Short-term weakness in Bharti Airtel shares likely: HSBC

MUMBAI: Bharti Airtel has reiterated its buy rating on Bharti Airtel and kept its price target for the stock at Rs450 after the company sold its Burkina Faso and Sierra Leone businesses. The bank said, however, shares could be weak in the short-term as the December quarter results could be subdued.

“…..pressure on voice tariffs in 3Q has been driven by incumbent telcos and not new GSM entrants. Hence, the dip in voice realisations may not bode for Indian telco investors,” said Bharti Airtel’s analyst Rajiv Sharma in a client note.

At 1:25 PM on Friday, Bharti shares were down 0.9% at Rs306.05. The Sensex was down 0.1%.

Bharti Airtel said the transactions in Africa is “value neutral” for the company.

“As the operations were profitable and had a higher consolidated margin than the African market overall, we expect Bharti’s Africa losses to widen and lower our FY17e EPS estimate by 3.8%,” the analyst said.