Johannesburg - M-Cell, the listed telecoms company holding a 77 percent stake in MTN, the cellular operator, could report an increase of over 91,2 percent in headline earnings a share for the year ended March 31, an analyst said yesterday.
Sunil Varghese, a telecoms analyst at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, said: ``Market consensus is that, on average, M-Cell`s headline earnings a share would increase to 48c from 25c.``
This would mainly be attributed to dramatic growth of more than 98 percent in subscribers to 2,2 million by the end of the financial year, he said.
The results will be released next Wednesday.
Speculation in the market was also that turnover could rocket up to R6 billion, a more than 313 percent increase from last year`s R1,45 billion.
M-Cell, whose main asset is the MTN stake, has an estimated market capitalisation of just over R40 billion. It is 40,5 percent controlled by Johnnic Communications, a listed operating company of the Johnnic group.
M-Cell`s other asset is satellite operator Orbicom, acquired last year from Multichoice. Orbicom has thus far contributed less than 2 percent to the company`s earnings.
Johnnic Communications houses all the converging Johnnic telecommunications, media, entertainment and Internet interests, including Times Media, the newspaper publishing group, Mega and Johnnic e-Ventures.
Varghese said M-Cell`s earnings would not be affected by the recently announced $150 million investment in the company`s joint fixed line and cellular operation, which had been increased from an earlier projected $70 million.
MTN expects to draw 30 percent of its revenues from its international operations, including those in Cameroon, Swaziland and Rwanda.
At present, the company is waiting on the Nigerian authorities to spell out new licensing procedures for the award of the four GSM licences on offer in that country, after the process was botched in at least three instances.
M-Cell should break down its strategy of how it intended to migrate to the third generation technologies, said another analyst.
MTN has already introduced a short messaging service, which has so far proved successful.
Robert Chaphe, the chief executive of MTN, has said before that the company ``wants to be more than a delivery platform``.
But it was aiming to deliver content provided by all Johnnic group companies.
However, an analyst said, the company should reasonably continue to register solid organic growth while the cellular duopoly remained.
M-Cell`s share gained 135c to R35,40, Johnnic firmed 210c to R87,60, and Omni rose 220c to close at R155 on the JSE yesterday.