Coverage
Telecommunication Services
A three-operator market on a network whose cost is already sunk, where the question is not who grows revenue but who earns more on that capital than it costs. On that test the three separate sharply, and the order has changed over the period covered.
Read the pieceMills
Four companies buying the same wheat at the same administered price and selling most of their flour at another, so the operating results barely differ. What separates their returns is not milling. It is what each buyer paid for the company at privatization, and how much of that price still sits on the balance sheet.
Read the pieceCar Rental
Three companies buying the same cars, hiring them out in the same market and selling them into the same used-car market. The renting is not what separates them: charge each one properly for the vehicle wearing out and their operating margins land within half a point of each other. What is left is the balance sheet, and the margin between what these fleets earn and what the money costs has all but closed.
Read the pieceManpower
Four companies that own almost nothing but a license, a stock of visas and the right to put a worker on somebody else's site. The growth is all in corporate contracts, it has come at a thinner margin, and what separates the four is which door each one bet on.
Read the pieceHow this is put together
The model comes first
Every figure on this site is read out of a financial model I build and maintain myself, one workbook per industry, restated onto a common basis so three companies can be put beside each other honestly. Nothing is retyped from a press release.
The build refuses to guess
Figures are addressed by the label they carry in the workbook, never by row position. If a label stops resolving, the site fails to build rather than publishing whatever now sits in that cell. A wrong number is worse than a missing page.
No price targets, no recommendations
You will not find a buy, sell or hold here. The useful output of this kind of work is a clear view of what a business earns on the capital it puts in, and what would have to change for that to move. What you do with that is your business.
What's next
Tadawul runs to 25 sectors. Four are done. The rest each need a model built and reconciled before they're worth reading, so they arrive one at a time.
When the next one goes up
Each sector takes weeks. One workbook, built and reconciled before a word gets written. That makes for a slow feed and a quiet inbox. Subscribe and you'll hear when a sector goes live, and nothing else.
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