Recent reports
Vodafone: Turnaround prolonged
23 May 2025Germany suffered a sizeable EBITDA decline in the 2H of FY25, and guidance for European EBITDA next year implies another tough year in FY26 with an underlying 5% decline for Europe as a whole excluding 1&1.
Elsewhere, the UK had a very solid FY25 and is a good news story for the Group with the merger with Three in prospect, but the Rest of World’s contribution is likely to diminish from here.
Various one-offs will support the outlook for next year, but operational execution is at the core of Vodafone’s raison d’être. Beyond some encouraging KPIs, investors continue to await meaningful evidence of such.
Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital is poised to take the reins of the Telegraph Media Group (TMG) after two years of unforeseen events that led to an unfortunate limbo at TMG.
We anticipate Gerry Cardinale will be vetted under the “public interest” regime for newspapers, which should be a smooth process and conclude by September 2025.
The saga of TMG provoked a new regime for foreign state-owned investors that is a new constraint on all media mergers.
Advertising has outgrown the UK's wider economy by 20 percentage points since 2000 thanks to online and advertisers in export markets, especially China, targeting sales in the import-dependent UK market.
If current trends held to 2030, advertising would reach 1.7% of UK GDP, over 50% higher than 2019—we believe this to be the least likely scenario as the UK already sustains higher ad intensity than major markets.
The next recession could be the moment when online ads growth corrects and then reverts to low single-digit growth in line with the economy. A 'soft landing' is also possible, while a surprise outperformance would require more drastic structural shifts.