Earnings Call Transcript - TV Q2 2024

Operator, Operator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Grupo Televisa's Second Quarter 2024 Conference Call. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the press release which explains the use of forward-looking statements and applies to everything that we discuss in today's call and in the earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Grupo Televisa. Please go ahead, sir.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Thank you, Elsa. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky; and Carlos Phillips, CFO of Grupo Televisa. Before discussing our second quarter operating and financial performance, let me remind you of the key corporate goals and strategic pillars Bernardo and I outlined for Grupo Televisa and TelevisaUnivision since the beginning of the year and the progress we have achieved so far. First, the corporate restructuring process at our Cable segment, led by Francisco Valim, intends to improve profitability, optimize CapEx, increase free cash flow generation, and position us well to achieve sustainable revenue growth over the coming years. The key measures implemented so far have already allowed us to improve profitability by almost 400 basis points relative to the third quarter of 2023, and we are confident that our EBITDA margin will continue to expand gradually over the coming quarters due to ongoing efficiencies. Moreover, during the first half of the year, operating cash flow for our Cable segment, which is equivalent to EBITDA minus CapEx, was over MXN 6.4 billion, growing by almost 50% year-on-year and accounting for around 27% of sales. This implies that the operating cash flow margin of our Cable segment has increased by close to 1,000 basis points so far this year. The second half of the year is expected to be heavier in terms of CapEx deployment, but we are cutting our 2024 CapEx budget for our Cable segment to $590 million, including $30 million for the reconstruction of our network in Acapulco, which we expect to be reimbursed by the insurance company. Therefore, we estimate that the organic operating cash flow for our Cable segment will increase by around 16% year-on-year in 2024. The second pillar is the acquisition of AT&T's minority stake in Sky, which we accomplished on very attractive terms to integrate it with our Cable segment and materially strengthen our competitive and financial position of the combined company. On this front, we have already implemented a new organizational structure for the combined company that allowed us to retain top talent and optimize duplicated roles. We have also started to implement synergies and efficiencies across several areas, including commercial, sales commissions, programming, IT, technology, finance, and marketing, among others. This integration will also allow us to standardize regions, sales channels and commissions, have better customer base management, increase productivity, achieve cross-selling and upselling, and improve penetration of triple-play services, reducing churn. It will also allow us to leverage Sky's exclusive sporting content in Cable, further differentiating our video package from those of our competitors. Evidence of this is that for the first time, we already offered the Euro Cup 2024 to both our Sky and izzi video customers. All in all, we are confident that our restructuring and integration process, most of which already occurred in the second quarter of this year, will allow us to deliver OpEx savings of approximately MXN 400 million in the third quarter relative to the first quarter of 2024. Longer term, we continue to forecast savings of around 15% of Sky's combined annual OpEx and CapEx. The third pillar is related to the conclusion of the spin-off of Ollamani and its listing on the Mexican Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol AGUILAS.CPO on February 20th. This spin-off was not only intended to streamline Grupo Televisa's operations and simplify our asset structure, but also to unlock value for our shareholders through this new company that currently has a market cap of around $330 million. Under Grupo Televisa's umbrella, we estimate the value assigned to the Ollamani assets was significantly lower. Our fourth pillar is to turn our direct-to-consumer business ViX profitable during the second half of this year. Our DTC business is growing and scaling, and our most important metrics kept trending in the right direction, with most of them ahead of plan. We added users and subscribers, grew engagement, reduced churn, and generated significant marketing savings driven by our efficient customer acquisition funnel through our free tier. Therefore, we are confident that we are on track to deliver the major milestone of a profitable DTC business in the second half of this year, only two years after launching the service, compared to four to five years from our peers. Having said that, let me turn the call over to Valim as he will discuss the operating and financial performance of our consolidated assets.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

Thank you, Alfonso. Good morning, everyone. First, let me walk you through the operating performance of our Cable operations. We ended June with a network of 20 million homes after passing around 71,000 new homes during the quarter. In the second quarter, we continued to execute our strategy to focus on value customers rather than volume, while working on customer retention and satisfaction. However, price increases implemented in the month of April led us to experience a short-lived increase in churn, leading our second quarter broadband net adds to remain sequentially stable at 10,700. In video, we disconnected 65,600 subscribers during the quarter as in April, we canceled the video package called Afizzionados. Over the coming quarters, we expect to gradually deliver stronger net adds as we keep focusing on churn reduction. During the quarter, net revenue from our residential operations decreased by 3.8% year-on-year, as our subscriber base was 5.7% lower due to the cleanup that we did in the third quarter of 2023. We lost some revenue due to the cancellations of the Afizzionados video package and because of the ongoing negative impact from Hurricane Otis in Acapulco, given that a still relevant amount of our customers are not paying their bills yet. On the other hand, net revenue from our enterprise operations increased by 4.4% year-on-year. Now, let me walk you through Sky's operating performance. During the second quarter, Sky's product portfolio was under review from the content and pricing standpoint, translating into softer commercial activity. Therefore, we lost 262,000 revenue-generating units, mostly coming from prepaid subscribers that had not been recharging their service. However, we expect the integration with our Cable segment to gradually contribute to reduced churn, driven by better customer base management and cross-selling and upselling opportunities. Sky's second quarter revenue of MXN 3.9 billion fell by 13.3% year-on-year, accelerating from the 12.3% revenue decline experienced in the first quarter, mainly driven by the softer commercial activity. Still, during the second half of the year, we are looking to reactivate our commercial strategy, particularly after integrating our product portfolio, commercial regions, and sales channels. To sum up, segment revenue of MXN 15.8 billion fell by 5.8% year-on-year, while operating segment income of MXN 6.0 billion declined by 7.7%. Our operating segment income margin of 37.7% contracted by 80 basis points year-on-year, mainly driven by inflationary pressures in labor and content-related costs, but expanded by 90 basis points sequentially due to the ongoing efficiency measures that we have been implementing since the third quarter of 2023. Regarding CapEx deployment, our total investments of MXN 1.8 billion during the second quarter fell by 51.1% year-on-year. So, our CapEx to sales ratio of 11.2% was over 1,000 basis points lower than that of the second quarter of 2023. Finally, operating cash flow for Cable and Sky, which is equivalent to EBITDA minus CapEx, was MXN 4.2 billion in the second quarter, increasing by 37.8% year-on-year and accounting for 26.6% of sales. This basically means that our operating cash flow margin increased by 840 basis points year-on-year. During the first half of 2024, we have invested around $220 million, equivalent to a CapEx-to-sales ratio of 12%. This amount represents less than 28% of our 2024 CapEx budget disclosed at the beginning of the year. A more efficient CapEx deployment focused on higher investment returns leads us to feel confident that our CapEx requirements for the full year will be significantly lower. So, we are cutting our 2024 CapEx budget to $720 million, including $590 million in Cable with $30 million for the reconstruction of the network in Acapulco, which we expect to be reimbursed by the insurance company, $120 million in Sky, and $10 million for corporate purposes.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Thank you, Valim. Valim has been with us for less than a year and is doing an amazing job. Now, let me walk you through TelevisaUnivision's second quarter results released yesterday morning. The company delivered another quarter of top-line growth with revenue of around $1.3 billion increasing by 3% year-on-year, while EBITDA of $362 million declined by 3%, but showing solid improvement over the first quarter as we move towards consolidated EBITDA growth, including profitability in our direct-to-consumer business in the second half of this year. From an operating standpoint, we achieved several milestones during the second quarter. First, in the second part of the quarter, we improved our competitive position on linear in the US as we aired two major international soccer tournaments, Copa America and Euro Cup. Second, we made progress bringing new advertisers to our platform in the US, helping them understand and embrace the power of our massive and overlooked audience and unique reach. Third, our programmatic and product placement capabilities tied to our leading share of audience in Mexico have been allowing us to consistently outperform the market in terms of advertising revenue growth. And fourth, in our DTC business, all our major KPIs are trending in the right direction, with most of them ahead of plan, positioning us extremely well to deliver sustainable DTC profitability in the second half of this year, an unprecedented timeline for only two years after launching the service, driven by a superior economic model and relentless execution. Moving on to the details of our revenue performance. During the quarter, revenue growth at TelevisaUnivision was driven by a solid increase in consolidated advertising revenue of 6%, partially offset by a slight decline in consolidated subscription and licensing revenue of 2%. Consolidated advertising revenue increased by 6% year-on-year, mainly driven by the strength of our DTC business and our solid performance in Mexico. Our audience for ViX's advertising video-on-demand, or AVOD, tier continued to grow, exceeding the 50 million monthly active users milestone, while generating nearly 50% growth in total streaming hours, far outpacing the growth in users. While we are already monetizing these users through ads, we also have a cost-effective funnel to upsell ViX's subscription video-on-demand tier, which is great and has a much lower SAC. In the US, advertising revenue was 2% higher as very strong growth in DTC was offset by some softness in our linear networks. In DTC, we delivered remarkable growth as we were very efficient in monetizing the significantly higher monthly active user base and engagement on ViX with strong sell-through rates of around 90% and material CPM premiums to linear. At our linear networks business, our results were mixed. We saw strength in sports as we aired the two major international soccer tournaments I mentioned before, which delivered very strong ratings in the second part of the quarter. Still, we experienced softness in the CPG, tech, and pharma categories along with some pressure from ratings declines during the first part of the quarter that were not fully offset by price. In Mexico, advertising revenue growth of 13% year-on-year was partially driven by the appreciation of the Mexican peso and because starting this year we acquired some third-party ad inventory, which contributed with 500 basis points of growth that will be accretive to the bottom line. In Mexico, the public sector continued to be impacted by advertising restrictions ahead of the Presidential elections in June. However, this was offset by strength from private sector advertising as recurring clients increased spending. Moreover, we delivered strong advertising revenue growth in our DTC business, supported by the material increase in our monthly active user base and engagement on ViX as well as our programmatic capabilities. FX-neutral advertising revenue in Mexico increased by 10% year-on-year, which is an amazing result. Consolidated subscription and licensing revenue decreased by 2% as very robust growth from ViX's subscription video-on-demand tier was offset by linear subscription revenue declines both in Mexico and in the US. ViX's subscription video-on-demand tier performed exceptionally well this quarter and was a strong growth contributor. The increase in subscribers accelerated and was driven by the direct sales channels, which are higher ARPU subs coming to us with high intent given the appeal of the content we're producing. We closed the second quarter with 8.4 million subscribers. In the US, subscription and licensing revenue fell by 1%, while in Mexico the decline of 3% was partially offset by the appreciation of the Mexican peso. FX-neutral, subscription and licensing revenue in Mexico decreased by 5% year-on-year. Looking ahead, we're making progress towards closing our US upfront at a pace in line with the industry. Early data indicates that this could be the fourth consecutive year in which we outperform the industry and capture market share from English-language broadcasters. Going into this year's upfront, our main strategic priority was to transition advertisers to Nielsen's Panel + Big Data measurement methodology. Moving in this direction is very important for us strategically, not only because its benefits will permeate throughout our businesses over time, impacting both the current scatter market and our future upfronts, but because it is the right way to appropriately measure all audiences. To sum up, the strong KPI performance achieved at our DTC business has allowed us to deliver robust revenue growth and has positioned us extremely well to deliver sustainable DTC profitability in the second half of this year. Moreover, we are confident that our record political year from an ads sales perspective will materially boost our top-line growth during the second half of this year. This should then return our company back to consolidated EBITDA growth for the full year and allow us to continue to focus on strengthening our balance sheet through organic deleveraging and by extending and smoothing out our maturities. To wrap up, Bernardo and I are confident that the strategy to streamline our operations and simplify our asset structure at Grupo Televisa, and the execution of our digital transformation strategy at TelevisaUnivision will allow us to improve our operating and financial performance in 2024. At Grupo Televisa, we are glad that we unlocked significant value for our shareholders through a spin-off of Ollamani, and now we're laser-focused on integrating Sky with our Cable segment, streamlining our combined operations, strengthening our competitive position and enhancing free cash flow generation. So far this year, our free cash flow conversion has improved considerably and a more efficient CapEx deployment focused on higher investment returns leads us to feel confident that free cash flow generation for the full year will be strong. And at TelevisaUnivision, we're very excited about the prospects for the second half of 2024. Our DTC business is growing and scaling, and our most important metrics kept trending in the right direction with most of them ahead of plan. We added users and subscribers, grew engagement, reduced churn, and generated significant marketing savings driven by our efficient customer acquisition funnel through our free tier. We also expect to get a fair share of political advertising in this cycle. Looking forward, we have very clear objectives in place: a profitable DTC business in the second half of the year and to end 2024 with a reduction in leverage. Now, we are ready to take your questions. Elsa, could you please provide instructions for the Q&A?

Vitor Tomita, Analyst

Hello. Good morning, and thanks for taking our questions. Two questions from our side. The first one is if you could give us some more detail on how much the Afizzionados discontinuation and the Acapulco situation impacted MSO revenue this quarter? And our second question would be more on the debt. If you could give us some color on how you think about your debt exposure to the US dollar from a strategic standpoint and how you think about hedging strategy around that debt? Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Thank you, Vitor, for your questions. I'll ask Francisco Valim to answer your first question that has to do with Afizzionados and Acapulco, and I'll ask Carlos Phillips to answer the second one that is related to our hedging strategy.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

The Afizzionados product accounted for about 1% of our revenue but was contributing significantly to negative EBITDA. We decided to discontinue the product since we no longer held any sports rights. From July onwards, Afizzionados would only incur costs with minimal content, particularly because our agreement with ViX offers us all the content we previously had and more. Discontinuing it was beneficial for our margins, although it did have a slight impact on revenues. Regarding Acapulco, in the past six months after the hurricane, we have established a complete fiber network that covers the entire city. However, the city has not yet fully recovered, especially in the affluent area of Punta Diamante, where buildings are being rebuilt. We are maintaining relationships with thousands of subscribers there by charging them a reduced fee to ensure customer retention, as they cannot pay the full price while their buildings are under renovation. We anticipate that by the end of the year, we will see an increase in clients in Acapulco as the reconstruction progresses.

Carlos Phillips, CFO

In response to your question about our exposure to US dollars in our debt, over 60% of our debt is fixed-rate and dollar-denominated. On our balance sheet, we maintain a significant cash balance, with more than 60% of it also in dollars. Furthermore, we have a substantial investment in TelevisaUnivision, which we view as a valuable dollar-denominated asset. Regarding cash flow exposure, we consistently use basic hedging instruments to manage our dollar exposure on a rolling basis. For this year, we have fully covered our dollar exposures, and we are nearly halfway covered for 2025, considering both our coupon interest payments and a portion of our dollar-denominated capital expenditures. Additionally, our upcoming dollar-denominated bond maturities in 2025 and 2026 are fully hedged into pesos. This summarizes our perspective on both the balance sheet and cash flow exposure to US dollars.

Vitor Tomita, Analyst

Very clear. Thank you both very much.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I have two as well. The first is a question on the competitive environment. I mean, is the fact that Telmex is not increasing prices going to become a competitive issue? Could this start affecting your net adds for the future? And the second question is behind the CapEx cut. I think you also cut CapEx on Sky and corporate, right? This is the number I had here was higher for both. So, what is the main driver? Is this mostly related to lower subscriber adds, or you're also reducing something on the maintenance or the deployment? Just wanted to deep dive a bit more on the CapEx reduction. Thank you very much.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Thank you, Marcelo. Francisco, can you take the...

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

Sure. We mainly focused on clients who have a video offer, and nearly 60% of our new adds come from those clients. For customers who only use the Internet, we provide them with ViX, reaching almost all our new clients. When comparing the prices, Telmex charges $389 for their services while we charge $450. When you factor in ViX, our offerings become quite comparable, so we don’t see this as a significant barrier in the current price range. We're also well aligned with other market players regarding promotions and price lists. Regarding our capital expenditures, we've made significant progress. By consolidating Sky and certain operations at the holding level, we've reduced the number of licenses we need, such as Oracle and SAP. This optimization allows us to avoid paying for the same service multiple times. The reductions reflected in our recent performance are primarily from the last six months, with more focus on the second quarter. Our network deployment remains consistent, aiming to finish the year with between 600,000 and 700,000 new homes passed. This increase in homes passed directly drives our capital expenditures, as we are cutting back on less essential expenses due to synergies we've created. For instance, we have reduced our workforce by over 5,000 compared to last year, impacting costs across the organization, including Microsoft licenses. We continue to invest in areas that require investment, specifically targeting 350,000 to 400,000 new sales each quarter, which remains unchanged. June was a strong month, and July looks promising as well.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Yeah. So, expanding on what Valim is saying, first of all, he has done an amazing job in the year that he has been with us. Second, I would say that most of our CapEx is sales-related, as he was saying. Therefore, if we maintain subscriber growth additions at a reasonable level, which we are on target of obtaining, and then further reduce churn, we should be able to have low-single-digit subscriber base growth in the medium term with less capital intensity. So, having said this, we believe CapEx-to-sales should be around 20% going forward. And in 2023, CapEx-to-sales already declined to 23% from almost 27% in 2022. So, we're on track to achieving that goal.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst

Perfect. Just to follow up on the homes passed expansion. I think you added something around less than 200,000 in the first half of the year.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

This is how telecom companies typically operate. We approve the budget and start deploying. It will build up through the end of the year. By the end of this quarter, we should be very close to 300,000.

Carlos de Legarreta, Analyst

Hi. Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for taking the questions.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Sorry. Carlos, sorry, we can't hear anything.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

Yeah. If you need to send a question, please, you can text it to Rodrigo and then we can...

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Yeah, because we couldn't understand any.

Carlos Phillips, CFO

Pick up the phone, Carlos.

Carlos de Legarreta, Analyst

Can you hear us better now?

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

Yeah.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Yeah.

Carlos de Legarreta, Analyst

All right. Thank you. So, after streamlining Sky and Cable, what sort of operating cash flow margin are you targeting in the medium term, let's say, 2025? And secondly, can you give us a sense as to what proportion of your existing broadband subscribers are also ViX VOD users? Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Our target for the operating cash flow margin is 20%. This is our goal. As I've mentioned before, we are on the right track to achieve a 20% operating cash flow margin. Regarding your second question...

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

In terms of operating expenses, we are aiming for MXN 400 million each quarter. So, over four quarters, that totals approximately MXN 1.6 billion, or MXN 1.7 billion for the full year. Regarding ViX, the majority of our clients currently have access to ViX, which is included in every package with speeds of 60 megabits per second and higher.

Carlos de Legarreta, Analyst

Okay. And can you repeat the comment, Francisco, on the OpEx, please?

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky

Yes. We are estimating now for the next couple of quarters, MXN 400 million per quarter. And so if you do the math on a yearly basis, if you analyze that, you should be seeing something between MXN 1.6 billion, MXN 1.7 billion in terms of savings regarding the synergies with Sky.

Carlos de Legarreta, Analyst

Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think that's, in fact, in line with what you said before. So, I appreciate that. And just to confirm the CapEx guidance, if you don't mind. It's $720 million, the whole budget. And by the breakdown, it's $590 million for Cable, including $30 million for Acapulco, $125 million in corporate?

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Francisco and the entire company are becoming much more efficient with CapEx deployment. As I mentioned earlier, our CapEx requirements for the year will be significantly lower, and we are reducing our 2024 CapEx budget to $720 million. This includes $590 million for Cable, which encompasses $30 million for the reconstruction of Acapulco, the costs of which we expect to be reimbursed by the insurance company, as well as $120 million for Sky and $10 million for corporate purposes.

Carlos de Legarreta, Analyst

Thank you, Alfonso. Just want to double-check that. I appreciate it.

Operator, Operator

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. The next question comes from someone with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst, Analyst

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. I have two here. The first one is a follow-up on the competitive environment. So, you mentioned that your offer for Cable is already in line with competition when you consider ViX and its value added. So, now looking for the future, how do you think about the potential for price hikes? Do you think it's likely you will be able to do it in the short term or not if it continues to be hard to have price hikes in the sector? And then the second one, are there any other product lines that you see that may be discontinued in the coming quarters like Afizzionados, or was that something a one-off and something specific that should not happen anymore? So those are my questions. Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-CEO

Well, thank you very much for participating in our call. We're very excited about the prospects that we see in the business. We have moved a long way and we're very happy with what we're seeing for the near future. Enjoy your summer. If you have any additional questions, please call us.

Operator, Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.