$VEON: a busted EM telecom hiding a 4x? | Samit Umatiya, UIG Funds
About this episode
$VEON is analyzed as a potentially undervalued telecom with significant assets, while discussing its troubled history and market perception.
$VEON trades like a busted emerging-markets telecom, but it owns 84% of Ukraine's Kyivstar and a Pakistani fintech, JazzCash, that already moves 15% of the country's GDP. Samit Umatiya of UIG Funds lays out the sum-of-the-parts case for why the holdco could be worth roughly 4x today's price, and Andrew pushes back hard the whole way: a not-so-storied history of value destruction, a sanctioned 45% shareholder, capital controls, and a long graveyard of telecoms that bungled every growth opportunity they ever had. The result is one long push and pull on whether the upside is real this time. This episode is sponsored by Fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global equities, with a web terminal plus a self-serve API that plugs real-time fundamentals straight into Claude and ChatGPT. Andrew uses it himself. Get 15% off at https://fiscal.ai/yav Chapters: 00:00 The setup: a sum-of-the-parts EM telecom nobody talks about 01:31 Sponsor: Fiscal.ai 02:35 Who is Samit Umatiya and what is VEON 04:19 Vimpelcom to VEON: the history and the Russia exit 08:14 Why is the market asleep on this name? 11:31 The sum of the parts: Kyivstar plus four frontier markets 13:59 Bridging…
Topics covered
- emerging markets
- telecom
- investment analysis
- value investing
- financial data
Sponsors
Fiscal.ai
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