Earnings Call Transcript - TIGO Q4 2021

Michel Morin, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Millicom's Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. I'm Michel Morin, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations at Millicom. And this event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO, Mauricio Ramos; and our CFO, Tim Pennington. And after their prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session. By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release, which is available on our website and along with the slides that we will be referencing during today's presentation. Now please turn to Slide 2 for our safe harbor disclosure. We will be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and could have a material impact on our results. We will also be referring to many non-IFRS metrics throughout the presentation, and we define these metrics on Slide 3, and you can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release and on our website. So with those legal disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to Mauricio Ramos, our CEO. Mauricio?

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Thanks, Michel. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We had another excellent quarter in Q4 and a strong finish to a solid year in 2021. So let's jump right in with the highlights for the year on Slide 5. First, 2021 was a year of continued strong customer growth across all our business lines and in all our countries; we saw strong demand and robust customer growth throughout the year, and this continued on in Q4. Second, we were able to convert that healthy customer growth into strong revenue and EBITDA growth of 7%, which gives us good momentum as we enter 2022. Third, in a year when we decided to invest to capture that growth, we delivered strong operating cash flow well ahead of our guidance for the year. And fourth and finally, we continue to raise the bar on ESG, which we will discuss later today and in more depth at our Investor Day this coming Monday. Let's look at the details beginning with our home customer growth on Slide 6. We now serve more than 4.1 million cable customers. We added a record 415,000 new customer relationships in 2021, and roughly 700,000 in the last 2 years. This customer growth in our home business over the past 2 years is even more significant when you consider that we are seeing better pricing, including charging for installation fees in many countries. Our home ARPU was up 2.5% organically in 2021. That's our strongest ARPU growth in the last 4 years. In fact, we have raised prices throughout the year in the vast majority of our markets. Now, turning to Mobile on the next slide. We had our strongest performance in years, adding more than 3 million subscribers, including more than 1 million in postpaid, which is consistent with our strategy to push postpaid in our markets. This is mostly due to our record performance in Colombia, but practically every country had a solid year in postpaid. Our customer base is up 22%. Finally, we saw steady growth in our B2B customer base throughout 2021, driven primarily by our SME client segment, which grew every quarter and ended the year up 16% year-on-year. On Slide 9, you can see how we've translated our customer position into strong service revenue and EBITDA growth of 6.7%. Every country and every business line reported positive growth for the year in 2021, with our home business leading the way with 10.9% growth. Now let's take a look at our performance in our largest countries, beginning on Slide 10 with Guatemala, which had yet another fantastic year. Guatemala provides a good example of a country where we have consistently invested in our network, in our brand, in our distribution, in our customers, and in our team, and the results speak for themselves. Over the past 2 years, we have made strategic spectrum purchases that have allowed us to drive our NPS scores higher and continue to add customers. In a country where 80% of our revenues come from mobile, we grew service revenue by 7% and EBITDA by 10%. As you can see on the next slide, we closed the year ahead of all the targets we set when we announced the acquisition of our minority partner's 45% stake back in November. Take good note of the numbers on this page, both on the left and right, because it is not every day that you see a telecom business with an EBITDA margin of more than 50% and an equity free cash flow margin of 30%, a business that we now own 100% of, and that continued to perform very strongly. Now let's take a look at Colombia on the next slide. As you can see, our customer intake was very strong and consistent throughout the year, and we had a monster year in postpaid with 800,000 net adds. It used to be that a good year for us in Colombia was around 100,000 postpaid net adds. We got 800,000 in 2021. As you can see on the bottom left, this customer growth is driving our top line, which is clearly reflective of mobile. That is starting to lift our EBITDA as the incremental revenue is now beginning to offset the higher customer acquisition costs that we have seen in currency since Q2 of this year. This sets us up for a solid 2022 in Colombia. Now let's look at Panama. You all know the story here. We bought 2 leading businesses, and our team did a hard job combining and integrating them throughout the pandemic. We have emerged as a clear leader in the Panamanian telecom market, with every part of our business growing along with an economy that is now recovering strongly. As you can see, our 3 largest countries performed very well in 2021, and we have entered 2022 with excellent momentum. Now let's shift gears a little to look at our operating cash flow. We told you at the very beginning of 2021 that we saw an opportunity to invest more than usual this past year to capture some additional growth that we saw in the market. And we did just that. We added record numbers of home and postpaid customers, and we sustained mid-single-digit service revenue growth, consistent with the long-term growth ambition that we had outlined before the pandemic. We also said we would deliver at least $1.4 billion, and we have come well ahead of that, even as we invested heavily to support our customer acquisition and as we near completion on some important mobile network projects that have been going on for a while. These investments now position us to sustain our strong momentum into 2022. Finally, 2021 was a watershed year for ESG agenda, and we continue to raise the bar in this area. We take our role as agents of positive change in the region very seriously. We want to raise the bar even further. So come next Monday, during our Investor Day, we will discuss the commitments we're making for the long term in our ESG agenda for the region. Let me now turn it over to Tim to provide the financials for the quarter.

Timothy Pennington, CFO

Thank you, Mauricio. Let me take you through the Q4 numbers, the balance sheet situation, and how we intend to report in 2022. So starting on Slide 16. This is just our usual bridge from the reported IFRS numbers for the quarter to the underlying numbers for LatAm service revenue and EBITDA, which better reflects the way we manage the group. With the consolidation of Guatemala, which took place midway through Q4, this will be the last time we report like this. In future, we will focus our attention on our IFRS results. But for this quarter, we will continue to discuss our performance for the LatAm segment as we've done in the past several quarters. So let's go to Slide 17. We reported positive year-on-year growth in every quarter of 2021. In Q4, we saw 5.7% organic growth. It was supported by a stable macro, remittances from the U.S. continued to be exceptionally strong and improved vaccination rates, which are now above 50% in several countries. Performance was driven by the home business, which was up 10% on last year, sustained by record net customer additions and improved penetration, which was up 200 basis points in HFC and stable ARPUs. There was another good performance from our consumer mobile business, maintaining a healthy 4.2% year-on-year growth, driven by subscriber growth. We're now just under 45 million customers and a more stable ARPU environment. Our consumer mobile business has already returned to pre-COVID levels, so the 4.2% growth we reported in Q4 is against the most challenging comparison of last year. This should give you a better sense of the strong momentum we saw during Q4, thanks in large part to the additional investments we've made in our mobile networks over the last couple of years. Finally, B2B delivered positive momentum, up 3.3% year-on-year, as the majority of our countries saw performance improvements. Now drilling down further on Slide 18 to service revenue performance by country. Once again, every country performed better in Q4 than they did a year ago. Standout performances were from El Salvador and Panama, whilst Colombia accelerated. El Salvador continues to sustain a very strong performance with all three business lines performing well. In Panama, this was the third consecutive quarter of growth. Mobile has been particularly strong over the last couple of quarters, and we saw double-digit growth in B2B, which is a strong sign that our B2B business is beginning to return to pre-COVID levels. In Colombia, our consumer mobile business accelerated to almost 13% year-on-year, driven by growth in postpaid mobile; we're now approaching 2.5 million postpaid customers in Colombia. We're starting to see this drive our ARPU higher, which increased sequentially for a second consecutive quarter. The strong mobile performance was the main factor driving the overall acceleration to 6.4% in this quarter. Guatemala, by contrast, had a quieter quarter. Q4 last year was exceptionally strong, so this was always going to be a tough act to follow. Looking at Guatemala for the full year, it has grown by 7.3% overall. I want to turn now to EBITDA on Slide 19. LatAm EBITDA of $617 million was down 2.7%, largely due to cost impacts. Direct costs were up due to bad debt returning to a more normal run rate compared to a year ago. Recall that bad debt charges last year were distorted by the impact of COVID. Our bad debt was $20 million higher this year. With respect to OpEx, ratios showed the strong customer growth, but this comes at a cost, largely reflected by higher commissions and costs linked to subscribers like content costs and network costs. In total, this added around $20 million to OpEx compared to last year. We also incurred an additional $8 million of corporate costs to support our Tigo Money investment; we see this level increasing to around $10 million per quarter in 2022, which will largely be reflected in corporate costs. Looking closely at EBITDA performance by country on Slide 20 shows a mixed picture, as the factors I've just explained on the previous slide had differing impacts at the country level. Starting with Panama, I'm very pleased to report a strong result, up 19%, revenue-driven, but also with strong cost control, especially in the second half of the year. Elsewhere, Guatemala, Bolivia, Honduras, and Colombia were affected by the bad debt normalization I referred to earlier; additionally, Colombia was affected by higher network maintenance costs. Guatemala was also impacted by lower margins on handsets, which were more expensive due to the global chip shortage and the growth in customers putting pressure on our network costs. In Honduras, strong subscriber growth in the fourth quarter contributed to higher sales and marketing costs. It was also affected by higher electricity costs, dampening the EBITDA performance. Finally, Paraguay saw a decrease driven by higher costs on commercial activity, particularly a new exclusive soccer contract and in MFS. Moving to Slide 21, you can see how our operating cash flow, that is our EBITDA less CapEx, compared to the previous year. We added $129 million to our EBITDA, but as Mauricio has already explained, we decided to invest our EBITDA growth into higher CapEx, largely as a catch-up on the lower investments in 2020 and to take advantage of the opportunities that Mauricio outlined. As a result, OCF was 2.6% lower at just over $1.45 billion, but this was still well ahead of the guidance we gave. Finally, let me close on the leverage situation. The major transaction in the quarter was, of course, the acquisition of the remaining 45% in Guatemala for $2.2 billion. This is the reason net debt is $1.7 billion higher than it was a year ago, closing the year with just over $7 billion in net debt and $8.3 billion if we include leases. We have also been active in the debt markets, rebalancing our maturity profile with the bond announced on the 28th of January. We have largely concluded the refinancing of the bridge loan. This yields a proportionate net debt to EBITDA of 3.36x at year-end, which, pro forma for the upcoming $750 million rights issue, would reduce to just over 3x, lower than the 3.1x we indicated at the time of the deal. Talking of rights issues, at this point, we would normally give our outlook for the year. But because of the rights issue, we have some legal constraints and can't comment specifically on 2022. What I can share with you is that we are targeting organic OCF growth of around 10% on average over the next 3 years. We will provide more detail about our medium-term plans at the Capital Markets Day on Monday. With that, let me pass it back to Mauricio to wrap up.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Thank you, Tim. Before we take your questions, let me recap the key highlights of the year. We had one of our best years ever in terms of customer intake. We added more than 3 million mobile subscribers, 1 million of them in postpaid, and 415,000 net additions to our home cable fiber business. Service revenue and EBITDA grew strongly, both up 7%, and in a year in which we chose to invest in the business, operating cash flow came in well ahead of our target. Finally, we completed the acquisition of our minority partner in Guatemala in a transaction that was immediately accretive to our cash flow and to our net income, which will make it easier for us and for you to model and value our business, as you will see beginning with our Q1 reporting in April. With that, we're ready for your questions.

Michel Morin, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations

Thanks, Mauricio. We will now proceed with the Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question, please e-mail us at investors@millicom.com, and we will add you to the queue. You may also e-mail us your question and we will answer it live. We'll now go to Diego Aragao from Goldman Sachs. Diego? Just give it a second to team up.

Diego Aragao, Analyst

Yes. So look, my first question is on the leverage. This should be at around 3x EBITDA adjusted for the future rights offering, as mentioned by Tim. I wonder if you can comment on your expectation for leverage, for instance, what will be a sustainable level for your business? And how long will it take for you to get there?

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Diego, that's a great question. I have the luxury of having 2 CFOs. One thing I'm not going to do is take the leverage question today, Diego. Let them figure out who's going to take it. I just want to ensure everybody meets Sheldon to my left. He is the new guy in town. You will see a lot of him on Monday because they see him hitting the ground running, and he can answer just about any question that you can throw at him. He's only getting Tim's help today just because he's in the apprentice seat for a little while. So you’ll have to figure out who's going to take the leverage question.

Timothy Pennington, CFO

Okay. I'll start because then Sheldon can sort of correct anything I say. Look, I mean, we've been very focused on leverage, and I'm very pleased that, on a pro forma basis, we are just a fraction above 3% at the year-end. We said that we are going to be below 3% by the end of 2022. In fact, on Monday, we're going to target 2.5x by 2025. We should be in that ballpark. But Diego, I don't want you to misunderstand. We're still targeting that 2x leverage target, which we believe is the right operating level for us.

Diego Aragao, Analyst

Great. I guess maybe the second question and first, nice to meet you. Looking forward to seeing you in person. So the second question is regarding Colombia, versus performance in that market despite growing competition. I'd like to get your views on the outlook for the market, especially because theoretically speaking, competition should continue to be tough in that market considering recent transactions from KKR with Telefonica and comments from America Moto about their expectations for Colombia. It would be great to hear your thoughts on that market in particular.

Mauricio Ramos, CEO

Yes. Thank you, Diego, for that. You'll see a lot more on Monday, but we like the decision we're in Colombia for the long term. We hold the largest amount of 700 MHz spectrum, which is strategically very relevant. We're employing it with a network that has been externally evaluated as the best network in just about every category in the country for the second consecutive year. With that, we've increased distribution and service layers throughout the organization. We've invested heavily in our commercial capabilities and have continued to deploy our fiber cable network in Colombia, which has been very successful. This gives us the ability to offload mobile data to WiFi. So when looking at the strategic picture in Colombia, yes, it's competitive, and yes, Telefonica has partnered with KKR, but we sit strategically 1 million times better than where we were 2 years ago. It's a very strong position. The thing that has to change is that, previously, I was saying, listen, it's common. We're going to win. Today, you have several quarters of numbers that are truly coming our way. We have now achieved almost 1 million postpaid net adds in Colombia, 800,000 of them this year. Our market share has increased by 200-300 basis points just this year. In the context of a mobile market that indeed is competitive and has seen prices come down, our revenue is overall increasing. Competition on price and quantity is actually up. We anticipated an inflection point and, indeed, we're beginning to see that. It was in Colombia, and I said that it was coming out of what will be Q4, Q1, and you already see it in Q4 with a clear uptick in revenue, positively affecting our EBITDA. With much of the network build-up behind us, OCF is also showing improvement in Colombia. For the first time ever, we now have mobile market share that is...