Ann: Half Yearly Report and Accounts, page-12

@Transversal

Thanks for your comments. No doubt, your technical analysis may be more accurate than mine to some degree.

In my experience though - and this is not specific to your comments at all, just a generalisation - people tend to find ways to overcomplicate things. The academics will come up with all sorts of metrics and formulae, expressing such useless concepts as Beta etc...

But that is not really how a business owner thinks.

My scenario was also unrealistic in the assumption that the business could not be sold for anything. In reality they would be able to sell some property, plant, equipment etc at the very least as well as flog off their programming rights for a 'fair value' to someone. I think this overly conservative view gives me a bit of leeway in terms of needing to be too precise on percentage points here and there.

Specifics aside, it is clear to me that Sky TV's fortunes would need to be bleaker than they have been so far for a very long period of time before the current market cap would make any kind of sense.

So far as investing goes (and this really is just a personal opinion) - if you can't work out a reasonable range of estimates from a 'back of the envelope' kind of analysis - then you should stay away from the stock.