Advanced Info Service Public Company Limited (ADVANC) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. We will start now. So welcome to our 2024 Analyst Meeting, the strategic direction. So for participants in Zoom, please choose English room, if you want to listen in English. And if you want to listen in Thai language, you can choose Thai room. And we have a translator online for your convenience. The presentation is ready, and you can download with the QR code as shown on the presentation. Today, we have an honor of the following executives Khun Somchai, our CEO; Khun Mark Chong, our deputy CEO; Khun Montri, our CFO. We have Khun Tee, our CEO Broadband; and Khun Nattiya, our Head of Investor Relations and Compliance. Myself, Somruetai will be facilitating this session. The session will be as follows. So we will start with Khun Somchai, talking about the highlights of last year and also 2024 forward -- way forward-looking. Next, Khun Mark would be talking about 2024 strategic direction. And lastly, we have Khun Montri to tell us about how we deliver the values amid the challenges. So first, let me -- please help me warm welcome Khun Somchai.

Good afternoon all the investors and analysts. On behalf of AIS, I would like to welcome you to this analyst meeting. As Khun [ Somruetai ] had already mentioned, I am going to talk about 2023 highlights and the way forward in 2024. And what I would like to briefly say about the past year of 2023, that we think. The first one, you will know that we are trying to scale up, and we are trying to have our core business stable, and you can note that we have 2 big movements in mobile and fixed broadband. The first one is NT 700-megahertz partnership, and we have the mobile operators that cover -- have the widest coverage. And with this, we are able to invest in 5G 700, and that's actually increased our coverage and efficiency. And we have NT who will help us in planning for our 5G and that would actually drive us forward. And secondly, in the long term in our business, we talk about the frequencies -- the 100 megahertz that we have. We want 20 megahertz since the last auction, but we couldn't auction it. And so with this, we were able to gain 5 megahertz from NT and at a cheaper cost in the past few years. And so this is the way that we will establish our stable business. And secondly, 3BB acquisition. This will allow us to have fixed broadband, which is -- they are the last player, and we would be able to ensure the mobile technology, and it will allow us to integrate our base into the fixed broadband in the -- with the 3BB customers as well. And in terms of technology return, we know that we have 12% net profit, although the economy last year was not so good and as expected by NESDC, but we were able to grow 12% -- and we also have a dividend payout of 88%. And a lot of analysts asked me if we would change our policy on dividend, but we will not do. So we will pay at least 70% of our dividend payout. And so please don't ask this question again and we will pay as much dividend as we can or it can be used as cash flow for future investment. And importantly, we also plan for the future. We have launched the new version of myAIS, and we have the points and privilege ecosystem. Last year, we have launched a new version, but it will take 2 to 3 years for our AIS app to be a super app. And if we can do that, we can actually reduce the cost and we can actually create good customer experience, and these are the highlights for the last year. In terms of 2024, which is this year, we have 4 or 5 factors that will happen. We believe that the economy this year will be better than that of last year. NESDC estimated the growth to be 3% or 4%, which is going to be better than last year. And the second thing is that we believe that 5G ecosystem will be more and ready, and we talked about 5G investment, our competition is also investing in this. There's no use case yet, but we see nowadays, and we have applications like AI or Apple Vision Pro, and I believe that there would be good use case from this year onwards. And also, we will see digital transformation and also ESG trends that we will see and this is actually in line with the [ strategization ] of AIS. And so this year, we think that these 4 things will definitely happen. And for AIS, this is not a new thing for you. I believe that we will grow according to the AIS ecosystem economy. We will do sharing economy. And this is the 3-piece model, which you may have heard I said before, and we will do 3 things in our business. The first one is digital infrastructure. That means that the business, be it mobile, fixed broadband or enterprise, we will create a strong digital infrastructure. In order to become a leader, we have to have good network, good infrastructure. We will actually build it to autonomous network and so on. And this is actually the business as usual that we do. But what additional things that we will be doing is cross industry collaboration. I said the word ecosystem, what is it? Today, AIS, we are building our business, and we grow according to the GDP and if we can actually utilize our data and can cross collaborate with other industries and cross-sell other products that will be helping other industry to grow as well. And secondly, we will have a market share from that part as well. And that's what we emphasize on in this part, the cross-industry collaboration. And if we can do this stably and strongly will have a new stream of revenue coming in. And the third thing is, although AIS is strong, and we can actually help our partners to become strong. Everyone is growing. But if the environment and society is not good, our partner business will not be able to grow as well. And so we focus on creating people and sustainability, and that's the core that AIS has played out. And how do we do this? So I'm going to show you this. Three years from now, 2024, '25, '26, we will build this house and you can see these 2, 3 important things. And the first one is we want to be a customer-centric company that focus -- more focused mainly on customer. And our customer is divided into 3 groups, individual, home and enterprise or business. And this is the first part. And under these 3 groups, we will have a foundation like house pillars that can serve these group of customers. We have mobile, fixed broadband, enterprise solutions and digital solutions as well and what can actually generate a lot of revenue for us is on content and games and maybe the scale is not that big now, maybe about just THB 1 billion, but it can still generate revenue for us. With this, you can see that we are actually generating profit from games and content, and we started to see profit in this part and we tried to expand our digital solutions as well. These are the 4 main pillars. And the other thing is ecosystem. We are trying to partner cross -- which I mentioned about cross-industry collaboration. This is not easy things to do so. It may take like 3 years. And so we will try to ensure that our customers can actually access other products, and that's a new source of revenues that we will be gaining. And under this, we would have a foundation to support all these. I have already said it. I said that we have to have a strong IT platform, we have to have a different network, and we have to have capacity and network has to be smart enough. And when we talk about data, it has to be smart data. And also, we focus on people as well. And this is the new foundation that we came up with. And so the other thing is on ESG and so AIS has laid out a very strong road map for this. And as I said, in our company, we have a Board -- we have set up, an ESG committee which we have the President of -- the Chair of this Committee and has been working on this issue for a long time. And so there are 3 things that we do: First, on economic, we will try to drive digital economy. We will use our product and service to drive more economic value. And on social, we try to promote digital inclusion as well as we try to work on environment or act on climate. And this is not just on theory. In the past year, in these 3 pillars, what have we done so far? The first one is driving digital economy. We have gained revenue of 4.1% from new digital services. And so this is what happened. And we aim to work on cyber security, we also provide training. We do work on data privacy, data encryption and we get certificates on that as well. And on the second pillar, promoting digital inclusion we are able to engage people. We try to expand our digital network across the country, and we try to ensure that people who never use digital services to be able to use it, and we were able to include 2.5 million people last year. And this is what we did with the villages and the health volunteers who never used before. And so in 3 years from now, we try to aim for 5 million people. And that's the number for the last year. And also, we have AUNJAI cyber program and so -- to enhance digital skill for 322,000 people, and you perhaps have seen before the projects that we have done. And so on act on climate, we have around 40,000 signal tower, and we worked on the -- we have the 8,800 base stations installed for alternative energy, and we were able to reduce around 30,000 tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent and that can actually reduce energy consumption. And that's the number that we want to show you and we have the E-Waste program and also our competitors doing this E-Waste program as well. But what we do is that we collaborate with different organizations like Central and with a total of 190 organizations, which we work with on this E-Waste project. And so this is the overview of what we have done in the past year and how we're moving forward in the past -- in the future 3 years. And so I'm going to pass the microphone to Mark, and he will talk about the strategic direction for 2024.

Thank you, Khun Somchai. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for coming to our briefing. If you don't mind, my English -- my Thai has not improved from last year. So I shall continue in English. And anyway, I think my Thai is not as good as your English so thank you. Let me talk about -- in 2024, what AIS intends to do. The principles of how we proceed in 2024 and over the next 2 years, are essentially based on core strengths, new digital services and developing new capabilities. So what this means for us is in our core strengths, the network, the businesses that we are already in, we will deliver more value. So in terms of 5G upgrades in terms of things like upselling, cross-selling, providing more services to our existing customers as well as new 3BB customers. In fact, we will -- because the market is quite saturated in the mobile side, and we have got new segments coming in, in the home, we will develop more segment-focused offerings. So what this means is that as you might see in recent months, we came up with things like online seller packages. You'll find that in the homes, we will have more targeted services for whether it's the professionals or whether you are running an SME business from your home to more segment focused. We will develop, therefore, for these new segments more digital services suitable whether to the lifestyle or whether to their working requirements. Things like whether it's smart home -- and of course, we are also trying to grow our enterprise segment, our enterprise business. So we are quite heavily invested there. You know we are in a JV with GULF and Singtel in building a state-of-the-art DC that's coming on the Eastern side of Thailand. Then you see IoT platforms, new platforms, digital platforms like Paragon and CPaaS. Paragon is an orchestration of cloud platform. CPaaS is a new intelligent platform that orchestrates your voice calls across -- whether it's PC, laptops, mobile, all your devices. And a key pillar for AIS is, of course, our customer service, and we intend to reinforce in that area. So enhance experience. Khun Somchai spoke about our new launch of the myAIS app. We call that internally myAIS 2.0. So we are going to enhance on that, build on that, and it will be the platform upon which we develop our loyalty points program and pushing that further. There will be cost efficiencies around the 4 key core pillars at the back which is IT, networks, data and people. With this, we believe we can achieve around 13% to 15% of core service revenue growth in 2024. Low single digit in mobile with double in size on broadband, enterprise will strive for double-digit growth. And then, of course, synergies from the acquisition of 3BB, leading to 14% to 16% EBITDA growth. I would go now into each of these major pillars and talk briefly about what we intend to do in each pillar. So in 5G, 5G monetization in mobile, 5G monetization remains very relevant. Our ARPU, we have managed to keep it at 10% to 15% higher ARPU compared to 4G, but there's a big 4G base of practically 25 million, 30 million handsets subscribers to be migrated onto 5G. So we think there's a potential for growth in the 4G migration to 5G and then digital differentiation, you see us develop more digital services to target the mobile segment as well as the home segment. FMC, that's what we mean by fixed mobile convergence. So in the 2024 aspiration, you see 95% mobile coverage. Today, we are almost 90%. With the help of NT700, we'll get to 95%. In broadband, with the enlarged scale coming in with 3BB, we plan to launch innovative products to capture this. So call it, firstly, we want quality acquisition. I think we have learned from past acquisitions that if you don't get quality upfront, they eventually churn out, and it is a loss in that particular customer acquired. So we have learned actually over the last year, attaining quality in the beginning is very important. It reduces churn. Our churn has dropped over the last year from high 1 point-something percent to now actually close to 1%. Segmentation with innovative products, very much what I've said. So recently, we pushed out a lot of fiber to every room because we do believe in the Internet age, you do need a good WiFi speed in every room and IP camera. Of course, this is not new, but there will be other new products that will be launched in the months to come. New digital services as mentioned. And integration is a key focus for the company. We have spent quite a big sum of money. So we do intend to squeeze out some synergies from that. Thank you. On Enterprise Services, Thailand is digitalizing, transforming, and we do want to play a big part in it. So we'll be growing. We want to grow our digital network to support Thailand's growth. The DC that I talk about is a major part. I think the Thai Prime Minister is trying to bring in hyperscalers to investments into Thailand. We think the DC is a major place. It's a good place to serve the hyperscalers. This DC is replicated from things that Singtel had done in Singapore is essentially that kind of design already serving hyperscalers, and we are bringing that into Thailand. Besides that [indiscernible] of the DC, we are also developing digital platform capabilities. Today, it is a lot of talk about platform, but we do think that the platforms that we are bringing in will help Thai enterprises to digitalize. Firstly, Paragon is a cloud orchestration platform. It is cloud-agnostic, meaning you need not be locked into a particular cloud, you can move your workloads across different clouds. CPaaS, as mentioned, it moves your voice call across your mobile, your laptop, your phones -- your fixed line phones. And also, it connects to your team's connector, whether it's a Zoom phone. So enterprises will be able to cleverly, intelligently route its call and it does lots of other things, like do-not-call registry, voice recording, et cetera. Finally, we think there's lots of opportunity coming with the new government in Thailand pushing for economic growth. There will be investments in different sectors. We do hope to work with different partners, different ecosystem to capture these opportunities. And we are targeting more than 10% growth because we think we are starting from a relatively low base, and there's opportunity in this area. Customer engagement, a key pillar for AIS. We believe that the COVID has educated a wide generation of Thais and actually people around the world on how to use the hand phone and digital apps on the hand phone and we want to leverage on this knowledge. So we will be pushing more services onto myAIS app, the 2.0 so that customers can do more things on their own, at your own time, 24x7. An uplifting experience and engagement, we believe that loyalty points is something that everyone with a hand phone loves -- tend to like. It is an area where we can do better, and we do intend to want to develop a good, engaging loyalty program. We already have one. We already launched, but we think we can do better. We want to widen the ecosystem of partners and develop ways that are more engaging for our customers. In terms of operations, gaining efficiencies, autonomous network, I think we have been talking about that. We are seeing progress in automating some of the backroom processes in our NOC in the way we route trouble tickets from a complaint into the engineer who has to attend to the problem from the low 40s of automation. We are now hitting 2/3, 60%, 70% of automation. IT and data intelligence. Data intelligence, we think will play a very important part going forward, especially for AIS. I think a lot of people know data is important. But for us, I think it is a juncture where it will play a big part because of our interest in virtual banking, we intend to go into that. And also, because a lot of enterprises are beginning to reach out to us to see how we can work together in leveraging data to improve their business and also to sharpen our understanding of our customers. And new technology. We are rehashing our IT architecture so that we can be more nimble, more agile. It's a multiyear effort. We've completed the first year. We are happy with the results. We are going to push harder further into this new IT architecture that will allow us to bring in new technologies like ML/AI. With this, happy to take questions later. I'll hand over to Khun Montri.

Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, analysts, and also investors that are here today. I am new here, and I got to know some of you already, I believe that I met other ones from time to time and I hope to get to know you better. And I don't have a lot of slides, and this is something that [Technical Difficulty]. This year, we wanted to focus on profitable revenue growth, strong growth, perpetual growth, and we don't grow in a way that create loss for ourselves. And secondly, CapEx optimization, we are trying to see the appropriate CapEx that we should invest and if it's in line with the revenue generation in the future and 3BB synergy realization. 3BB acquisition last year was a good thing for AIS overall in terms of EBITDA in the future. But there are also certain things that we want to harvest from our previous investment, and we will talk about that in 3BB synergy realization. And so the last 2 priorities are we will try to sustain investment-grade rating. We want to deliver stakeholder value. And so with this 5 priorities, it can be explained in this slide. And so the first 2 are on the first slide and the other ones are on the rest of the slides. And so Khun Somchai had his house, and I also have my so -- my house. And so this one focuses on financial part and as Khun Somchai mentioned, he mentioned the digital business, but that is not a financial strategy. But my slide concerns mobile, Khun Mark has mentioned the strategic direction that he will have to continue growing the mobile growth, and it's a low single-digit growth, broadband double-in-size growth, and enterprise is also a double-digit growth. And so what are our priorities in terms of finance? You can look down below here. And in terms of quality customers, which will lead to profitable growth, we have to look at the quality of our customers in the long term. So these customers are the customers who will not generate bad debt or churn, and also we have to analyze incentives and see how the customers are actually going to generate profit for us. And that is to improve product margin. And the second pillar is on targeted marketing expenditure. We have specific segments, which we will focus on. And the campaign that we launched would be something that is in line with what we already have, and we have to focus on retention. In terms of expenditure on marketing, we aim to go below 4% of total revenue. The third one is CapEx. We will invest for the network that allows us to be the leader in the market. And the things that we will focus on is on the profit management and -- because that's the customer base that can actually generate revenue for us. 3BB network, we already invested in there, and they can reach a lot of homes, and we try to leverage the existing 3BB network. And Khun Mark has mentioned, the investment in terms of software and AI, we will try to invest in software AI in order to become more autonomous or -- autonomous network, and it will actually save our OpEx. AI can actually have [indiscernible]. And last is optimize OpEx. We already talked about CapEx. But of course, OpEx has to be efficient. We have many different sizes, and so we have to revisit whether the rents are suitable. And also, we have other projects that we are about to invest and other projects that are not prioritized and we have to weigh the cost and benefit of those. And so lastly, power saving with solar cell. CapEx, we will invest around 15% of our service revenue. But for OpEx, it has to be in line with the revenue growth. Just now I mentioned the third one is on the 3BB integration realization. If you look on the left-hand side, before the acquisition, you will see what we benefit from this. The CapEx optimization, you can see that it's around THB 1 billion to THB 2 billion per annum; for OpEx, we can save around THB 400 million to THB 800 million per annum; and the revenue from cross-selling, up selling is about THB 150 million to THB 300 million per annum, and integration cost is already in our plan. Over coming 3 years, we will spend on OpEx and CapEx of around THB 500 to THB 700 million. And on the left-hand side, we will focus on integration and for last year, we have already done the branded product part. We have combined our products. We already started that. And we have shared across -- cross-content as well. And channel and privileges, we have already piloted co-location. If you go to the shop, we tested whether -- if we combine the shops, would it actually impact the subscribers or our customers. We have already done that last year. And our team, we have put a lot of effort to combine 3BB and AIS teams together. And in 2024, what we have learned from Khun Somchai and Khun Mark's slides is that we focus on FMC in terms of value uplift and also cross-sell. Of course, 3BB customers who are using their fiber optics and is still not an AIS customer, we'll try to use 3BB sale force to create more value or create value creation. We will ensure that there is a seamless service availability. And in terms of privilege, people we will also share privileges between 3BB and AIS. In the next year, in 2025, we will have our brands harmonized and the AIS and 3BB customers will be the same and in terms of people and operations at HR, we will also harmonize this part as well. And in terms of sales operations, we will not only sell broadband products, we will sell everything that we have in our portfolio. And in terms of 2025, we will have a harmonized brand, and we will have a single online service platform and also harmonized channels -- single channels. And we will have our network and IT integration completed within 2025. There is back end and front end, the front end may work -- may finish first and back end may finish a little bit later. And so this, you will see a single operation in 2025, when you walk into a shop, you will see everything, fiber, mobile, IoT solution. And this is my last slide on delivering stakeholders' values. In terms of finance, we have to look at capital management and to sustain investment grade rating. And the first one, we have to look at the strong cash flow and EBITDA that we get from 3BB. We will have to be able to maintain healthy leverage. The second one is on interest rates. You may be concerned about currency and exchange rate or interest rate issues, which is fluctuating quite a lot, and we are trying to manage this by managing the risk. And lastly, on the leverage option, we would have to diversify our options. I do say that we don't have the necessity to borrow at higher cost, but we have to think about how much we have to diversify in order to have options and have investors investing with us. And that's pretty much it for my part. So happy to take [indiscernible].

Now, we're going to [indiscernible]. [Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]