Liberty Latin America Ltd. Q2 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good morning, and welcome to Liberty Latin America's Second Quarter 2021 Investor Call. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investors section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. Following today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available under the Investors section of our website. Today's remarks may include forward-looking statements including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical facts. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Liberty Latin America's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K and the most recent Form 8-K filed with the SEC, along with the associated press release. Liberty Latin America disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement or information is based. In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, which can be found in the appendices to this presentation, which is accessible under the Investors section of our website. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Balan Nair.

Thank you, Mike, and welcome, everybody to Liberty Latin America's results presentation for the second quarter and first half of 2021. I'll begin by taking you through our group highlights and operating results before handing over to Chris Noyes, our CFO, who will follow with a review of the company's financial performance. After that, we will get straight to your questions. As always, I'm joined by my executive team from across the region, and I'll get them involved as needed during the Q&A following our prepared remarks. As a point of housekeeping, we will both be working from slides, which you can find on our website at www.lla.com. Starting on Slide 4, with our highlights, we delivered a strong set of results in the second quarter as our markets continue to recover from the impacts of COVID-19. RGU adds of 73,000 represented continued momentum following a record quarter 1 performance. Cable & Wireless Caribbean & Networks and Puerto Rico once again drove the group with strong commercial execution. In Mobile, we had our best-ever quarter, adding 118,000 new subscribers. This was driven by Panama, which very nearly replicated our record Q1 performance, and in Jamaica, where adds were 55,000, which was 45,000 higher than the first quarter. Our continued operational recovery, which drove 8% rebased revenue growth, together with a disciplined focus on cost controls, resulted in a robust rebased adjusted OIBDA growth of 10% in Q2. Liberty Puerto Rico had another strong quarter, up 21% on a rebased basis while C&W Caribbean and Networks, and C&W Panama also delivered double-digit rebased growth compared to Q2 2020, which was a quarter that was most impacted by COVID-19. We also grew sequentially from Q1, which shows our resiliency and focus. New build and upgrade plans are core elements of our growth strategy and following our most active first half ever, with approximately 360,000 new homes passed or upgraded. I am pleased to announce that we are increasing our 2021 target to now deliver over 700,000 new or upgraded homes, more than 95% of which are fiber to the home. Finally, we announced earlier this week that we have received the required authorizations to complete the acquisition of Telefónica's Costa Rican operations. We expect this transaction to close very shortly. Moving to Slide 5 and highlights for our key markets. Note that we've provided relative revenue contributions for each market through the percentages shown. Starting with Puerto Rico, our largest single market, which contributed nearly 1/3 of the group's $1.2 billion in revenue in the second quarter, all of which is U.S. dollar revenue. We continue to see strong growth in our Puerto Rico operations as broadband penetration increases, and we continue to deliver healthy adds. In terms of the integration of Liberty Mobile, this is progressing well and remains an exciting driver of future free cash flow growth as we look to generate significant synergies from the in-market combination. Moving to Chile, which represents 18% of LLA revenue in Q2, we are progressing here by stabilizing the subscriber base and now look to build on this platform by selling into our growing high-speed footprint. Given the challenging competitive environment, we are also very focused on managing costs and are seeing some savings from actions we have taken, and we are matching our competitors' pricing. We would rather give our consumers the savings than concede any subscribers to our competitors. Lastly, while we are seeing some easing of mobility restrictions, curfews and international travel restrictions still remain. Next, to Costa Rica, where, as I mentioned, we will close our acquisition of Telefónica's business very shortly. This will create an innovative converged scale player in the market and drive good synergies through in-market consolidation. As with many of our markets, some degree of mobility restrictions are still in place. However, Cabletica has consistently performed well through the past 18 months driven by growing in-home broadband demand. Turning to the bottom row, Panama contributed 11% of the group's revenue in Q2. Here, we saw our mobile momentum continue in Q2 with subscriber additions driven by the Todo Todito plan. Panama is one of the most severely impacted markets by COVID-19. However, mobility restrictions have eased and the availability of vaccines is expected to increase. Next, to Jamaica, which is the largest C&W Caribbean and Networks market and represented 9% of LLA revenue in the second quarter. Here, we have seen some very good operating and financial results despite relatively low vaccination rates. In the last 12 months, Jamaica has added 95,000 RGUs and 111,000 mobile subscribers, which is a testament to the hard work of our team and the consumer acceptance of the new propositions we have launched. Moving to Networks, which contributed 7% of LLA's Q2 revenue. As we've mentioned in recent quarters, this is a high-margin and mainly U.S. dollar business that has also benefited from increased bandwidth demand across broadband and video applications in the region. Lastly, what we've categorized as other markets, representing the rest of C&W Caribbean & Networks and contributing just under 1/4 of Q2 revenues for LLA. Growth for these markets is expected through higher data penetration and usage in both our fixed and mobile products. In terms of the broader backdrop, tourism is an important economic driver for these markets, and an increased number of visitors is anticipated in the second half of the year, further helping recovery. Of the markets in this grouping and LLA overall, Trinidad is currently the most negatively impacted by COVID-19 restrictions. Turning to Slide 6, and our operating performance, starting with fixed subscriber additions, where the group had another strong quarter, bringing first half net ads to just under 150,000 RGUs, or nearly double the prior year period. Taking each reporting segment in turn, C&W Caribbean & Networks reported higher net adds year-over-year in the second quarter with the largest contribution coming from Jamaica, where we added 26,000 RGUs. The Bahamas and Barbados represented the majority of the remaining adds. In Panama, we added 9,000 RGUs in the quarter, with footprint expansion and product improvement set to drive further growth through the year. ARPU is impacted by retention activities such as the use of lifeline plans, discounts and moving customers to lower-cost plans. Liberty Puerto Rico in the Upper Senate continued to increase broadband penetration and grew its subscriber base by 22,000 in the quarter. The prior year benefited from higher demand as customers adapted to working and learning from home. In Chile, we are stabilizing our subscriber base following RGU losses in the second half of 2020. The market remains very competitive, and we continue to focus on customer retention, as mentioned on the previous slide. Our last segment, Costa Rica, had another good quarter with net adds of 11,000 and robust ARPU development. As a group, we delivered strong Q2 adds of 73,000 RGUs with year-over-year improvements driven by C&W Panama and C&W Caribbean & Networks. Our group ARPU per customer at $50 was up 3% year-over-year on an FX-neutral basis. Moving to Slide 7, and a record mobile performance, starting again with C&W Caribbean & Networks, where we added 58,000 subscribers in the quarter, a swing of 234,000 subscribers compared to Q2 2020. Jamaica added most of the segment subscribers in the quarter, up by 55,000. Turning to Panama, which again generated the most adds in the quarter, growing its space by 60,000 net subs. As mentioned, this was driven by our unlimited data, Todo Todito plan. Liberty Mobile grew its subscriber base modestly in the quarter. Of note, we saw improved growth in postpaid, where we added 11,000 subscribers. Finally, VTR lost 7,000 mobile subscribers in the quarter. We operate as an MVNO in Chile, predominantly providing postpaid services to existing fixed service subscribers and then as a small player in the market. In aggregate, as a group, we added a record 118,000 mobile subscribers in the quarter with a blended ARPU of $19. The increase of 68% year-over-year is driven by the inclusion of Liberty Mobile in Q2 2021.

Thanks, Balan. Starting on Slide 12. We reported revenue of $1.17 billion in Q2 or 8% rebased growth over the prior year. In terms of products, we achieved rebased growth across the board with our largest gains in Mobile and B2B, both of which were the most severely impacted by COVID-19 in the prior year quarter. Taking our revenue performance, combined with our focus on cost control, we were able to post adjusted OIBDA of $464 million or 10% rebased growth. P&E additions stepped up from last year's levels to $215 million in Q2 or 18% of revenue, partly reflecting the addition of Liberty Mobile as well as higher CPE spend. Our year-to-date CapEx was 16% of revenue. We expect our spend to increase in H2 as we look to further our Liberty Mobile integration and pursue our aggressive network expansion, upgrade and capacity plans. In terms of FCF, we reported $35 million of adjusted free cash flow for Q2, bringing our year-to-date total to $93 million or 15% higher than H1 2020. Relative to last year's Q2, the decrease was primarily due to much higher cash CapEx of about $75 million in the quarter. We remain well on track to deliver our full year target of approximately $200 million in adjusted free cash flow, and we would expect substantially all the remaining FCF in H2 to be generated in our seasonally strong fourth quarter. Turning to the next slide, I will dive into our Q2 segment performance and for reference, we have included the adjusted OIBDA comparison to last year and to Q1 in the bottom half of the slide. Starting on the left with C&W Caribbean and Networks. We delivered $434 million of revenue and $188 million of adjusted OIBDA, reflecting rebased growth of 8% and 14%, respectively. Notably, our financial results also expanded from Q1. Our rebased revenue performance in Q2 was driven by growth across all our products. As Balan previously noted, we have seen strong RGU growth, particularly in Jamaica, and this has been the driver of fixed revenue progression. In Mobile, revenue has grown through a higher ARPU as mobility restrictions have become less severe and usage has increased. And in B2B, we are benefiting from the positive effects of modestly improving economic activity. Managing our cost base was crucial to robust cash generation in a challenging 2020, and we have been focused on being thoughtful around spend as revenue recovers. This has helped to drive significant OIBDA margin improvement as Q2 margin reached 43%. P&E additions expanded to $73 million or 17% of revenue as we supported our quarterly subscriber growth and invested in a combination of projects, including those related to capacity, new build, and products.

Turning to Cable Wireless Panama, CWP's Q2 revenue of $128 million and adjusted OIBDA of $46 million or 15% and 24% higher on a rebased basis, respectively, our strongest result of any segment in the quarter. Compared to the prior year, revenue growth was driven by strong B2B performance, including the return of government-related projects that have been put on hold and higher mobile usage from improved economic activity. Our residential mobile business also reported double-digit rebased growth as our subscriber base increased by over 200,000 in the past 12 months. The momentum underlying our business can be seen sequentially to Q1 as revenue and adjusted OIBDA increased by $6 million and $2 million, respectively. Capital spending grew in the quarter to $20 million or 16% of revenue. Our construction crews delivered 39,000 homes, bringing our year-to-date total to 60,000 new and/or upgraded homes. Liberty Puerto Rico is highlighted in the middle of the slide. Growth continues with the business generating top-line rebased growth of 11% and adjusted OIBDA rebased growth of 21%, bringing revenue and adjusted OIBDA to $360 million and $161 million, respectively. Rebased revenue growth was driven by double-digit growth in our legacy fixed operations, which resulted primarily from the 124,000 RGUs we have added over the last 12 months. Additionally, the recently acquired Liberty Mobile business delivered rebased revenue growth of approximately 7%. On the cost side, we are in the early days of integrating and synergizing the Liberty Mobile asset. Notably, Q2 integration OpEx was only $2 million. P&E additions were $51 million or 14% of revenue, and we expect capital spend to accelerate in H2 with integration and ramping new build activities, in part related to the Uniendo funding that Balan highlighted.

Switching to VTR. Our year-over-year rebased declines remain elevated as we have discussed on prior calls. Q2 revenue of $209 million and adjusted OIBDA of $69 million reflect rebased declines of 6% and 18%, respectively. These declining growth rates are modestly improved compared to Q1. Our challenging revenue performance is directly attributable to subscriber losses, particularly broadband RGUs over the last 12 months. On a year-over-year basis, adjusted OIBDA declined faster than revenue due in part to higher content and network costs. P&E additions were $56 million or 27% of revenue as we further expanded our new build activity to over 130,000 homes compared to 77,000 in Q1. Finishing with Cabletica in Costa Rica, this business posted rebased revenue growth of 13% to $36 million and rebased adjusted OIBDA growth of 3% to $13 million, while P&E additions were 20% of revenue. Our top line continues to be driven by strong broadband volume and ARPU growth. Post completion of the Telefónica acquisition, our Costa Rican operations will more than double in size, and we would expect to begin integrating the new business with our legacy operations during Q3.

Moving to Slide 14. The charts show the last 6 quarters, including the drop in our results last Q2, the positive impact of the Liberty Mobile acquisition beginning in Q4 and improving quarterly sequential results. With the addition of Liberty Mobile and improved financial performance, LLA delivered over $900 million of adjusted OIBDA in H1, which is a step up from where we were last year. As we think about rebased growth rates for the next 2 quarters, we would expect our rebased growth rates to be much lower than our Q2 levels. This is a function of more difficult comps in H2 as Q2 2020 was the financial low point for us from COVID. And with respect to adjusted OIBDA, we expect to incur most of the 2021 integration OpEx for Liberty Mobile in the second half. Notwithstanding this phasing of integration expense, we have lowered our conservative target for 2021 from $35 million to $40 million, down to roughly $20 million, of which $3 million was incurred in H1. Turning to Slide 15, Q2 was quiet in terms of capital structure activity. At June 30, we reported $8.9 billion of total debt, $1.3 billion of cash and $1.2 billion of availability under our revolving credit lines. During Q3, we expect to draw approximately $290 million in bank loans to fund our acquisition in Costa Rica. The remainder of the $500 million purchase will be funded by LLA's corporate cash and by our 20% local partner. In terms of leverage at quarter end, we had gross leverage of 5x and net leverage of 4.2x. Our weighted average cost of debt on a fully swapped basis is running around 6%, and the average tenor of our debt is 6.3 years, which the debt maturity schedule on the bottom right clearly depicts. One change which Balan touched upon is that we recommenced our share buyback activity and repurchased $10 million of equity during the quarter. It has been a year since we last bought back stock. And based on the recovery we are seeing in our business, the confidence we have in our cash flows and what we think is a highly attractive return, we thought it was smart capital allocation and a good time to recommence the program. Moving to our final slide. For LLA, we posted strong financial growth as we continue to recover from the pandemic. Similar to Q1, our results were ahead of our own expectations for the quarter. No doubt the macroeconomic rebound in Latin America will take a considerable amount of time to take hold. And as such, we remain laser-focused on cost control. Our recent performance, combined with our discipline around costs, will position us to gain incremental operating leverage as the regional environment improves and inflows. A key recurring theme for us going forward will be network infrastructure investment. As we have highlighted today, we are upsizing our fiber expansion, but importantly, staying within our CapEx and free cash flow envelope. Our inorganic strategy has not only enabled LLA to drive scale efficiencies and synergies but has been critical in enabling us to better serve our customers' needs with fixed and mobile connectivity in markets like Puerto Rico, Curacao, and soon-to-be Costa Rica in Q3. Specifically, in a market like Puerto Rico, we've been able to create a U.S.-like business that generated over $300 million in adjusted OIBDA in just the first 6 months of 2021. To close out our prepared remarks, we remain confident in delivering our LLA consolidated targets and are setting the stage for continued growth in 2022. We were also pleased to publish our inaugural ESG report last month and look forward to sharing more information through future disclosures as we further develop our program. With that, operator, we are ready to take questions.

Operator Instructions. We will begin with Soomit Datta with New Street Research.

I have a couple of quick questions, if I may. First, regarding the buyback, it seems to be performing better than I anticipated. Could you share your thoughts on the program moving forward? I believe you received authorization for around $90 million. Are you planning to be active in the market consistently, or will it depend on share price movements? It would be great to get some insight into your thinking on this. Secondly, concerning integration costs, it appears you may have saved some money or potential costs in that area. I would like to know more about where those savings originated and whether there's potential to further reduce those costs in 2022. Lastly, if I could, I’d like to ask about the details regarding Liberty Mobile in Puerto Rico. It seems to be generating around a 42% EBITDA margin, based on the revenue and EBITDA figures you provided. Is that a correct assessment? Is it on a new growth trajectory? Any additional information on this would be very helpful.

Hello, Soomit, thank you for your questions. Let me review them. The first one about the buyback. We have always been careful with our capital allocation, and given the current trading of our equity, this decision makes sense. As Chris mentioned in his comments, we are quite optimistic about the future. The Board has authorized $100 million for this purpose, and we will proceed according to our planned approach. We feel confident about it. Regarding integration costs, they decreased this year because we took a cautious approach. We avoided certain expenses related to licensing and vendor costs, which helped reduce those costs. I anticipate we will have some integration costs next year, but I do not expect them to increase, nor do I foresee the same level of cost-cutting measures repeating next year. It should stabilize according to our plan, and we are optimistic about it. Concerning Liberty Mobile, we will provide more details on the specific margins later. The margins vary significantly; equipment margins are nearly zero, whereas postpaid margins are solid, and prepaid margins are even better. Roaming margins are the highest, but they do taper off. In Puerto Rico, our fixed business margins have also significantly improved, contributing to our overall growth there. Chris or Naji, would you like to add any insights on the margins?

I would say, obviously, on the margin side, the lion's share of the OpEx integration will kind of start flowing through here in the second half. So that will put some pressure on margins as well from what you saw in the first half of the year.

Thanks, Chris.

We'll now move to a question from Kevin Roe with Roe Equity Research.

Balan, could you update us on the strategic direction for the subsea cable business and work to potentially separate that business? And secondly, the Delta variant, it's in the news every day in the U.S. It's causing some changes in corporate behavior. We've seen mass mandates from some companies. Some companies are paying employees to get vaccinated; some are mandating vaccinations. Are you taking any different approaches this time around with Delta to keep your employees working and your stores open?

Sure, Kevin, on the strategic side, I'll address that first. We’ve started to gain clearer insights into our subsea asset. We’ve evaluated what it would take to separate it in terms of accounting, legal, and tax considerations. It's a strong business and strategically important to us. However, we have not made a final decision regarding this asset. I believe that sometime in the fourth quarter, our Board and we will review whether we want to test its value. We believe that from a sum-of-the-parts perspective, this asset is undervalued within our overall infrastructure. We may explore ways to clarify its stand-alone value. Regarding the Delta variant, we are handling it similarly to how we managed last year. As you may remember, this time last year was quite challenging, and we have gained insights on how to respond without overreacting. In our region, vaccination rates are significantly lower than in the United States, which is a concern since the Delta variant spreads mainly among the unvaccinated. For our employees, we prefer that those who interact with customers—whether in our retail locations or entering customers' homes—be vaccinated. This applies in areas where vaccination rates are high. In certain regions, like Jamaica where the vaccination rate is about 10%, enforcing this rule is not feasible due to vaccine access issues. Nevertheless, when vaccination rates are high across our areas, we aim to be a network provider that assures customers feel safe with our technicians in their homes.

We'll now take a question from Matthew Harrigan, Benchmark.

Congratulations on the results. I was just curious, you've got a lot of touch points with very sophisticated businesses, even enterprise customers in the Caribbean area on account of your subsea network. What do you perceive as the UCaaS opportunity there? I mean, clearly the region like the U.S. to a certain extent, but it feels like you're pretty well positioned coming out of the blocks. I know that's more of a conceptual than an immediate block and tackling question. There's a lot going on, but I was just curious, given your positioning.

Matt, on the enterprise side, I'll say from our subsea business, it's a tale of two stories. The carriers, the wholesale guys are just seeing ever-increasing demand for bandwidth. We've been putting in capacity for a lot of our customers. From an enterprise standpoint, I think it's one that we've been looking at strategically on trying to convince a lot of the hyperscalers that having a bigger and better presence in our region is important for them. So as an example, a lot of them on their edge data centers do not have them located in our region. It's driven by two things: one, the volume of people; and two, the lack of focus. We've been having some conversations with some of the hyperscalers around, they need a presence in our region; come into Costa Rica, come into Panama, come into the Caribbean. You would be surprised with the connectivity that's available, the parts that's available, the data centers that we have as well. So there's a stimulation point to that business.

With no additional questions, that will conclude today's question-and-answer session. I'd like to hand the call back over to Balan Nair for any additional or closing remarks.

Thank you, operator, and thanks, everybody on the call. I am actually very happy with our progress. Clearly, we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter and brighter. We will continue to work very hard for you. My team is committed to that. The management team, the whole company is committed to that for you and for our customers. So thank you for your support and encouragement. Have a great day.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Latin America's Second Quarter 2021 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.