TCELL heads into today's earnings release with the borrow market tightening sharply — the clearest sign of rising short-seller conviction the stock has seen in months.
The cost to borrow TCELL has more than doubled over the past month, climbing from roughly 0.87% in late June to 2.08% now. That pace of increase — up 28% in the past week alone — points to fresh demand for short positions ahead of the print. Availability remains in comfortable territory at around 196%, meaning the lending pool is not stressed, but the direction of travel is unambiguous: borrowing TCELL has become meaningfully more expensive in a short window. The short score has drifted higher too, edging from 36.9 at the end of July to 41.8 this week, though at that absolute level it still sits in the lower third of the universe — shorts are building, but the position is far from extreme.
The case for concern heading in is not hard to construct. The stock has lost 5% over the past month and slipped another 2% on the week, closing at TRY 103.10. The Q1 result in May delivered a jarring lesson: TCELL fell 4% the day after that print and shed 11% over the following five days. Bears will point to persistent Turkish lira headwinds and inflation pressure on real consumer spending as reasons to expect more disappointment. Bulls, meanwhile, can lean on a valuation that looks genuinely undemanding — the P/E ratio sits around 7.4x, price-to-book is below 0.66x, and EV/EBITDA is a slender 1.9x. The analyst consensus remains a firm buy, with a mean price target of roughly TRY 155 — nearly 50% above where the stock trades. EPS momentum factor scores rank in the 91st percentile, suggesting the earnings revision trend has been strongly positive even if the share price has not rewarded it.
Ownership adds an interesting wrinkle. The Carlos Slim-affiliated entities — Fundación Carlos Slim and Control Empresarial de Capitales — collectively added more than 180 million shares in the period through June, bringing the combined Slim-linked stake to over 37% of the company. That scale of strategic accumulation from a sophisticated, long-term holder is a hard signal to dismiss, even with the near-term macro noise. The state-backed TVF anchor holding at 26.5% means the free float is tight, which partly explains why short activity can move borrow costs without extreme absolute short interest.
Today's print is less a test of whether Turkcell is growing and more a test of whether management can demonstrate margin resilience and pricing power in a hyperinflationary domestic economy — the gap between a 91st-percentile EPS momentum score and a stock down 5% on the month suggests the market is not yet willing to take that on trust.
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