – Tim closed the first half with revenues down slightly to 7.56 billion and adjusted margins down to 3.2 billion (-3.7%), weighed down by extraordinary investments in the network and by the cost of the partnership with Dazn which required him to review the year-end targets downwards.
But the company sees pink, the glass and half full: the group reaffirms the medium-term targets, and that from 2022 growth will take place thanks to the information technology services of Olivetti, to those of cyber security of Telsy, to the cloud of Noovle and Sparkle’s submarine cables whose revenues, after the restructuring, have returned to double-digit growth.
These activities ancillary to those of telephone service, which languishes mainly due to the downward price war, have a lower profitability, but unlike telecommunications, they run at much higher market multiples than those for telecommunications in Europe (equal to five or six times the company value of the gross operating margin).
“We want to extract all the value there is in this company – he said Luigi Gubitosi during the conference call with analysts – because the sum of the parts is worth much more than the market capitalization. The cloud, for example, grows by 20% per year and trades at 16-20 times the mol (gross operating margin, ed), which by 2024 we estimate will rise to at least 400 million “. In short, only Noovle (which can be worth up to 8 billion euros), over 67% of Tim Brasil (3.1 billion), the share of Inwit (the 15% or 1.5 billion), the primary and access network of Fibercop (valued at 7.7 billion by Kkr, of which Tim has 58%) Sparkle and Telsy, are worth more than the group that between capitalization and debt is around 30 billion.
“Speaking of partnerships, in the coming months we will work with Cdp on a number of initiatives regarding the digitization of the country, including the network – reiterated Gubitosi – Our goal is to make the most of our assets and the recovery fund, both on the network and on the project to digitize the PA, and create a large national cloud “.
As for the single network project, that is to unite Tim’s infrastructure with that of Open Fiber, the group’s CEO reiterated “the desire to find a solution on the network has not changed”. The issue would have been complicated by the long passage of shares between Enel and the Macquarie fund. “The news that Enel is coming out convinces us even more that the project is feasible – he concluded – Our will, commitment, approach have not changed. We also like Cdp’s pragmatic approach, we will talk about it with them. “said Gubitosi.
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