Earnings Call Transcript - TEO Q2 2024

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

Good morning. On behalf of Telecom Argentina, I would like to thank everybody for participating in this conference call. The participants of today's conference call are Roberto Nóbile, Chief Executive Officer; Gabriel Blasi, Chief Financial Officer; and myself, Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations. The purpose of this call is to share with you the results of the 6-month period in the second quarter, ending June 30, 2024. If you have not received our press release or presentation, you can call our Investor Relations office to request the documents or download them from the Investor Relations section of our website located at inversores.telecom.com.ar. I would like to go over some safe harbor information and other details of the call. We would like to clarify that during the conference call and Q&A session, we could mention certain forward-looking statements about Telecom's future performance, plans, strategies, and objectives. Such statements are subject to uncertainties that could cause Telecom's actual results and operations to differ materially. Such uncertainties include but are not limited to the effects of ongoing economic regulations, possible changes in the demand for Telecom's products and services, the effects of potential changes in general market and/or economic conditions and in legislation. Our press release dated August 12, 2024, describes certain factors that may affect any forward-looking statements that could be mentioned during this call. The company has reflected the effects of the inflation adjustment adopted by Resolution 777/18 of the Comisión Nacional de Valores, or CNV, which establishes that the re-expression will be applied to the annual financial statements for intermediate and special periods ended results, including December 31, 2018. Accordingly, the reported figures corresponding to the first half of 2024 included the effects of the adoption of inflationary accounting in accordance with IAS 29. In this presentation, we will also include historical values, which are easier to understand. Our press release is complemented by our earnings presentation. Please read the disclaimer contained in Slide 1 and Slide 2 of this presentation. Today, we will go over our business and financial highlights and end the call with a Q&A session. Now let me pass the call to Gabriel, our CFO, who will start with the presentation.

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Thank you, Luis. Good morning, and welcome to everyone. Moving to Slide 3, it summarizes our highlights as of June 30, 2024. Our main operational and financial achievements were our EBITDA margin for the first 6 months of the year was 29.7%. Thanks to our effective cost management and pricing strategy, we were able to improve our margins on a year-over-year basis despite the challenging macroeconomic environment. In the first half of 2024, our CapEx was approximately $246 million, equivalent to 13% of our revenues. The current focus of our CapEx is on the expansion of our fixed and mobile access network, focusing on our fixed FTTH network and 5G in mobile. Due to the real appreciation of the peso observed during the first half of 2024, we registered a net income profit of ARS 859 billion, associated with real exchange differences gains included in our financial results. This is mostly generated by the effect of the macro variables over our debt in U.S. dollars. Our mobile subscriber base continues to grow, increasing over 3% year-over-year. Mobile usage of data, measured in average monthly gigabytes per user, has grown 18%. In broadband, our FTTH accesses keep growing rapidly. And during the last quarters, they have contributed to increasing our customer base, while our HFC network has remained mostly stable. Additionally, we have achieved a growth in broadband ARPU above inflation for the year-over-year period. Flow's unique customers reached almost 1.5 million, increasing 11% year-over-year. Additionally, our pay TV business continues to grow in Paraguay. Our fintech, Personal Pay, continues to grow, reaching almost 3 million onboarded clients as of June 2024 and achieving a relevant market position. During the first half of 2024, we registered a strong improvement in our financial net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, indicating a reduction of the relative leverage ratio and highlighting the company's strong resilience to FX depreciation. Finally, during July 2024, we returned to international debt capital markets with a successful issuance of our notes due 2031 for $500 million. Investor support for this transaction was very important as we reached a total amount of offers of over $1.3 billion, underlining the strong credit quality of the company. Additionally, we executed liability management transactions, a tender offer for our 2025 notes and an exchange offer for our 2026 notes. We will provide commentary afterwards. Slide 4 shows the company figures for 2024. Telecom's revenues totaled almost $1.83 billion. Revenues measured in constant pesos decreased 13% year-over-year, improving the trend registered during the previous quarter and registering growth in real terms of 5.6% quarter-over-quarter. Our EBITDA amounted to $543 million during the first half of 2024, while EBITDA margin increased 1.3 percentage points versus the same period of 2023. Telecom's mobile subscribers in Argentina amounted to 21.2 million, increasing more than 578,000 when compared to 2023. Broadband and pay TV clients totaled 4.1 million and 3.3 million, respectively. Fixed voice subscribers, considering IP telephony lines, amounted to 2.8 million during 2024. Our regional operations remain very solid. We are the second most important player in the mobile market in Paraguay and in the pay TV market in Uruguay, with 2.4 million and 117,000, respectively. Slide 5 shows our pricing strategy during 2024. The accumulated inflation in Argentina for the first half of 2024 was 79.7%, while year-over-year inflation as of June reached 272%. We continue to adjust prices on a monthly basis during the first half of 2024. Even in a context where year-over-year inflation remained high, we managed to have a positive evolution of our service revenues in real terms quarter-over-quarter, growing 3.5% above inflation versus the first quarter of 2024. Additionally, due to our successful pricing strategy, we have observed an important recovery of ARPUs in U.S. dollars in most segments, where broadband and fixed voice have reached growth above the levels as of June 2023. It is important to highlight that we are also focused on maximizing the stress that price adjustment rate over our subscriber base. In that sense, we also performed retention actions, mainly discounts and promotions granted to our clients. Slide 6 shows the evolution of our products. As mentioned before, our pricing strategy has yielded positive results in terms of the evolution of our subscriber base. In our mobile segment, we have observed a total increase of more than 578,000 subscribers, representing an increase of 2.8% year-over-year. This was mainly related to the good performance of our prepaid segment, where we registered a stronger customer recharge rate. We managed to increase our subscriber base for the seventh quarter in a row. Our postpaid participation over the total mobile subscribers is currently 38% of our total mobile customer base. In broadband, we have observed growth in FTTH accesses, while our HFC accesses remain relatively steady. Our broadband subscriber base has registered more increase year-over-year, while we are focusing on retaining our subscribers in a challenging economic and competitive environment. In turn, we have observed a reduction in xDSL accesses, which we are migrating to FTTH. FTTH currently represents 18% of our total subscriber base in broadband. In pay TV, our Flow platform continues to perform well, and our pay TV accesses have remained steady quarter-over-quarter. In the second quarter of 2024, Flow's unique customers reached almost 1.5 million, increasing by 141,000 total clients or 11% when compared to the same period in 2023. We observed a good performance for our Flow Flex product, which currently represents around 6% of our pay TV subscriber base. The pay TV subscriber base trend continues with a similar evolution as of the previous quarter with an improvement in terms of net adds as of the end of the second quarter. Our fixed voice segment continued to register a reduction in accesses, mainly in our traditional fixed copper network, which we are partially replacing with the new IP telephony accesses over our HFC and FTTH networks. Slide 7 shows the breakdown of our revenues. Service revenues totaled over ARS 1.3 trillion, decreasing 12% in real terms versus the first half of 2023, showing a 235% nominal increase mostly due to the price adjustment we performed. Our revenue breakdown as of June 2024 shows an increase in the participation of fixed and data services when compared to June 2023, mainly explained by the growth observed in data services in foreign currency, mostly corresponding to our B2B segment. During the first half of 2024, the participation of revenues in foreign currency, including our subsidiaries, constituted 20%. Mobile represents 40% of the revenues, while broadband and pay TV add up to almost another 40%. The rest is composed of fixed telephony and data revenues, representing 13% of our revenues, and equipment sales finally represent 6.8%. During this quarter, we have managed to increase our revenues in real terms versus the first quarter in our three most important segments: mobile, broadband, and pay TV, reaching growth of 4%, 9%, and 2%, respectively. Slide 8 shows our regional operations. Our operation in Paraguay continues with a good performance. We have 2.4 million mobile customers which have grown 5% year-over-year. Our fixed broadband and pay TV offering in that country also continues to show good results. Our broadband and pay TV subscribers amounted to 297,000 and 110,000 subscribers, growing 17% and 10% year-over-year, respectively. Personal Pay clients in Paraguay amounted to 291,000. This operation has a strong EBITDA margin of 54%, while remaining almost at level with a negative net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of minus 0.32x. Our operation in Uruguay is currently focused on pay TV, and we have 117,000 paying clients there. We see potential for growth in the local broadband market as we are obtaining licenses to offer services in certain locations in the country.

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

Thank you, Gabriel. Beyond our regional operations and core business, we are growing in the fintech business in Argentina through our digital wallet, Personal Pay, which currently accounts for more than 2.9 million onboarded clients. We launched this business in 2022, and in an industry with exponential growth, we already have a relevant market position. In this sense, as of June 2024, the total payment volume of Personal Pay has multiplied by 61 times while the total payment number has multiplied by 21 times in comparison with the figures as of June 2023. Moreover, as of June 2024, the digital wallet comes with funds invested from its clients in mutual funds for ARS 311 billion. This positions our fintech as the second most important in terms of clients' account balances in the market. On Slide 9, we provide an overview of our main financial figures. Consolidated revenues grew by 229% in nominal terms during 2024, reaching almost ARS 1.4 trillion. When analyzing the figure adjusted by inflation, revenues amounted to almost ARS 1.7 trillion, showing a decrease of 13% in real terms versus the same figure in 2023. We increased our prices, but we're also focused on maintaining our subscriber base. In this sense, the lag versus inflation in our revenues is explained by the effect of certain discounts and promotions we grant after price adjustments to retain our customers in a strong competitive environment. This lag has been reduced during this quarter as we achieved growth in our revenues in real terms quarter-over-quarter. EBITDA increased by 265% year-over-year in nominal terms, generating a nominal EBITDA margin of 32.2% during 2024. In turn, the EBITDA margin in real terms was almost 30%. In June of 2024, we reached the fifth quarter in a row maintaining or increasing our quarterly margin compared to the same period the year before. This is a good indicator that the pricing and cost management strategies are guiding us in the right direction. In this sense, we were successful in improving the operational profitability of the company.

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Slide 10 shows the evolution of EBITDA year-over-year and the impact of different components of revenues and costs. During the first half of 2024, the company was able to contain the pressure coming from inflation in most of the cost lines, which has contributed to generating an expansion of the EBITDA margin versus the same period of the previous year. The main expansion factors were the following: in terms of labor costs, we observed that on average during this half, salaries have increased below inflation. Salaries have started to decouple versus inflation since December 2023, and this has contributed positively to our EBITDA margin. We registered a good performance additionally in commissions and advertising costs, mostly due to a reduction of commercial relations and collections commissioning and to some other items such as flat debt, which has reduced from 2.5% of sales as of the first half of 2023 to 2.1% in the first half of 2024. Handset costs were also lower due to the lower quantity of devices sold. Slide 11 shows the company's net results and EBIT. Our EBIT increased in the first half of 2024 as we registered lower D&A expenses. The operating margin during the first half of 2024 was minus 3.7% of consolidated revenues, while in historical figures, the same margin was 25.6%. Due to the result of high inflation and stable FX during the first half of 2024, the company had a net income of ARS 859 million. These results are financially mentioned. A strong appreciation experienced by the peso on real terms during the first half generated positive results, mainly in connection with our financial debt denominated in foreign currency. This led to positive exchange differences in real terms, which amounted to ARS 1,400 million during the first half of 2024. Slide 12 displays a summary of the company's CapEx in PP&E and intangible assets during 2024, which amounted to almost ARS 225 billion or an equivalent of $246 million at the official FX rate. This amount is 2% lower when compared to the previous year in constant pesos. In turn, our consolidated amount of CapEx for the first half of 2024 represented 13.5% of our revenues, increasing versus the same period of the previous year. Technical CapEx was mainly composed of investments in our access network and technology, representing 49% of the CapEx during the first half of 2024. During the first half of 2024, 44 new mobile sites were deployed, and another 606 existing sites were upgraded. We are advancing in the rollout of 5G. We have over 100 5G sites working in the 3.5 GHz bands, and we expect to have 200 sites by the end of 2024. We are essentially adding 5G equipment to our existing sites with additional bandwidth to mainly populated cities of Argentina for our first stage of deployment. In our fixed access network, we increased the employment of new FTTH over 4,300 new blocks, including the overlay over our HFC network. We also improved the upstream capacity of our HFC network by 7,000 blocks. Approximately 40% of our CapEx for the first half of 2024 was allocated to installations and customer premise equipment, or CPE, which are installations and equipment in the homes of our clients, and 12% to our international operations. Slide 13 describes our cash flow generation during 2024 compared with the same period of 2023. Our cash flow generation remained robust, affected mostly by an increase in working capital needs due to the normalization of our commercial vendor financing after the restrictions to access the official FX market observed during 2023. The remaining components, measured in U.S. dollar terms, experienced little variation versus the first half of 2023. This is good news since the huge devaluation of the FX that occurred in December of 2023. Our cash flow generation before dividends and interest payments was equivalent to USD 151 million. Slide 14 shows key figures for 2024. A conversion to U.S. dollars is obtained by dividing the figures in constant pesos as of the end of each period, using the end of previous full effects for each year. Our gross debt amounted to $2.8 billion as of June 30, 2024. As of June 2024, the company holds cash and equivalents for $411 million. Thus, our net debt was about $2.4 billion. We have been and continue to reserve in U.S. dollars denominated in sovereign bonds, which were partially applied to cancel local short-term loans. EBITDA for the last 12 months as of June 30, 2024, using the aforementioned conversion method for figures invested in U.S. dollars, was equivalent to more than $1 million. The last 12 months of EBITDA as of June 2024 in U.S. dollars increased by 52% versus the same period as of December 2023. This important increase shows that the company has the ability to recover its operational profitability in U.S. dollars and that is resilient to FX depreciation. In Slide 15, we give more insight regarding the impact of the macroeconomic situation on our figures and net debt. After the huge devaluation that occurred by the end of 2023, our main figures, such as revenues and EBITDA, experienced a decrease when measured in U.S. dollars. Because of this, our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio temporarily increased. Thanks to our effective pricing policy and the FX stabilization, we have been able to increase our main figures measured in dollar terms. Our EBITDA for the last 12 months as of June 2024 was equivalent to almost $1.1 billion, where our net debt was $2.4 billion. In this sense, the net debt-to-EBITDA ratio as of June 2024 was 2.2x, practically in line with levels observed before the December 2023 devaluation. Slide 16 shows the breakdown of our financial debt. Our total outstanding debt principal as of June 2024 amounted to more than $2.7 billion. We currently have a very manageable maturity profile. We have access to the official exchange rate market for all of our maturities scheduled according to our current Central Bank regulations. In fact, on August 6, we made the scheduled amortization payments for our 2025 notes. This was one of our main cross-border maturities for the year, and the remainder maturities for this year are substantially low. In this sense, we expect to continue accessing the local capital markets for potential financing needs during this year as we have been doing lately. So now let me pass the call to Gabriel, who will continue with the presentation. Thank you, Luis. We present the summary of the liability management transactions we conducted during July and August and the impact of our maturity profile. The credit quality of the company was made clear through the issuance of our 2031 notes. We managed to issue a sizable U.S. dollar-denominated bond for $500 million with a yield below this 9.7% yield, with an interest coupon of 9.5%. In fact, investor support was high, and the total amount of the offering was about $1.3 billion. The main use of proceeds for this issuance will be the repayment of certain multilateral loans with ITV and IFC and the payment of the considerations for the tender offer of the 2025 notes. This means that the transaction will be debt-neutral and will significantly improve our maturity profile. Moreover, this transaction was launched in connection with two other liability management operations: a tender offer for our 2025 notes, which concluded with the principal amount tender in a post-amortization factor of $19.8 million. After having made the payment of the principal amortization on August 6 of $112.4 million, the remaining balance is outstanding. An exchange offer of our 2026 notes, tendered by the early participation date, affected foreign exchange $115.3 million. This reduces the amount of maturity for 2026 and extends them over 2029, 2030, and 2031. Additionally, we issued a local dollar-linked note for $81.3 million and $33.7 million with yields of almost 2.9% and 1.5%, respectively. This has contributed to extending our local short-term debt to a range of between 1.5 and 2 years with a very convenient cost of financing. All these operations taken together have yielded an improvement in terms of our maturity profile, and we estimate that we are extending the average life of our debt to 3 years, in addition to improving the total cost of our debt. Finally, in Slide 18, we conclude with some financial remarks and highlights for this period. We achieved an expansion of our EBITDA margin in a challenging context. We managed to grow our customer base in mobile and stabilize our broadband and pay-TV customer bases in a very competitive environment. Our fintech, Personal Pay, is currently a relevant market player with almost 3 million subscribers and the second most important player in terms of remunerated account balances. We have shown resiliency in terms of our business model with a strong recovery of topline and EBITDA figures despite high FX depreciation and inflation. The company's financial management continues to be on the right track. We have a solid and stable free cash flow generation before dividends and interest payments, generating between $400 million and higher than $500 million annually during the last years, considering ordinary CapEx for each year. Our cash position is strong and is mostly denominated in U.S. dollars, allowing us to lower peso volatility risk. Finally, through the liability management transaction we discussed, we improved our maturity cycle, extending the average life of our debt and improving our financing cost.

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

Thank you, Gabriel. We are now ready to take any questions you might have. Before we begin, we want to remind you that you can ask your questions during the Q&A session, which will start right away. We have a question from Marcelo Santos from JPMorgan.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst

I have two questions related to margins. The first is on the consolidated margins. When you look at the margin on a year-over-year basis, they had great expansion. However, when you look on a quarter-over-quarter basis, they declined a bit. I want to understand this better because this is the first quarter in which you post a sequential increase in real revenues for some time. I think it would be more natural to expect a bit of margin expansion, but are there some seasonal factors that somehow pressure margins? I just want to understand better. The second question is on Paraguay's margin. I think there was a strong year-over-year improvement in the margins, so I just wanted to understand better the factors that are driving this improvement.

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Starting with the first part of the question, I don't have a single answer. In fact, what happens is a mixture of different effects, Marcelo. Number one is that we have some type of seasonality. If you look at what happens to our margins on a yearly basis, you will see that typically, we start with margins on the upper part of the curve and then they slowly come down. That will be like the normal situation. In this case, on top of that, you have the effect of inflation that, during the period, has moved very differently. We started with a much higher inflation and the drop has been very significant. So the relative effect of this drop, remember what we always say regarding how the company behaves in a high inflation environment, and on the drop, that has helped a lot in terms of improving the margin. Also, you see a significant change between quarters because, during the first quarter, inflation was two digits, and in the second quarter, we had inflation of one digit, and currently, inflation continues to drop below even 5%. I don't think inflation will drop to 0. There is some resistance on core inflation, and it's more likely to stabilize in the 2% to 3% range. But we expect our margin generation to normalize from now until the end of the year. I understand that this has not been clear in the explanation regarding the fall. But I suggest if you want, we can do a separate call and dig into the details to provide you with a better understanding of what happened on a quarterly basis.

Roberto Nóbile, CEO

Thank you, Marcelo, for the question. This is Roberto. We accomplished several significant projects related to our back-end modernization by the end of last year. The implementation of the sales force was completed in December. We are beginning to see the benefits of consolidating our B2C customer interactions into a single site, a unified billing system, and a streamlined communication method. Digitalization has increased, with 60% of our contacts now processed through our own digital platform. As we boost digital interactions, we are reducing the hours we purchase from our contact centers. These changes are positively impacting our margins despite seasonal fluctuations. If we compare the first quarter of last year to this year's first quarter, in previous years we would typically raise prices in January, wait two or three months, and then start increasing again, which made the first quarter look much better. Since April 2023, we have been increasing prices monthly, so there is no longer a seasonal factor; the price adjustments are continuous. We are working to pass through inflation as swiftly as possible.

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Marcelo, can you please repeat the second part of the question?

Marcelo Santos, Analyst

The second part is Paraguay had a very nice margin increase on a year-over-year basis. I just wanted to understand what are the key elements driving this margin improvement?

Roberto Nóbile, CEO

What is driving the margins is the broadband business. We have achieved a 35% market share. We are still growing, and that is all new revenue streams adding to our P&L. Of course, this expands our EBITDA generation. Additionally, we have been able, on the mobile side, to compress costs and increase margins as well. So it's a mix between our stable mobile situation and the improvement in the FTTH business.

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

We are moving to the next question from Ernesto Gonzalez from Morgan Stanley.

Ernesto Gonzalez, Analyst

It's on your outlook for the second half. Could you discuss any resistance you expect from customers on potential price increases? Overall, any color you can provide on your expectations for the second half?

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Roberto, I don't know if you want to proceed, or I can answer that?

Roberto Nóbile, CEO

I can start if you want, and you can follow up. Sorry for the misunderstanding, but we are in different locations, which is why we are communicating online. July and August are very good months. I would say that they are on the same trend as the first half. We are working heavily on sizing the company. That is something you will probably see results from the next quarter. This means that we are preparing the company for 2025 to be in good shape for continued competition. On the revenue side, the slowdown of the inflation rate helps alleviate our customers' expectations. We also launched a new promotion that sets the price until the end of the year, calculated to give the customer enough visibility on what the price will be month by month, while also allowing us to keep increasing our ARPUs by the end of the year. We don't see customers slowing down their requests for promotions, which is a very good sign, and I think it will remain stable until the end of the year.

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

We will move to our next question from Lorena Reich from Lucror Analytics.

Lorena Reich, Analyst

My question is related to the previous one because it's on prices. Given the removal of the cap on price increases, what are your expectations for pricing increases going forward? Do you expect a positive impact on profitability because of that? Or do you see that, given the strong competitive environment in the industry, that may not happen? You've been doing a great job at reducing costs to maintain very good profitability despite the price cut. But with these news, do you see any changes going forward?

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Maybe, Lorena, there is some confusion. The legal front involving Decree 690, which was an intention of the past administration to regulate prices in the sector, has been declared null by the Supreme Court. However, this does not restrict the company's ability to raise prices as the legal measure that we took about two years ago has always allowed us to do so. Although the past administration intended to place some cap on price increases, it never actually impacted the industry comprehensively. What drives our pricing policy relates to the evolution of our portfolio. We have seen positive growth in mobile, and we maintain a stable portfolio on broadband and TV, with minor movements. We do not expect any significant change regarding price increases.

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

We will continue with another question from Mariano Andre from Clay Capital.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Two points I would like to clarify. One is when you mentioned the comparison of cash flows for the first half of 2023 versus the first half of 2024. If I'm not mistaken, you indicated that part of the variation was due to not accessing foreign capital. I don't know if I picked that up correctly, but could you clarify? The second point is, to what extent do you intend to do further liability management for the maturities of 2024, 2025, and 2026, which appear to be the heaviest commitments you have to honor?

Gabriel Blasi, CFO

Just to clarify, I am not quite sure if I understood properly the first part of the question, but I will do my best. Regarding restrictions, the previous administration established various types of restrictions on the foreign exchange market, which didn’t allow companies to pay for their imports. This resulted in commercial debt accumulating in Argentina as a whole. That debt was in the range of $35 billion. During the last part of last year, we began encountering restrictions to pay these imports as part of local systems. Fortunately, when this administration took office, they changed the rules in February, establishing a mechanism allowing the company to pay those creditors through the acquisition of specific bonds that were issued for that purpose, known as BOPREAL. The company utilized this system. We acquired these bonds with pesos, and at present, we have around $60 million of debt pending negotiation, while the original outstanding was $200 million. The situation is almost completely resolved, and we do not expect significant outcomes from this. This explained the most relevant variation of working capital that you see in our figures because of this. The second part of your question regarding liability management: the company has a very active position in terms of dealing with its debt. We aim to orderly change the structure of the debt to gain tenure and decrease costs, which is what happened. About one-third of our debt is multilateral, with different types of loans, all of them floating or pre-cancel loans. Another one-third is local debt issued during the last two years at negative real rates. We continue using that debt to leverage the surplus of pesos in the market. However, we cannot expect this situation to last forever since monetary policy will normalize. That’s why liability management was key, reducing maturities and managing debt more efficiently.

Luis Rial Ubago, Manager of Investor Relations

As we do not have any more questions, thank you very much for participating in our quarterly conference call. Please do not hesitate to contact Investor Relations for any further inquiries you may have. Good morning or good afternoon to all, and have a nice day.