Infrastructure Securities

Telecoms are booming with the confinement

Telecom Italia reports a 70% increase in land line usage since the confinement, and 30% for mobile.  Surely, the enablers of teleworking, on-line entertainment and social networking will benefit from more traffic, as long as people are forced to remain at home.

But who benefitted from this trend in March, 2020?  Netflix, Google, Facebook and Microsoft had an average loss of 7% in March, and the big telecom networks in Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Switzerland had an average loss of 15%. But the real enablers, the telecoms infrastructure companies, fared much better. The five largest telecom tower companies in the US and Europe were flat, and a basket of the largest data centres rose an average of 8%.

This does not look like a trend that will die out soon, and Quaero’s Infrastructure Securities Fund has been holding 26% of its assets in the last two categories