Tony, I liked your idea of using a proxie.
If we can find an appropriate proxie for TBR we will
be able to assign a P/E and a value with more confidence.
Our proxie should be something similar or what someone
paid for in a similar situation.
I may be totally off base here since I haven't been following
the TelCos in LatAm, but of the companies you listed, the ones
that intuitively make sense as a proxie are (I'm going strictly
by my perception of size as a similarity):
SYMBOL P/E (Country)
TMX 16.4 (Mexico)
TEO 24.3 (Argentina)
TAR 19.9 (Argentina)
The Argentina phone companies carry a much higher P/E than
the Mexican company.
So I think the next questions are:
1)Do you think TBR is more similar to the Argentina phone
companies than to the Mexican one?
2) Are the governments involved or are they completely private?
3) Any idea why TEO trades at such a high P/E? Was it just
privatized or has it been running privately for a while?
One other point I would like to explore, which should make
things easier:
Does anyone know of any LatAm telco that has been privatized
in recent history? If so what did it go for? (Price, P/E,
market size...)
Tony, Thanks for your input, let's see if we can get
the brain juices going and get others helping to refine the
valuation!
PS.
I don't know if anyone else noticed this in the TBR annual report,
but it SURPRISED me. The TBR average monthly employee salary was
R$2,406/mo = R$28,872/yr = US$25,550/yr
I don't know what the average salary is in the US, but this is
approximately Can$36,800 which is only a couple thousand off
the average Canadian income, and I bet they pay much less in taxes
than we do and their cost of living is less. So the average TBR
employee is probably better off financially than the average
Canadian...not bad for a developing country... |
