✍️Islam Zween
When I read this week’s Argaam Intelligence report, I found myself recalling similar cases abroad — Wells Fargo after the fake-accounts scandal, Tesco after its accounting crisis. 
In cases like these, the accounting is cleaned up, management changes, earnings improve — yet something still hangs over the stock: investor memory.
In investment terms, you could call this the “reputation burden“: a company repairs its business before it fully recovers its image. The market doesn’t only need better numbers, it needs enough time to be confident that what it is looking at is a durable turnaround and not just a good stretch.
The Intelligence report began from a broader question: why do Gulf telecom operators trade at different multiples when their growth and diversification strategies look so similar?
Its conclusion was that the market doesn’t appear willing to pay for growth or portfolio breadth on their own so much as it cares about domestic market economics, balance-sheet strength, capital discipline, and a company’s ability to convert earnings into sustainable returns.
Mobily then arrived as a practical test of that idea. In 2025 its revenue grew 7.9%, its EBITDA margin came in at 38.8%, and its return on equity reached 17.1%, against 17.8% for stc. Even so, Mobily traded at roughly 7.2x EV/EBITDA versus about 9.1x for stc.
Does that mean the market is treating Mobily unfairly? Not necessarily. stc is larger and more liquid, holds a broader portfolio, and carries a sovereign and strategic weight that justifies part of its premium.
Nor can Mobily’s discount be traced entirely to the 2014 accounting crisis — though it can’t be separated from it either. That crisis weakened confidence in earnings quality and internal controls, and those take longer to rebuild than a set of financial statements.
So the right question isn’t whether Mobily deserves the same multiple as stc. It is whether the discount has grown wider than today’s economic differences justify.
In that sense, Mobily is not a guaranteed re-rating story but a conditional one. If the good results settle into a repeated pattern, free cash flow improves, and discipline over capital spending and debt holds, the market may start to close the part of the discount the numbers no longer support. A business can recover over a few quarters; trust requires a complete new track record.
You can set Mobily’s case alongside the other cases Argaam Intelligence has covered. The companies and sectors differ from report to report, but the question stays the same: when does the market believe the numbers and grant them a premium, and when does it stay guarded and keep the discount in place?
The Telcom Operator That Fixed Itself — and Still Trades at a Discount
Across GCC telecoms, the strategy decks have started to look alike. Data centres, cloud, enterprise, fintech — the same growth pools, the same ambitions, named by nearly every operator in the region.
Yet the market refuses to price them alike.
So what is actually separating them? Not the destination, but the route.
Click here to read the research paper by Argaam Intelligence in full
You Read It Here First in Argaam Weekend: Who Captures the Value
Why isn’t strong growth alone enough when the quality and sustainability of revenue are in question?
Cerebras and G42: A Critical Reading of the Financial Statements
The flip side of the Mobily case: how does the market award a company a premium that comes from scarcity and narrative, not profitability alone?
Rasan Was the Opening Statement. The Next Listing Is the Verdict
Why isn’t asset value alone enough, and how do liquidity, ownership, and investor confidence create a persistent discount? In all three cases the numbers are not what’s in dispute — the dispute is over the meaning the market reads into them.
The Saudi Listed REIT Market: An Empirical Overview
✍️Islam Zween
When I read this week’s Argaam Intelligence report, I found myself recalling similar cases abroad — Wells Fargo after the fake-accounts scandal, Tesco after its accounting crisis.
In cases like these, the accounting is cleaned up, management changes, earnings improve — yet something still hangs over the stock: investor memory.
In investment terms, you could call this the “reputation burden“: a company repairs its business before it fully recovers its image. The market doesn’t only need better numbers, it needs enough time to be confident that what it is looking at is a durable turnaround and not just a good stretch.
The Intelligence report began from a broader question: why do Gulf telecom operators trade at different multiples when their growth and diversification strategies look so similar?
Its conclusion was that the market doesn’t appear willing to pay for growth or portfolio breadth on their own so much as it cares about domestic market economics, balance-sheet strength, capital discipline, and a company’s ability to convert earnings into sustainable returns.
Mobily then arrived as a practical test of that idea. In 2025 its revenue grew 7.9%, its EBITDA margin came in at 38.8%, and its return on equity reached 17.1%, against 17.8% for stc. Even so, Mobily traded at roughly 7.2x EV/EBITDA versus about 9.1x for stc.
Does that mean the market is treating Mobily unfairly? Not necessarily. stc is larger and more liquid, holds a broader portfolio, and carries a sovereign and strategic weight that justifies part of its premium.
Nor can Mobily’s discount be traced entirely to the 2014 accounting crisis — though it can’t be separated from it either. That crisis weakened confidence in earnings quality and internal controls, and those take longer to rebuild than a set of financial statements.
So the right question isn’t whether Mobily deserves the same multiple as stc. It is whether the discount has grown wider than today’s economic differences justify.
In that sense, Mobily is not a guaranteed re-rating story but a conditional one. If the good results settle into a repeated pattern, free cash flow improves, and discipline over capital spending and debt holds, the market may start to close the part of the discount the numbers no longer support. A business can recover over a few quarters; trust requires a complete new track record.
You can set Mobily’s case alongside the other cases Argaam Intelligence has covered. The companies and sectors differ from report to report, but the question stays the same: when does the market believe the numbers and grant them a premium, and when does it stay guarded and keep the discount in place?
The Telcom Operator That Fixed Itself — and Still Trades at a Discount
Across GCC telecoms, the strategy decks have started to look alike. Data centres, cloud, enterprise, fintech — the same growth pools, the same ambitions, named by nearly every operator in the region.
Yet the market refuses to price them alike.
So what is actually separating them? Not the destination, but the route.
Click here to read the research paper by Argaam Intelligence in full
You Read It Here First in Argaam Weekend: Who Captures the Value
Why isn’t strong growth alone enough when the quality and sustainability of revenue are in question?
Cerebras and G42: A Critical Reading of the Financial Statements
The flip side of the Mobily case: how does the market award a company a premium that comes from scarcity and narrative, not profitability alone?
Rasan Was the Opening Statement. The Next Listing Is the Verdict
Why isn’t asset value alone enough, and how do liquidity, ownership, and investor confidence create a persistent discount? In all three cases the numbers are not what’s in dispute — the dispute is over the meaning the market reads into them.
The Saudi Listed REIT Market: An Empirical Overview
