MacQuarie has boosted its target price for BT Group plc (LON:BT.A) as the UK government hopes to kick-start and facilitate the move to Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTp) investment, but has downgraded its rating for broadband rival TalkTalk Group PLC (LON:TALK).
In a note to clients, the Australian broker’s analyst said: “We expect a cacophony of newsflow in the rest of 2017 as financing agreements and FTTp projects are announced. Political aspirations support the altnet business model and so far in 2017 close to £400m has been raised to invest in FTTp.”
They added: “The UK government’s outlook is longer term than the regulators at the moment. Importantly, achieving Ofcom’s 12% IRR target and ‘excessive' OCF margins will take until 2024/25 for FTTp investments, giving BT a long window to invest.”
READ: BT rallies on regulator's plans to monitor broadband arm Openreach
The analysts said they expect BT to announce a comprehensive FTTp build in the next six months following the kick-off of a consultation in July 2017.
They expect BT to target over 1mln homes per annum, with a target of 10mln in total by 2025 in addition to the g.fast target of 10mln, and see 2020/21 as the positive turning point in Openreach operating activities.
The analysts said: “Key to our pricing assumption are the facts that by 2026 we do not believe Openreach will have significant market power, allowing Openreach to negotiate its own wholesale pricing rather than have a regulated access price, in our view.”
They said they have remodelled to assume higher wholesale FTTp costs - now a £15 base case, up from in £10 previously.
The analysts added that for BT this implies a wholesale FTTp price closer to £19-£20 and as a results they raise their mid-term earnings per shares (EPS) forecasts for the group by around by 1% and up their target price by 3%, to 340p from 330p, reiterating an ‘outperform’ rating on the stock.
TalkTalk rating downgraded to ‘underperform’
However, for TalkTalk they have downgraded their rating to ‘underperform’ from ‘neutral’ with an unchanged target price of 150p, which gives 20% downside potential.
The analysts have adjusted their EPS estimates for TalkTalk, raising them by 3% for 2018, but cutting them by 1% for 2019 due to slightly lower ARPU (average revenue per user) assumptions as the ongoing rebasing of the group’s back book continues.