Grameenphone Ltd. (GP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Grameenphone's Second Quarter Earnings Call for the Year 2026. I'm Chowdhury Tazrian Israt from Investor Relations, and I'll be hosting today's session. Joining me on today's call are Mr. Yasir Azman, our CEO; and Mr. Otto Risbakk, our CFO. We will begin with remarks from the CEO and CFO covering key business highlights, financial performance and our strategic priorities. The recording of this call, along with other earnings release and related materials are available on our website, and we encourage you to review them for further details. Before we begin, a quick note on today's schedule. The Q&A session will take place right after the call at 2:00 p.m. local time. Invites have already been shared with our investors and analysts. If you'd like to participate, please feel free to share your e-mail address with me during the call, and we'll make sure to include you. With that, now let's get it over to our CEO, Mr. Yasir Azman, to get us started.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our quarter 2 2026 earnings call. I'm Yasir Azman Chief Executive Officer of Grameenphone. Let's start with the call with some industrial and macro updates. According to the latest report from our regulators, the telecommunication industry in Bangladesh recorded a total of 188.6 million subscribers as of May 2026, reflecting an increase of around 2.5 million subscribers since March 2026. During the same time frame, mobile data users also increased by 4.3 million, reaching to 119.1 million in May 2026. Now a little overview of our macroeconomic landscape. The point-to-point inflation rate has eased in June, but still high at around 9.2%. The foreign exchange reserve stands at $31.7 billion. Exchange rate is stable, but under mild depreciation pressure, hovering around Taka 123 per USD. As per IMF and World Bank projections, Bangladesh's GDP growth for fiscal year 2026 is expected to be in the range of 4.7% to 6.1%, reflecting a modest recovery amid ongoing macroeconomic challenges. Before moving on, I would like to briefly comment on the national budget 2026, 2027. The government adopted an expansionary fiscal stance in the fiscal year 2026 budget with higher public expenditure and development ambitions supported by a notably ambitious revenue mobilization target. The success of this fiscal framework will, therefore, depend significantly on tax collection performance and implementation effectiveness. From a sector perspective, Finance Act 2026 conveys a constructive policy direction for the ICT, digital and telecommunication industries. The legislative changes reflect a growing recognition of the sector's role in driving digital transformation, connectivity and economic growth. A particularly positive development is the withdrawal of fixed BDT 300 SIM tax, which represents a meaningful step toward rationalizing sector-specific taxation. This measure supports affordability, customer acquisition, and broader digital inclusion objectives. The budget also introduces important simplifications across both direct and indirect tax regimes. These changes are expected to reduce compliance complexity, improve administrative efficiency and create a more predictable tax environment for businesses. Another notable development measure is designed to facilitate the resolution of long-standing tax disputes and enable the exercise of legal rights by reducing statutory deposit requirement of appeals. The government has also taken steps to enable digitalization by establishing tax frameworks that can better accommodate emerging products, services and evolving business models in the digital economy. Having said that, telecom sector still faces unreasonably high corporate and customer taxes of 40% and 39%, respectively, which is far off the global regional benchmark. Looking ahead, we hope to see continued policy dialogue and a gradual rationalization of sector-specific taxes to support sustainable industry growth. The budget also highlighted many of the plans supporting capital market development and foreign investment climate. We see these initiatives as positive for the broader investment climate as Bangladesh's largest listed company by market capitalization, we are well positioned to benefit from a stronger, more liquid capital market and increased investor participation. Let me now turn to the business highlights and walk you through some of the key developments that shaped our performance during the quarter. This quarter, all key customer metrics improved sequentially. We regained subscribers, active data user growth, while data usage continued its upward momentum for the third consecutive quarter. These improvements follow the commercial recalibration we implemented towards the end of quarter 1. Last year, we adjusted our entry-level propositions to encourage greater data adoption and long-term customer value. While the strategy was directionally right, customer response, particularly among voice-centric users, was slower than anticipated. We responded by refining our commercial approach and we are now seeing early positive signs of the customers and our outcomes. Customer engagement and usage trends are improving and sequential revenue has recovered compared to the previous quarter. While year-on-year revenue remains below last year's level due to the lagged impact of the earlier strategy and impact of two Eids, in a quarter last year, we believe the business has reached an important inflection point with stronger fundamentals, providing the foundation for future revenue recovery. The second development is the continued strengthening of our network, which remains the foundation of everything we do. During the quarter, we completed the development of the 700 megahertz spectrum across more than 1,000 sites nationwide. This significantly enhanced indoor coverage expanded connectivity to unserved areas and provides a stronger foundation for Bangladesh's growing digital economy. We are also seeing encouraging early benefits from the 700 megahertz development and deployment. The strength of our network was demonstrated during the FIFA World Cup during the Argentina versus Australia match, Grameenphone handed the highest data traffic ever recorded in our history, successfully managing more than double the normal traffic while delivering a stable customer experience. As customer expectations continue to evolve, our digital services need to become faster, more scalable and more secure. During the quarter, we made significant progress in building our sovereign secure cloud platform, creating a modern technology foundation for the next phase of our digital transformation. While this work happens behind the scenes, it is critical investment for the future. It will accelerate innovation, improve operational resilience and enable us to deliver new digital services to our customers much faster. Taken together, these developments reinforce our confidence that we are moving in the right direction. While there is still work to do, we are building the capabilities, strengthening the customer proposition and creating the momentum needed for the quarters ahead of us. Our digital strategy continues to be an important driver of our sustainable growth. And this quarter, we made encouraging progress across the entire digital ecosystem. At the heart of this ecosystem is our MyGP, which has firmly established itself as the digital front door for our customers. Active users increased to 23.2 million. Digital reloads now account for nearly 46% of our sales to subscriber transactions and approximately 1/3 of our revenue is generated through digital channels. So we can see a fundamental shift in how customers engage with Grameenphone and increasingly choose digital channels for their telecom needs. Through personalization, gamification and new platform capabilities, MyGP continues to deliver increasing incremental ARPU with the digital ARPU premium rising consistently over the past 5 years. Our ambition extends beyond digitalizing telecom services. We are transforming MyGP into an open digital platform where ecosystem partners can leverage our scale to reach millions of customers. Today, customers can seamlessly access premium service like the FIFA Pass, Netflix Vouchers, Truecaller Premium and Shikho through a single digital experience. The FIFA World Cup demonstrated the strength of this model by combining exclusive digital content with attractive connectivity propositions. We delivered over 500,000 subscriptions, generated more than 1,200 terabytes of incremental data usage per day and over BDT substantial amount of millions in ad tech revenue. During match hours, data consumption increased by 21%, showing how relevant digital experiences can simultaneously strengthen customer engagement and create new revenue streams. While our current digital ecosystem continues to mature, we also invest in the next generation of digital revenue opportunity. The recently introduced VAT mechanism for direct operator billing creates an important regulatory enabler for expanding digital content and subscription services through international partner. We estimate that this has the potential to unlock good revenue over the next few years. At the same time, we continue to strengthen our digital security portfolio through solutions such as GP Shield, responding to the growing demand for cybersecurity services among both consumers and enterprises. Sustainability remains an integral part of how we create long-term value for our customers, shareholders and the communities we serve. During this quarter, we made meaningful progress on our climate agenda through 2 important initiatives. First, we strengthened responsible resource management by recycling more than 46 tons of e-waste in compliance with internationally recognized R2 and ISO 14001 standards, reinforcing our commitment to circularity and environmental stewardship. Second, we took a second and significant step in our decarbonization journey by initiating the procurement of 200 gigawatts of renewable energy under Bangladesh's newly introduced MPP policy. As one of the first companies to pursue this opportunity, we are proud to support the country's clean energy transition while advancing our own ambition of building a more sustainable and resilient business. We are not only connecting Bangladesh digitally, but also helping to build a digital society that is safe and inclusive and trusted. Through our partnership with UNICEF, we supported the integration of online safety education into the national curriculum, reaching more than 2.2 million students nationwide. We are helping create a generation that can navigate the digital world safely, responsibly and with greater awareness. Preparing Bangladesh's workforce for the AI era is an important part of our sustainability agenda. Through Grameenphone Academy, we are expanding access to practical AI education and future-ready digital skills by launching 8 new expert-led courses focused on particular skills from AI-powered productivity to workflow automation and digital innovation. Having walked you through the business and strategic progress during the quarter, let me now turn to our financial performance. So while the operating environment remained challenging and pressure on consumer wallets continued, this quarter reflects encouraging sequential progress of around 6% in top line. But compared to same quarter last year, we have reported a decline of 3%. The revenue improved compared to Q1 -- quarter 1, which is encouraging. Subscriber engagement improved active data users and data usage continued to grow during the quarter. So while the top line has not fully reflected growth yet, the business is moving in the right direction and is up for recovery. Moving next to EBITDA. We saw a 6.6% improvement compared to the previous quarter. Year-on-year, EBITDA was down by 6.1%, largely reflecting the softer top line. What is encouraging, however, is that we maintained a healthy EBITDA margin of around 58%, demonstrating continued cost discipline and operational efficiency despite the challenging environment and continued investment. If you then look at our net profit, we also see a big improvement from the previous quarter of around 14.7%. Higher depreciation and amortization, together with reduced foreign exchange losses supported profitability during the quarter. However, compared to last year, normalized NPAT declined by 6.5%. It's worth mentioning that the comparable quarter included a one-off tax impact, and so the comparison is against the relatively stronger base. Overall, I think we have continued to demonstrate resilience in protecting profitability despite the revenue pressure. Turning to cost. This remains one of our strengths. We have consistently maintained good cost discipline over the past several quarters. And this quarter was no different. Total operating costs increased by only around 1.8% year-on-year despite continued investments in network and IT and still inflationary operating environment. Finally, on CapEx, we invested around BDT 5.5 billion this quarter, which is significantly more than what we have done over the last several quarters. That's why it is very much intentional that we have invested for growth and our customer engagement. The majority of the investment has gone into the areas that strengthen our long-term competitiveness and network modernization, the deployment of 700 megahertz spectrum and digital capability. So while we are maintaining strong financial discipline, we are also making sure we are investing where we see long-term value. Now over to our Chief Financial Officer, Otto Risbakk, to take you through the financials in details.

Thank you, Azman. And let me, as usual, start with thanking all the investors and analysts and everybody following us on this call. Good to see you for this second quarter of 2026. And let me, as usual, also start with the revenue metrics. I'm quite happy to show you this picture because this quarter, we see all the revenue metrics improving. If you look at -- we're starting with the subscriber on the top left, you can see that we had a not so good second half of 2025 and also a rather weak first quarter of 2026. And I'm very happy to see now that in the second quarter, we see that all the revenue metrics are moving in the right direction. We gained back the subscriber we lost in the last year. We added more than 2 million subscribers this year, ending up with 86.3 million. And that we actually also back to year-on-year growth. And more importantly, we also added 2.4 million data subscribers now passing for the first time more than 60% data penetration in our base. And that's very encouraging because it's on the data side that we will see the growth coming -- going forward. And we also see not only that the subscriber and the data subscriber grew, also we see a noticeable increase in usage. And this quarter, average usage per subscriber increased to 8.4 gig per month, up from 7.8. And that shows a much higher digital engagement with our customer. The second quarter is a very important quarter for us because it's the Eid. And this time, I also have to -- like I did last year, I have to thank the technology team, the commercial team and the logistics teams because during the Eid festivals, the whole country moves back to their villages, families meet and it's such an important event for them. And that means that we have to reconfigure our whole network. And they did, as last year, a fantastic job. Our network works seamlessly. We actually have to reconfigure the network in every single spot along where people go. We were able to provide a very, very good network experience during such an important time. And that is important also to support the growth that we now bring with us into the third quarter. We've also had the start of the World Cup, and that has definitely created some challenges to our network, which we have met really, really well. Bangladesh is a passionate country about football, I understand divided between Brazil and Argentina. And Argentina is still in. So let's hope for the best. We see that the network has been able to carry all the additional traffic from the World Cup, and we have been able to delivering really, really superior performance to our customers on the digital side. And going forward, it is -- we continue to have priority on improving the network, and I will talk a little bit more about on the next slide. If you look at the ARPU, you also see a good uptick this quarter. You see it went up from BDT 146 to BDT 152. It is still lower than it was last year. There is always a certain lag when we increased the customer base during the quarter, we don't see the full increase reflected yet in the ARPU and in the revenue. We are very focused to bring this momentum into monetization in the next quarter. So going forward, we'll also focus on continuing to offering the right mix of customer value, including bundles and digital engagement and focus again on delivering superior network experience from our leading network. So the key takeaway from this quarter is that the customer metrics for customer fundamentals have moved meaningfully in the right direction. And our focus in the next quarter will be to monetize on this momentum. So now over to the revenue slide. Yes. So let's now look at the revenue slide, and this is a slide where I'm both happy and unhappy. As you can see on this slide, our revenue decreased from BDT 41 billion in the second quarter of last year to BDT 40 billion this year, and that's a drop of about 3%. And this comes after we also had a decline of 2% in the last quarter. And this is obviously something the investors and analysts are very focused on, and so are we definitely. What I'm more happy with is to see the rebound. We are up more than 6% on the revenue Q-on-Q. And let me try to explain a little bit why I'm both happy and unhappy. So obviously, the revenue of a quarter is very dependent on the subscriber base and on the ARPU we have at the beginning of a quarter. And as I explained on the previous slide, we did have a weaker second half of 2025 and a not so good first quarter. We have seen, as I showed on the previous slide, also that the revenue metrics have improved meaningfully this quarter with all metrics up. subscribers, 2 million. Usage is up also with a high percentage. Data users are up. So we do see an underlying trend. But obviously, there is a lag from getting revenue from this increase in the customer base and these improved metrics. Still, we did relatively well. I'm very happy with the 6% Q-on improvement but that's happened on a smaller starting base from Q1. So our focus, as I said on the previous slide, will be to monetize on this positive revenue metrics that we are now having going into the third quarter. I'm definitely more comfortable and encouraged at the start of the Q3 than I was in the previous quarters. And our full focus will be to monetize on the momentum that we have on the revenue metrics. And now over to the cost and results slide. So now let me go through the P&L. And let me start with looking at the environment in which we are operating that you see here on this slide. This graph is showing the red line, the inflation that we've had over the past years and the blue line is showing how we are managing the costs. And as you can see, the inflation has been very persistent between 9% and 10% over the last years, whereas we -- on the cost side, thanks to our structural approach to cost and capital allocation, we have managed to decrease impact or reduce the impact of the inflationary environment. And I have to say it's both inflation. You also talk about ForEx exposure. And on top of that, we know we have had some global impact on chip prices on one side on energy cost another. Despite this, we are showing a very good development cost. You may recall last quarter, we actually had a negative development on cost. Hence, we reduced cost compared to previous quarters. This quarter, if I look on a year-on-year basis, we had a modest increase of 1.8%. So this means that we are -- we continue to remain vigilant on cost side, and we do this with a series of measures. I think I explained it in previous quarters, but let me repeat it. So we have basically 3 different pillars the way we worked on cost. One is the long-term structural initiatives where we look at where we can improve the structure as a whole. And those are programs that they run continuously, but they typically look at the longer term. Then we translate that into yearly operating efficiency targets where we execute on the long-term initiatives, but we also add some initiatives during the year. And then obviously, in an inflationary environment like this, we also have some tactical initiatives that is helping to curb the impact of inflation. And that -- the effect of that, you can see on the P&L on the EBITDA side, where you see that although the EBITDA dropped 6.1% compared to last year, the EBITDA of BDT 23.1 billion, down from BDT 24.6 billion last year. This drop is primarily due to the top line effect. The active cost management is reducing the impact of the top line. If I look at the Q-on-Q basis, it's the opposite. We saw that the revenue increase Q-on-Q is flowing through the P&L and improving EBITDA, which we see increased 6.6% in the quarter. The focus that we have is relentlessly to protect the earnings potential through active cost management while we also work on improving revenue. On the EBIT side, you see a similar development. Let me finish this slide with some comments on the ROCE or the return on capital employed. That's a very important measure because it actually measures how effectively we are allocating and using our capital. You can see here, we delivered a strong result of 26.3%. It's a little decline compared to the previous quarter. But as you can see, it's actually an increase compared to the same quarter last year. And this comes despite the fact that we have this quarter, capitalized the new 700 spectrum that we acquired recently and also have started investing in low band. So this is a good performance. I'm quite proud of. And if I can put the 26.3 percentage into perspective, if we compare this with the cost of capital in Bangladesh, which is around 15%, 16%, depending on how you make it, we still are making significant return in excess of the cost of capital. And that will definitely be also the focus going forward. So now let me go through the net profit and dividends for the quarter. As you can see on this slide, the net income shows a similar pattern as revenue and EBITDA, where we see a decline year-on-year, but we see a strong improvement quarter-on-quarter. And if I normalize the net income, we see that we had a decline of 6.5% during the quarter, mainly due to the revenue impact. But that is still a strong margin of 19%, a better margin that we've had in the recent quarters. And I should also notice that in 2025 in the same quarter, we had a small adjustment on tax related to PSR that had a positive impact of about BDT 0.6 billion. If you look at the NPAT bridge on this slide, you can see the components, what's driving the net profit. And you can see here that the main driver is the revenue having an impact of BDT 1.2 billion. And you can also see that the impact on cost and net financial is rather small. And that is due to what I explained earlier, the good performance we have on cost management. So you see a very limited impact of the inflation impact on the P&L, cost increasing only with BDT 300 million during the quarter. D&A, depreciation and amortization is also showing a very modest increase, and this increase is also due to the 700 spectrum that we took into use and the launch of the 700 low-band network. If you look at the net financial cost, you see a positive impact this year of BDT 428 million. And this is due to 2 factors. One, in the same quarter last year, we actually had a very negative ForEx impact as the Taka was depreciating. This year, it's the opposite. The Taka is holding pretty well. I think the government is doing a good job in managing the accounts, and we see that investors have quite good confidence in the Taka. It has remained very stable over the last quarters. And a second reason for the good performance on net financials, obviously, is our strong balance sheet. We have virtually no debt. And hence, we -- the high interest rate doesn't have an impact on our P&L. With this result and the strong balance sheet we have, we are pleased again that the Board has recommended, which corresponds to close to 100% payout ratio. I should also add that this dividend is fully supported by operational cash flow. It also in line with our dividend policy. So let me sum up this slide with a reflection on the results and how this fit with our capital allocation policy. So we normally follow 3 pillars when it comes to capital allocation. The first one is on long-term investments where we select the project we want to invest in very strictly based on 2 main criteria. One, it has to have a customer effect; and second, it has to have a financial return. So that is the foundation for any investment that we do. Second is our continuous and relentless focus on operating performance. As I've gone through in the previous metrics, we have a very structural approach, both to driving revenue and also to protect margin and manage cost in -- independently of the cycle. And we've seen these couple of years how important it has been our operational focus and our long-term view on operating efficiency that we have been managed -- able to manage the very high inflation and protect the earnings. And the third pillar of our capital allocation policy is that we will -- we want to protect the margins and the results so that we can continue to offer stable dividends to our shareholders. So let me go over to the last page of the presentation on CapEx and free cash flow and debt. Yes. So let me go through the last slide, going through the investment side of our business. And starting with the CapEx. As you can see, we are increasing the CapEx in our business. We invested BDT 3.6 billion in the first quarter. We are now at BDT 5.5 billion. We added BDT 5.5 billion in the second quarter, which leads us to more than BDT 9 billion for the first 2 quarters. And this increase is -- normally, we always invest more in the first half in the second half. But this year, you will see that we will probably continue to invest more also into the second half. And one very exciting part of the CapEx investment this year is the rollout of the low band. As you know, we acquired 50 megahertz in the 700 band. And we have started in June rolling out the base stations with the 700 network. We have added more than 1,000 sites so far, and we see very encouraging results. As you know the 700, somebody calls it the super spectrum because it has a very long reach and also a very good indoor capability. So when you combine that with our strong holding in the 2,600, where we have 80 megahertz, we can provide both high capacity and now improved coverage and indoor. So this combination is very good. And we will continue to roll out more low band in the next quarters and in the years to come. So this is very exciting. And what this means for customers is better network experience. If we look at the cash flow this quarter, again, a very strong quarter, BDT 17.7 billion operating cash flow in the quarter. It's a little bit lower than the previous quarter, but that is due to -- mainly due to the higher CapEx. It's still at very, very strong margin if you compare to any telco globally. So let me finish with the net debt, which is on this side of the graph. As usual, we have a very low net debt. We are monitoring our cash flow very carefully, both on the operational side, on the CapEx side and also on the working capital side. This means that we are able to invest with a very long-term view and also that we have a very little impact of the high interest rate environment that we have currently in Bangladesh on our P&L. So now let me summarize this financial part of the presentation. And I would like to mention 3 things. First, obviously, we are not happy with having had 2 quarters in a row with negative growth. Second, we will really focus on capturing the good momentum we saw in the second quarter so that all the revenue metrics are positive. We are adding subscribers. We are increasing usage, and we are also investing in the network with the low-band rollout, which will continue full speed in the second half of the year. The third is that we will continue to remain very focused on managing the cost side, in particular as the environment still is quite volatile. But we have a very good momentum going into the third quarter, and I'm more confident now than I was 1 or 2 quarters ago. So with that, I give the word over to Azman.

Let's focus on key takeaways for today's earnings call. The encouraging improvements in our customer fundamentals this quarter give us confidence that the business is moving in the right direction. At the same time, the macroeconomic environment is gradually becoming more supportive with inflation easing and GDP expected to return to a healthier growth trajectory. Combined with our strong network, digital capabilities and highly engaged customer base, we believe we have the right foundations to restore sustainable top line growth, and we are strongly focusing on that area. Maintaining disciplined cost management remains a key priority for our business. We'll continue driving operational efficiencies through our operational excellence program while leveraging AI, automation and digital transformation to unlock the next phase of productivity improvements and sustainable cost optimization. We have already seen encouraging results, and we'll continue scaling these initiatives to build a more agile and efficient organization. At the same time, we remain committed to investing in the future from network modernization and digital platform to new technologies and ecosystem partnerships. We will continue making disciplined investments that strengthen our long-term competitiveness in the market. Together with the government and our partners, we look forward to contributing to Bangladesh's digital ambition while creating sustainable value for our customers and shareholders.