An Appeal Court sitting in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, has ordered MultiChoice to sub-license some of its channels to Metro-digital in line with the code of the Nigerian Broadcasting Commission (NBC).

While delivering his judgement on Wednesday, Justice Olabode Adegbehingbe, dismissed the ruling of the lower court, which dismissed the suit of the Appellant, Metro-digital, despite the appealant proving the existence of the dispute between itself and the first respondent, MultiChoice.

Justice Adegbehingbe also directed the second respondent, NBC, to compel Multi-choice to follow the court order within 21 days.

Meanwhile, Groupe Canal+, a French broadcasting giant, which recently increased its stake in DStv-owner MultiChoice to 18.44% in June, has further increased the position to 20.12%. Canal+ began buying up shares in MultiChoice in 2020 and has spared no time to increase its stake.

Canal+ is owned by Vivendi SE, a French mass media holding company which is widely known as the owner of Gameloft, Havas, and Prisma Media to name a few.

Canal+ is a top player in the area of premium content in Europe and has developed a strong presence in Asia and Africa, regions the company has targeted due to their high growth potential. It thus comes as no surprise that they have targeted MultiChoice for investment. The increased position has induced speculation that Vivendi, through Canal+, may be looking to take control of MultiChoice since they previously made a bid to acquire MultiChoice Africa but got rejected.

Protea Capital Management senior investment analyst Richard Cheesman previously stated, “There is little geographical overlap between MultiChoice and Canal+ in Africa, and there would be many synergies from a merger such as content costs, satellite leases, and perhaps expediting the use of the MultiChoice tax losses,” as motivation for the stake in MultiChoice.

It is evident that Vivendi is looking to grow into Africa and has taken a keen eye to MultiChoice as a way of doing so. With Vivendi being a holding company, it can become a very daunting task to value them as a potential investment. Investors are likely to impound the stock price with vague and ambiguous information in a systemically incorrect way.

At Global and Local Asset Management we firmly believe in stripping out all vague and ambiguous information from the investment process. This is why we use New Age Alpha’s developed system called Avoid the Human Factor (H-Factor).

Currently, as of July 8 2022, our friends at New Age Alpha New York have provided us with a H-Factor Score of 45.8%, which indicates that Vivendi has a 45.8% probability of NOT being able to deliver on the growth implied in its share price (or, if we turn this probability around, a 54.2% chance of delivering the growth implied by its share price).