Eutelsat Communications enters the final week of September caught between a steadily sliding share price and one of the tightest borrow markets it has seen all year — a combination that puts the lending-market story squarely at the centre of this week's note.
The borrow is getting meaningfully harder to find. Availability stood at just 19.4% on Tuesday, meaning fewer than one share remains available for every five already lent out. That is itself an improvement from the near-complete lock-out seen over the prior two weeks, when availability collapsed below 4% on September 11 and held around that level through September 18 — the tightest the pool has been in the past year, against a 52-week minimum of 2.3%. The release valve appears to have opened slightly, but the pool remains firmly in "very tight" territory. Cost to borrow has moved in parallel: it touched 3.8% on September 22, up 34% on the week and 67% on the month. That pace of increase — almost doubling in a month — tells you demand for borrows has stepped up materially since late August, when CTB was running closer to 2%.
The ORTEX short score corroborates the picture. It has climbed steadily from 77.7 on September 9 to 78.8 on September 22, placing Eutelsat in the bottom 2nd percentile on both short-score rank and days-to-cover. That is not a stock where shorts are drifting out — it is a stock where the bearish positioning is becoming more entrenched, and the cost of maintaining it is rising. The stock has dropped 2.6% on the week and 7.1% over the past month to €1.761, compounding the losses for shareholders while keeping shorts broadly on-side despite an escalating carry cost.
The Street has no recent analyst activity to change that calculus. The mean price target — at €2.32 as of mid-September — implies roughly 32% upside from the current price, but no upgrades or new notes have crossed the tape in the past two weeks, and with the stock trading deep below even that modest target, the valuation backdrop is unflattering. EV/EBITDA is near 5x, price-to-book is 0.63x, and the earnings yield is negative: a company in financial restructuring mode, not a re-rating story yet. The 30-day EPS momentum factor ranks at the 100th percentile — a signal worth watching — but the 90-day equivalent drops to the 5th percentile, suggesting the improvement is recent and not yet sustained. Quality metrics remain depressed.
The ownership structure adds an interesting wrinkle. The French state (via Agence des participations de l'Etat) holds 17% of shares, Bharti Space 10%, and Bpifrance a further 5.5% — more than a third of the company between three strategic shareholders with no recent changes to those stakes. Van Eck and Vanguard both added modestly in August. The ownership base is heavily strategic, which limits the free float available to both lenders and buyers alike — a structural factor behind the persistent tightness in the borrow pool. Insider trade data is stale (the last reported activity was December 2025 and relates to a capital raise at €1.35 per share), so no current signal there. The next earnings event falls on October 23 — and prior history is sparse but notable: the August 2026 print sent the stock down 3.8% on the day before it clawed back entirely over five days, while a May 2026 print triggered a 28% one-day jump. That range of outcomes illustrates just how binary the narrative around this name can be.
The October 23 earnings date is the next hard catalyst, and with availability still tight and the short score pressing higher, the tension between the cost of being short and the fundamental pressure on the stock is the dynamic to monitor most closely heading into that release.
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