América Móvil Spent a Year Getting Ready to Buy Something. It Bought Two Things and Closed the Shop.
Leverage has fallen to the floor of the target range, free cash flow is compounding at 40%+, and the M&A pipeline that framed every 2026 call has quietly emptied — leaving a capital-return question management won't answer directly.
AMX · Earnings Call · 2026-10-21
Leverage first, strategy second
For four straight calls, América Móvil's script had a fixed rhythm: a macro preamble, a subscriber tally, and then Daniel Hajj explaining why the company had to stay liquid because consolidation was coming to Latin America and it intended to be the buyer. That rhythm broke in the third quarter — not because the numbers were bad (revenue up 7.6% year on year to MXN 251 billion, EBITDA margin 40.8%, half a point better), but because the balance-sheet thesis that justified the posture is now finished. Carlos Garcia Moreno delivered the line that matters: “our net debt stood at MXN 400 billion excluding leases. It was equivalent to 1.21x net debt to EBITDA after leases down from 1.51x at the end of 2025” — Carlos Jose Garcia Moreno Elizondo, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-21. Free cash flow was 41% higher than 2025, which itself had been 47% above the year before. The stated target range is 1.2x to 1.5x. They are sitting on the floor.The pipeline that emptied
Back in February, with leverage still marginally above the 1.5x ceiling, Hajj was explicit about the plan once it came down: “we're going to do leverage and be in the lower range of our target to be prepared for opportunities” — Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2026-02-11. By April he was more concrete — “I'm personally seeing good opportunities in some countries that makes very good fit for us, and we are looking and doing that” — Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, CEO · 2026-04-22. This quarter, the same analyst question got a different answer.That is a genuine shift in the M&A pipeline, not a rhetorical one. Desktop in Brazil closes October 1 (a BRL 1.4 billion headline that will mostly land in Q4 accounting), the Peru asset is stuck at the regulator, and a final dividend of roughly MXN 17 billion goes out in a couple of weeks. The two things they actually bought are now integration problems, not options. And Chile — the market Hajj called out in February as a consolidation he regretted missing, where he hoped América Móvil could "consolidate the market in Chile, not only in the wireless, also in the fixed" — does not appear once in this Q&A. A theme does not get dropped more cleanly than that.And we do not have anything more in the M&A pipeline, other than the acquisition in Peru that is waiting for regulatory approval likely to be received until the second half of the year. And we do not have anything else on M&A.
The question nobody wants to price
Marcelo Santos of JPMorgan has now asked a version of the same capital-allocation question on three consecutive calls. The answer is always "a balance" between deleveraging, distributions and optionality. With leverage at the bottom of the guided range and the acquisition list empty, that balance has objectively tilted toward shareholders — but management would not say so, and the buyback remains framed as a residual rather than a policy. The silence is the signal: a company that spent 2026 arguing it needed dry powder has run out of stated uses for it.AI as a cost line, not a capex line
América Móvil rarely produces a genuinely new theme, which is what makes its freshest keyword interesting. AI platforms sits at the very top of the company's keyword list this quarter — a different framing from the scattered "artificial intelligence" and "AI application" mentions that appeared in 2024 and 2025. Hajj: “we have been improving a lot in cost and efficiencies with some of AI platforms that we think are very convenient for us” — Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-10-21. Oscar Von Hauske added that the operator is “focused on agents and helping us to reduce cost” — Oscar Von Hauske Solís, Chief Operating Officer · 2026-10-21 in call centres, customer interaction and network maintenance, under a stated three-year plan. Note the contrast with the rest of the market. The global keyword complex around artificial intelligence is almost entirely about demand for compute — AI data center and its adjacent cluster — and that cluster's tape has been fading across both the 90-day and 30-day windows. América Móvil's AI is a margin lever, not a capex sink. That distinction explains how a 40.8% EBITDA margin coexists with a top line growing in the mid single digits. The proof case is Central America, dismissed by analysts as a set of small countries and defended by the CFO as a meaningful block: “Service revenue growth in Central America in the quarter was 11.4%. And EBITDA growth, again, the region was 16.1%” — Carlos Jose Garcia Moreno Elizondo, Chief Financial Officer · 2026-10-21.Mexico: cleaning the base, and an awkward MVNO
Five million prepaid net disconnections landed this quarter, attributed to subscriber cleanups in Mexico and Colombia. This is the registration mandate arriving, and it was flagged early — in April management warned “there's going to be a lot of cleaning the basis of subscribers” — Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, CEO · 2026-04-22. Hajj concedes the drag is not finished: “we still are in the process of registering all the numbers” — Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, Chief Executive Officer · 2026-10-21, with a rolling fortnightly deadline through December. The offset is quality — ARPU growth in Mexican postpaid was, per the CFO, the highest in at least three years, on prepaid to postpaid migration and upselling. Mexican broadband showed the reverse pattern — softer net adds, stronger revenue — because 94% of the base is now on fibre and pricing power has replaced volume. Then Brazil's NuCel, where two separate questions about the MVNO's pricing autonomy and cost mechanics drew two admissions of ignorance.That is a sharp contrast with February, when NuCel was a clean positive: “There's no doubt that NuCel is helping us in number portability, and we're doing very good with them” — Daniel Hajj Aboumrad, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) · 2026-02-11. The NuCel relationship has shifted from a portability tailwind to a competitor operating inside Claro's own network economics — and management would rather not model it aloud.I do not remember the agreement but I do not remember the agreement that we have with NuCel. But I do not I do not know if it is set inflation or if it is for 2 years. I do not know. I do not remember really the agreement that we have with them.