Buy Hold Sell: Making the call on 3 communications stocks (and 2 guest picks)

Guys, we're gonna kick off with some opening questions.

Daniel, I'll come to you first.

The communications sector disappointed FY26, and the recent press hasn't been great there.

What's the general outlook in the year ahead?

Yeah, I think for the telecommunications sector, uh, definitely some tough news in recent weeks.

Telstra's had their network issues, and SpaceX is claiming they're gonna, you know, take on all the global telcos.

Uh, for us, like, we're not too worried about those two things.

We think they're pretty too...

They're pretty short term.

Uh, for us, the real big question for the telco sector i- is the competition outlook medium term, you know, with the challenger brands.

That's the key debate at the moment.

Yeah, Hayley, actually, just following on from that, as Daniel mentioned, you've got the, the big three operators in the telco market here.

So you've got Telstra, TPG, Optus.

You are seeing some of the challengers come through and take some market share there.

Is that a trend you see continuing?

Yeah, I think the, um, challengers keep chipping away at the share, and we are seeing some signs of that through some of the high-frequency data that we follow, um, especially at the value end of the market.

But do we actually think this translates into value shifting away from the likes of Telstra? Um, we don't really think so.

In the case of Telstra, um, they actually, um, have really structured their, um, model, um, across this flagship brand, value brand, and wholesale businesses.

So even if some customers do migrate away from, uh, their flagship brand, they can still capture some of the economics in the other parts of the ecosystem, although it might be at a lower margin.

So I think, I guess to Daniel's point, like, the bigger question here isn't about, you know, uh, the challenger brands taking share off the, um, the, the main, uh, three brands, but it's more about the industry pricing discipline.