AOT:

AOT released their latest flight/passenger figures last week, and things look awful with passengers -28% for the first week of Feb, expect for this rate of change to increase for the rest of the month.

The first step they’ve done to counter the drop is to reduce the landing fee and now there’s news that they may waive the minimum guarantee payment to help retailers (read: King Power). Note that concession revenues are ~26%.

Not pretty times.

5G:

Over the weekend the 5G bids were completed without too much fanfare (such a shame, here I was hoping for JAS to make it another event) here’s a quick summary:

• 5 players joined in, ADVANC, DTAC, TRUE, CAT and TOT
• Thailand (or the military) made THB 100 bn.
• 700MHz: The final price was at Bt17.2bn per license of 5MHz bandwidth (up 95% from Bt8.8bn starting price). CAT Telecom (CAT) won two of the three available licenses, and another license was taken by ADVANC.
• 2600MHz: The final price was at Bt1.96bn per license of 10MHz bandwidth (up 5% from Bt1.86bn starting price). The band was also sold out, in which ADVANC took 10 licenses at Bt19.6bn while TRUE took nine licenses at Bt17.9bn cost (including extra cost to select bandwidth slots).
• 26GHz: The final price was at Bt445m per license of 100MHz bandwidth (5% above Bt423m starting price). 26 licenses (from 27 available licenses) were divided among four operators, 12 to ADVANC, 8 to TRUE, 4 to TOT, and 2 for DTAC.

So what?

ADVANC

• Won the most spectrum – 1385MHz in total spanning the three bandwidth auctioned.
• License life is 15 years so P&L amortisation is THB 2.8 bn p.a. or ~9%
• So expect for the yield/DPS to drop unless they increase their divvy from 70% to pre-4G levels.
• Arguably in the best position with far more capacity than True.

True

• 890MHz on two spectrum’s (2600 and 26 GHz)
• Payments of THB 5.3 bn, but they haven’t had a positive FCF on their core business in, forever…?
• Annual amortisation THB 1.4 bn = accounting net losses
• Some say they were rational, I say they don’t have a balance sheet to support any stronger bidding.

DTAC

• DTAC has 200MHz in the high band spectrum 26GHz.
• Low amortisation. Minimum risk on DPS cuts.
• The rumours/strategy is that DTAC will just piggyback from others (i.e. CAT) instead of spending the capital on the investment themselves.