Hard times for Spanish Telefonica?

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A large part of the Spanish stock market index IBEX is based on Telefonica stocks.  Should the telephone company experience a revenue shock, then bad times would send down the whole Spanish stock market. In this week signs turned very negative and I take them as a seismic prediction tool for a coming financial earthquake:

Today I received four (!) phone calls from Telefonica’s sales agents. I refused several times to be educated on new offers, but they dare to call again and again. Let’s face it: This is terrorism!

Right now, I started to look up the web of phone numbers of Telefonica’s managers and I provide them to the call center agents (in Mexico or somewhere else). It now has reached a level of disturbance, which keeps me from working and make effective use of my phone line - but this is just a short note along the sideline. The more interesting part of this story is that I observed this pattern, every time - before - the stock went down.

What really concerns me is that Telefonica seems to apply a last man standing strategy – ahead of a deflationary shock. This indicates to me that the operator is in trouble. Said so, I have to look more in the financial details to understand the current position and outlook for the company. 

But just looking at the way how the Spanish telephone operator treats me as a client, I believe it might eventually not benefit enough from its Latin American business to offset the falling revenues in the domestic market. Clients noted that Telefonica still keeps a monopoly position, in the open EU market. That has however not helped the company to become more professional and their unprofessional Telephone terrorism indicates that no attempted is made to serve the client, but rather follow a lock-in strategy.

Keep in mind. This is not investment advise but just an academic discussion of things I noticed.

tags:invetsing, telefonica, stock markets, spain, latin america, telephone operator, Spainish stock market, IBEX,