Prosegur Compañía de Seguridad, S.A. (GGAL) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, and welcome to Prosegur Third Quarter 2025 Results Presentation Webcast. Before we start, I would like to remind you all that this presentation has been prerecorded and that it will be available on our corporate website. I will now hand you over to our CFO, Maite Rodriguez.

Good afternoon, and thank you all for your presence. We are pleased to present Prosegur results for the 9 months of 2025. As we shall see throughout the presentation, we continue to outperform last year's results in our main businesses, particularly in Alarms and Security, where our growth strategy has proven to be not only effective as evidenced by the strong financial results and cash generation achieved, but also highly sustainable for the foreseeable future. Going down through our P&L, the results at a business level continue to be leveraged by financial results and accrued taxes, resulting in an impressive 47% increase in net income year-on-year. For all the above, we are confident that we continue to be on the right track to comply with our main objective of generating value for our shareholders. Now with all this in mind, let's deep dive into the most significant aspect of the period. Our top line grew by 2.5% compared to the same period of last year, mainly driven by organic growth and partially offset by FX effect. As stated, our security business continues to be the engine behind the growth as we continue to penetrate the U.S. market, while at the same time, we are still able to show healthy organic growth rate in more mature markets such as Spain and Portugal. As for profitability, EBITDA stood at EUR 258 million, 9% higher year-over-year, primarily explained by the strong performance of our security business. Indeed, volume growth, coupled with an agile commercial strategy to pass through cost to prices explained the 18% growth compared to the previous year. Our Cash business, despite showing good operating results in all major geographies was negatively impacted by the depreciation of the dollar, which tend to further trigger devaluation throughout Latin American countries, the devaluation of the Argentinian peso that showed sharp instability to the ramp-up to the legislative elections and the implementation of an aggressive cost-saving program in Latin America. Indeed, as already explained in our previous second quarter results, this resulted in extraordinary severance costs impacting not only in EBITDA, but also cash generation. Going forward, these efficiencies will materialize in higher margins in the future. For our Alarms business, as we will see, operational performance was clearly enhanced, reflected in better and healthier indicators. This is true for MPA as well as for Prosegur Alarms. It's worth mentioning that in MPA, we reached during the first week of October, 600,000 connections, marking a milestone in our growth history. Not only we were able to achieve double-digit growth, but also did it in sustainable and profitable fashion. As for cash generation, we were able to partially offset the slowdown from our cash business, thanks to the efficient working capital management and by keeping infrastructure CapEx under control. Our security business further contributed to this task. As said, and as we will go through in detail later in the presentation, the addition of the cost saving program and the FX volatility impacted cash generation in our cash business. We continue to show a strong and solid position debt-wise. Indeed, net debt stands at 2.3x relative to EBITDA. As we shall later see, in Prosegur Cash, we successfully issued a EUR 300 million 5 years bond at a highly competitive rate of 3.38%. This not only highlights the good work from our financial team, but also the good prospect of the business for the future. It is indeed a good testament to our ability to transform and diversify our business, both geographically and product-wise, as we have been arguing in the past. Let's now turn to Slide 2, where I would like to deep dive into our sales and EBITDA figures. As said, total sales during the first quarter increased by 2.5% over last year, reaching EUR 3.7 billion. Discounting for the FX effect maybe in Latin American regions, almost the entire growth was organic, evidencing on the one hand, our strict policy when it comes to passing through inflation to prices and on the other, our capacity to capture additional volume as we continue increasing our market share. As for geographic sales diversification, it should be noted that growth continues to be the driver. Both USA and APAC region continue to grow at higher than average rate. This is very relevant and speaks to the future growth avenues of our main businesses. As you already know, in our Security business, we continue to bet for USA as we see it as an exceptional market given its size, margins and our capacity to continue penetrating it as we offer a wide range of products and services. In our Cash business, our strategy is twofold. In most mature markets, we accelerate diversification through transformation products, while in the APAC region, we continue to see high growth rates in our traditional service. Moving now to further review profitability. EBITDA reached EUR 258 million, marking a healthy 9% increase compared to last year. Our Cash business registered an EBITDA of EUR 164 million, marking an 8.5% reduction when compared with the previous year. This includes the extraordinary expenses incurred due to the implementation of the cost saving program. If excluded, EBITDA would have amounted to EUR 176 million, in line with last year. Turning now to our Security business. EBITDA amounted to EUR 63 million, 17.5% higher compared to the first half of 2024. Healthy volume growth, coupled with a strict discipline on cost explained the enhanced performance. Technology sales further contributed to the good results. As we always explained, our ability to provide high-end tech solutions is one of our main competitive advantages and continues one of our main pillars. Lastly, our Alarms business continues to be on good track and good proof of this is the evolution of main financial indicators such as service margin and churn rate. At this point, I would like to explain the results generated by our PGA division. As you may probably know, PGA stands for Prosegur Gestion de Activos, and it's a business line itself. The only difference to the other business lines we operate is that PGA does not offer services to third parties. In a nutshell, the PGA provides 3 different type of services. It rents buildings and facilities to most of the other businesses. It owns the Prosegur brand, reason why it charges a royalty for letting the other businesses use it and provides a consulting service to the other businesses, including finance, human resources, legal and IT services. At the same time, it incurs with any other corporate expenses. With this, what we want to convey is that as any other business line, it has a P&L, and we strive to maximize it as in any other business. Let's now turn to our P&L that, as it can be seen, showed a remarkable increase compared to last year. The better performance on financial results, as already explained in past presentations, has a lot to do with the normalization of the Argentina economy. As explained, inflation rates are going down quite rapidly, resulting in a negligible impact due to inflation accounting. At the same time, the abrupt narrowing of the FX gaps further contributed as dividend upstreaming became cheaper. Going further down to accrued taxes, the 238 basis points reduction in the effective rate should be highlighted. The rationale behind this reduction is twofold. On the one hand, we had better results in all individual geographies. And on the other, as just explained, negative results stemming from hyperinflation accounting and dividend upstreaming were significantly reduced. All of the above led to a net consolidated income of EUR 82 million, achieving an astonishing 59% higher year-over-year. Let's now turn to cash generation during the period. At first, the EUR 22 million reduction in operating cash flow pops out. However, 2 things should be duly noted. The first one is the EUR 12 million of extraordinary severance cost of the already mentioned cost saving program in our cash business in LatAm. The second one is the delay of EUR 14 million of sales that were collected during the first week of October. Factoring for these 2 effects, the pro forma operating cash flow amount to EUR 147 million, EUR 4 million higher compared to the previous year. The EUR 9 million reduction in working capital requirements despite higher sales is worth of mention as we continue to pursue a strict discipline when it comes to DSO. As already stated, net financial debt reached EUR 1.3 billion, resulting in a total net debt-to-EBITDA ratio of 2.3x. It's worth highlighting that both the structure of the debt has recently been enhanced in October as Prosegur cash has successfully issued a EUR 300 million 5-year bond at 3.38%. That's all from me for now. I will now turn the presentation over to our Head of Investor Relations, Juan Ignacio Galleano, who will give you more detailed information on the development of the specific business areas.

Thank you very much, Maite. Let's now have a look at the results of each business line covering the main performance indicators and most relevant aspects of the period. Starting with our cash business, I would like to reinforce the almost 7% of organic growth that we achieved during the first 9 months of the year. Growth drivers have been twofold. First, volumes from our traditional business continued to grow at double-digit rates in the APAC region. Second, transformation products continue to deliver good results, reaching now 35% of total sales. This is highly relevant as it paves the way for more sustainable growth for the near future in more mature regions. At the same time, it should be stated that revenues of our traditional volumes in regions other than APAC continued to grow, partially thanks to our ability to pass through inflation, but most importantly, because volumes themselves continue to grow, albeit at a lower pace. As for EBITDA, we already mentioned the extraordinary impact of the severance costs associated with the cost saving program we deployed in LatAm. As you all know, the macroeconomic environment has drastically shifted with inflation rates slowing down. This has forced us to readapt our cost structure to this new environment. At the same time, the high penetration of cash today in the countries enable us to enhance logistics of our traditional business by making it more efficient and thus allowing us to reduce workforce. It's worth to highlight that once the extraordinary costs are excluded, EBITDA margin reached 11.8%, in line with the previous year. Turning now to cash generation. Operating cash flow reached EUR 109 million, marking a 23% reduction compared to the previous year. Once again, the EUR 12 million of extraordinary costs stemming from the cost saving program, coupled with FX impact, mainly explains the reduction. At the same time, it should be noted that approximately half of the postponement in the collections that we already referred to were from our cash business. It is worth highlighting that the annual cost of upstreaming dividends from Argentina is now under EUR 1 million, a significant reduction compared to previous years. Given the outcome of recent elections in Argentina, we should expect that the burden of such costs continue to be negligible in the foreseeable future. On the positives, the strong discipline in CapEx and working capital requirements should be noted. Let's move now to our Security business, which continues to favorably evolve over time. Total revenues reached EUR 1.9 billion with the organic share reaching 13%. As usual, this is mainly driven by our volume-based strategy that leads to operating leverage, our capacity to pass through inflation to prices and the outstanding performance of the operation in the U.S. The latter also explains the negative FX impact as the dollar continued to depreciate against the euro during the quarter. All the above, coupled with enhanced efficiencies and operating leverage resulted in total EBITDA reaching EUR 63 million, 17.5% higher compared to the same period of last year. Margins for the part continued to increase, reaching 3.27% during the first 9 months of the year. Even though all geographies performed, results were mainly driven by our operations in Spain and the USA amid the fact that we accelerated the pass-through of cost to prices compared to last year. Operating cash flow resulted in EUR 37 million compared to the EUR 2 million registered during the first 9 months of last year. This is by every means impressive and marks a new standard for the business. Indeed, we've already reached volumes and margins that imply a positive cash flows, no matter how aggressive we are in sales growth. This is definitely a very important milestone for the company as now all main businesses will contribute to our deleveraging strategy. Let's now turn to the Alarms business, where we reached another important milestone. Indeed, our client base in MePA surpassed the 600,000 connections during the first week of October, while DTC continues to increase in Prosegur Alarms. As we always stress, the growth itself is not nearly as important as the quality of the growth, reason why we are very pleased with the results we are showing. Indeed, we continue to reduce churn rate in MePA, reaching 9%, 2 percentage points lower compared to the previous year. In Prosegur Alarms, churn rate showed some resistance to go down, mainly explained by the particular economic situation in Argentina, in which the population is under strong economic stress negatively impacted in churn rate. As for ARPU and service margin, they continue to increase at very healthy rates. I would like to highlight that service margin includes depreciation costs. These costs are mainly associated with part of the acquisition cost that is being capitalized following NIIF 15. Once excluded, service margin for Prosegur Alarms and MePA would increase 4% and 1%, respectively. As for acquisition costs, the increase in both cases has to do with the deliberate strategy of increasing marketing expenses, while at the same time, we continue to invest in product enhancements. In this line, it's worth mentioning that new channels are rapidly growing. We intend to continue betting on these channels as they bring good quality connections at lower costs. As the share of these alternative channels grow over time, the overall acquisition cost should go down even if we continue investing in marketing and in product enhancement. Let's now turn to the following slide to see how all these indicators flow into recurring cash flow. The combination of higher service margin, coupled with either stable or lower churn rate naturally implies an increase in recurring cash flow, that is the resulting cash after the clients that churn are fully reacquired. In the charts above, we are showing is the 12-month rolling recurring cash flow of both Prosegur Alarms and MePA. The one on the right side clearly indicates that the generating cash flow capacity of the 2 businesses combined for Prosegur stands at EUR 81 million, 21% higher year-over-year. As mentioned in previous presentations, recurring cash flow is consistently reinvested into driving growth. Nonetheless, it reflects the true cash generation capacity of the Alarms business, clearly underscoring its strong cash generation potential. This concludes our analysis of the performance of each business line for the first 9 months of the year. Thank you all for your attention. I will now hand the microphone back to our CFO, Maite Rodriguez, for closing remarks.

Thank you very much, Juan Ignacio. Let me now share with you my closing thoughts on the most relevant conclusions of this results presentation. Overall, as we have seen during the presentation, all businesses reported enhanced operating efficiencies and strong results. On a consolidated basis, total sales increased 2.5%, reaching EUR 3.7 billion despite the adverse effect of depreciated currencies. EBITDA increased 9%, while net income increased by a remarkable 47%, thanks to the good performance of all our business lines. Normalized consolidated operating cash flow reached EUR 147 million once the EUR 26 million extraordinary impact are excluded. In our Cash business, the organic sales increased by a healthy 7%, while we put in place an aggressive cost saving program, thanks to the good penetration of our transformation products that will allow us to further increase EBITDA margins in the upcoming months. Turning to our Security business. Sales volumes increased by 6% compared to the previous year, and we achieved higher margins, thanks not only to scalability, but also to a robust client portfolio and efficient price pass-through. Even more important is the fact that the business will start to structurally contribute with positive cash flows from now on. Lastly, our Alarms business demonstrated very solid growth, surpassing the 1 million connections. This growth is accompanied by strong results in key management indicators. We have seen improvements in churn, service margins and ARPU. This strong performance translates into a rolling recurring cash flow of EUR 81 million, implying a 21% year-over-year increase and pointing the robust cash generation. As many of you know, we are finalizing our strategic plan for the next 4 years with objectives set on a biannual basis. Once completed, we would like to share with you our strategy for the Alarms business. Therefore, we are pleased to invite you to an Alarms Capital Market Day on Tuesday, December 16, where we hope to address any questions you may have regarding the valuation of the Alarms business. As said at the beginning of the presentation, we reported strong results for the first 9 months of the year, paving the way for achieving the objectives set for the year. This was all on my side for this results presentation. I would like to thank you all once again, and we are now open for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question. This is from Enrique Yáguez from Bestinver Securities.

I have 2 questions. The first one is regarding the strong improvement in profitability in the Security business in the second quarter despite some deceleration in organic growth. So the question is what has driven this strong improvement if there's no further volumes? Is just -- is this explained by the timing of the pass-through of cost or any other reason? And second, on the Alarms business. I know that you have said that you are going to host an Investor Day for this business on December, where you would probably explain the strategy. But my question is, taking into consideration the attractive valuation achieved by Verisure in its IPO, could you consider a potential partial disposal of this business unit over the next year in order to crystallize value?

Thank you, Enrique, for your 2 questions. In relation to the first one about the strong security -- the strong growth of the security business in this quarter, we are very happy with the results of the Security business, how it's evolving. And we -- even we think that we are going to continue having this positive tendency. It's mainly -- it's not coming because nothing special. It's just because the business is doing well. USA and Iberia, they are -- as you know, they have the higher margins, and they are also doing very well. We are increasing volumes, but we are also doing efficiencies. We are also having a strict discipline in passing through to inflation. So all these together and also controlling very well all our operations, it's providing a good result, not only in the P&L, but also in the cash flow. I would like to point out something that in this quarter, we have a 4% stand-alone improvement. For the next quarter, it's not going to be so high, but it's also going to be positive, and it's also going to be even higher than last year. Why is that? Yes, I would like to remind that all when we transfer cost to prices, sometimes we anticipated those transfers and sometimes we have delays. So in this quarter, we have anticipated something that was supposed to enter in the 4Q. So I would like to point out that. But the main reason is because the business is doing well because we have very clear targets in efficiencies, in operative optimizations, in passing through cost and also the technology business, as historically, we always have been saying that they always help us because it makes us provide a different type of service with more value to our customers is also helping. And in key countries, the technology is also doing very well, and that means that the margin is also increasing. But it's not the difference because the main improvements are coming from the Guarding business. So -- the traditional one, I mean. So it's just because we have very clear goals and a very, very good team. And in relation to the second question, and thank you for this question because I think that it's important to mention or to speak about the succeed of the IPO of Verisure, mainly because they have solid at a multiple of 79x the monthly fee. While -- and even when we -- I would like to remind also that when we sold MPA in 2020, it was at 78x. What it means that the value per subscription of Verisure amount the day of the IPO of EUR 3,600. And today, I think that even it's higher. And when we sold MPA, it was like EUR 2,900. So if we just do that with what we have now, I know that we are different to Verisure. Verisure is a bigger company and that means that if they have bigger size, they have more scalability and higher margins. And even they have different geographies. But if we go to the geographies that we have had similar quality of connections or of subscripters. And if we apply, for example, our EUR 2,900 per connection of MPA to our current portfolio of Iberia, discounting the 50% of Telefónica part, our -- between our 50% Spanish MPA and 100% of our Portuguese, we have more than 400,000 connections. So if we just multiply EUR 2,900 means that just Iberia's value is EUR 1.2 billion. So -- and our market capitalization is around EUR 1.5 billion. So I think that Alarms business and thanks to this IPO of Verisure demonstrates that is the hiding treasury of Prosegur. And I think that this IPO even demonstrates that. So -- and in relation, if we are going to crystallize it in the future, we will see. But from now on, it's not -- as I always say, it's not on the table. But what we have to do is we have to continue growing. We have to continue maintaining our good indicators. We have to improve our service margin so that we have a better quality of subscripters. And so that we can increase the value per connection instead of being EUR 2,900, we could arrive to those EUR 4,000 that is the value of Verisure's euros per connection. So from now on, we are not going to crystallize it, but it -- I think that it's -- that's why we are growing and growing and growing, but it's something that, I don't know, maybe in the long future, it could be an option, but not in the short or even on the 16th of December in our Investor Day, we are not going to mention that because it's not on the table.

We'll now take our next question. And this is from Alvaro Bernal from Alantra.

My one is regarding the PGA. Nine months -- well, the PGA and others, the line that incorporates a bit of everything when you do the differences for the EBITDA in this 9 months, it summed EUR 31 million this year. And last year, we're talking about EUR 4 million. That's approximately a EUR 30 million delta. If you could break it down to see where exactly it's coming from, it would be amazing. I understand that it's mainly from the PGA. But within the PGA, there are several things. And if it's basically coming from charging to other divisions, that means that implicitly, there is one that is performing better. And just want to get my head clear around that fact. Yes, that's my first question. And my second question is regarding the Alarms business, precisely MPA. When do you expect to be free cash flow breakeven after post growth? So if I'm more or less correct in my assumptions, this could come next year or the following one. Is that in your plans?

Thank you, Alvaro. In relation to the other businesses that is related to Prosegur Tech and PGA and shareholder cost. I will try to explain you slowly and like with a full explanation because maybe it's complicated to understand it. So we have in others, what we have or overhead, so I don't know how we call it, we have -- from one side, we have cybersecurity, AVOS that both of them, they have an EBITDA in the case of cybersecurity in this third Q of minus 7% and AVOS of plus 4%. The rest is related -- we have plus 26% that is related to what we call PGA plus shareholders. So in PGA, Prosegur Gestion de Activos, what we have, and that's why it's positive, it's because we have building -- we include 3 different concepts. The first one is the building rentals, the revenue that PGA is receiving just because we rent all our buildings to the rest of the businesses. We have the trademark that here from last year to this year, both of them buildings and trademark has increased quite significantly, mainly because in the case of the trademarks, it's coming because of an agreement that we achieved with the Spanish tax authorities. And that's why the royalty must be higher. In the case of buildings, it's because a lot is also coming from the inflation of Argentina that we are increasing the rent. And the third part, the third point that is included in PGA is related to the markup that we charge to the different businesses coming from the service that the support areas or the legal, HR and so on services that we provide. But this one must be splitted in 2. The first one is related to the local expenses to the local -- expect this for PGA, but -- or for the -- sorry, for the businesses, the local expenses that provide a consulting service to the businesses, but locally. And here, we have like, I don't know, finance, HR, legal, IT, the ERP costs and things like that. But then we also have corporate expenses. Corporate expenses is like the headquarters expenses. So -- but these ones, these expenses, they are not -- they are also included in the margin that you are analyzing when you see the margin of Security, the margin of Cash, the margin of Alarms, those expenses, those corporate expenses are also included. Even we are thinking that maybe at the beginning of the year, we are going to try to -- those overheads or those headquarters or corporate expenses to exclude them from the businesses. Why? Because sometimes when you calculate the -- I don't know, Security is going to be, I don't know how many times EBITDA. you are also including those corporate expenses. So -- but if I sell tomorrow the Security business, they are not going to include those expenses. So we are thinking that for year-end, we are going to give you like both margins, the Cash, Security and all of them with those headquarters expenses and without those headquarters expenses. And those ones, of course, they are always negative. And I think that, that -- when we say overhead, sometimes we are thinking on PGA, I think that there are some misunderstood between the concept between what we call overhead, what the analysts call overhead and so on. So I don't know if you get the idea of what I was trying to explain, but if not, we will also include a specific slide in the next results presentation so that we could clarify all this.

Yes, everything understood.

And related to the Alarms question about when we are going to reduce the debt. We will tell you the 16th of December in the Investor Day, okay, that we will give a little bit of guidance and so on. You will have to wait till then.

Hoping to get that [indiscernible] on the PGA would be very helpful for us, definitely.

[Operator Instructions] And we have a follow-up question coming through. The question is from Enrique Yáguez, Bestinver Securities.

Sorry for coming back. I have another question regarding your balance sheet. For this year, your main target was reducing financial leverage. Taking into consideration that you are on a good path to achieve it, what will be your main financial objective for next year and if you will consider reactivating M&A optionality in security or in the cash business? I know that you are trying to follow opportunities in the business or even improve the shareholder remuneration.

Thank you, Yáguez, for your question. In relation to debt, we are -- as you know, we keep our goal that is trying to decrease the net debt that we have. And for next year, in terms of capital allocation, we will -- now in December, we are going to pay our EUR 87 million dividend. But I can't still -- I can't tell you what we are going to do for the next years, mainly because we are working now on our strategic plan, and it will be approved in the Board of February. So we are still working on that. And maybe on the February's full year results presentation, I could provide you a little bit more guidance in relation to that.

And there are no further questions at this time. So I would now hand the conference back to the speakers.

Thank you very much for attending the presentation. If you need further information, please contact our Investor Relations department, who is open to help you at any time. See you the December 16.

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.