Kaufman Brothers today initiated coverage with a BUY rating and 12 month price target of $15.
Vik Grover is the covering analyst. According to the WSJ annual survey (from June 2000), I believe Grover was the third best stock picker among the analysts covering Telecom Carriers. This is a rather detailed report; seventeen pages. The report values BESTEL alone at $10.50 a share to GBT.
Interesting that anyone would now initiate coverage on a tiny telecom company like GBT; perhaps viewed at this time next year, the timing will appear prescient.
KBRO's web site, and access to research:
kbroresearch.com
Here are a few of the highlights from the report:
•We view GBT as an interesting speculative play in the global emerging telecom infrastructure provider space.
•For the past several years, the company has been quietly developing a portfolio of investments that we believe, in total, provide significant upside to the company’s stakeholders during the next several years.
•We have valued GBT using models driven by asset and/or revenue multiples and reflected proportionate equity ownership at the holding company level.
•We believe one of these investments, BESTEL, is primed to be monetized over the near term, either through an initial public offering or through a sale to a Tier I carrier seeking a leading facilities-based presence in Mexico.
•Other entities, such as ARCOS-1, are fully funded for their network builds and, when completed within the next 12 to18 months, should provide GBT an opportunity for a significant return on investment (ROI) through asset sales, bandwidth swaps for out-of-region routes, and/or spinout IPOs.
•Further, operating units AduroNet and NeTrue position GBT in front of an accelerating wave of growth in IP-based communications, especially in Europe and the Pacific Rim where new infrastructure is being deployed in order to promote economic growth and enable value-added applications, such as IP VPNs, VSAT connectivity, and voice and fax over IP (VoIP/FoIP) solutions.
•The company currently has little to no coverage on Wall Street and is under the radar screen of investors.
•In anticipation of some of the company's units being sold through spinouts to investors or to other carriers while other units move through inflection points in their own growth stories and make quantum leaps towards becoming full operating companies, we are initiating coverage of GBT with a BUY recommendation. |
