< The 2016 All-Europe Research Team

Total appearances: 35

Team debut: 1988

UBS fields an eight-member European telecommunications team under the leadership of Polo Tang, who last year guided the group to its first appearance on this roster in five years, at runner-up. He and his colleagues rise to third place now. Before assuming his current role, Tang directed regional media coverage, leading UBS to appear on that roster every year from 2007 to 2013. He has been with the firm since June 2002, signing on to cover regional media equities, as he had done at ABN Amro and Dresdner Kleinwort Benson. Tang, 39, earned a master’s degree in electrical and electronic engineering from University College London. The researchers are stationed in London and publish on 38 companies. “We are bullish on European telecoms and believe that the sector can return to growth in 2016 after a decade of decline,” reports Tang. “The sector has been impacted by a perfect storm of weak macro, regulatory cuts and intense competition, but these factors have now subsided.” Last February the squad made a contrarian call on diversified mass-media giant Sky. Consensus opinion on the U.K.-based company was negative, owing to concerns that Sky would not retain the rights to broadcast live Premier League soccer matches in forthcoming seasons, given competition from the likes of domestic rival BT Group and the U.S.’s Netflix. Tang and his colleagues, however, reiterated their buy rating, predicting that Sky would prevail in the Premiership auction battle and advising clients that market participants were underestimating the growth from new initiatives. They were proved right. Within a month Sky won rights to broadcast the lion’s share of the soccer matches for three years through 2109 and subsequently delivered several successive quarters of record subscriber growth. The stock had risen 16.4 percent by mid-January, to 1,034.86p, outperforming its European peers by 23.1 percentage points. Since January 2014, when the squad first recommended buying Sky, it had posted a 23.3 percent gain, compared with the regional sector’s gain of 4.7 percent. UBS’s analysts believe that a price of 1,350p is justified.