Colt - 2005 New Year, New Highs.............

Henryxx
I use a calculation that to lay electric cable is at its cheapest about £100 per metre ; 20,000km of cable = £2bn. Add to that the "infrastructure" to control, manage, report and administer all that cabling and I doubt you would get it established for much less than £1bn but am happy to concede that may be on the high side. Despite all this being systematically written off in their accounts - I do not believe the real worth of the infrastructure is devaluing.

IMO (and I'm open to listen to arguments to persuade me otherwise) but the value of a company is surely equal to the Assets (20,000km worth) plus income stream and to a lesser degree the customer base. [Let's ignore the personnel and costs of redundancy (and - terrible comment I know but - I don't suppose indian redundancies count to too much) but I'd like to be able to wager that if I had a 20k kilometre European wide cabling infrastructure that I could flog it to someone for a lot more than £850m].

You are right : the tax credit (especially in light of the M&S ruling) is worth bucks as well. CTM would be worth buying for virtually the tax credit alone - and if the price ever hit 45p the Market Cap would be equal to the value of the tax credit alone.

Nope - I seriously believe (know) that CTM is massively undervalued at the moment.