GTN Limited (GTN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the GTN Limited Fiscal Year 2024 Half Year Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. Representing the company today are Peter Tonagh, Chair and Non-Executive Director; and Brent Henley, Global Chief Financial Officer. Before I turn the call over to Peter, I would like to remind the listeners that this call is subject to the disclaimer and important information included in the company's half year earnings presentation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Peter, Chair and Non-Executive Director. Peter?

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our overview of GTN's first half performance. Before I start, I'd like to welcome our new Global Chief Financial Officer, Brent Henley, and our new Global General Counsel, Sophie Jackson, who are here with us today. We're delighted to have them on board. I'd also like to recognize the highly valued contributions of Scott Cody, our departing Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer, and Gary Worobow, our departing Executive Vice President, Legal and Business Affairs, who is also with us today. In particular, I thank them for their support throughout the transition from our previous CEO over the last 8 months. We wish them both well. This transition marks the start of an exciting new era for GTN. We now have a new locally based executive team of Vic Lorusso, Brent and Sophie, a very strong set of country heads in our core markets -- that's Vic, John, Donna and Fabio -- and a very solid balance sheet, providing us with opportunity for future capital management and growth initiatives. But before we jump into the financials, I just wanted to identify two significant changes that we're driving with our new team in place. The first is that we're driving a greater sense of P&L accountability to our highly capable country heads, providing them with a greater sense of local ownership of both the operating performance of their country but also of identifying and proposing new opportunities for growth. But alongside that, we're also driving for greater collaboration between our markets. So we're already seeing the benefits of sharing information systems, advertiser learnings and, in some cases, leveraging our advertiser relationships between our markets. Vic Lorusso has responsibility for coordinating across this group and is doing an exceptional job. Brent will take us through a bit more detail on each market and our first half performance, but I'd like to focus on just a few highlights upfront. I'm very proud of the team for their performance in this half. Notwithstanding the transition of management, we delivered a very solid set of financial results. Revenue grew overall by 5%, while adjusted EBITDA, our primary measure of performance, grew by 11% and net profit after tax increased by 46%. If I remove the cost of transitioning to our new team, adjusted EBITDA would have grown by over 29%. While Australia under Vic Lorusso's leadership continues to be our biggest and most profitable market, I do want to highlight that the non-Australian markets accounted for 54% of revenue in this half. Of special note is our Brazilian market under Fabio, which grew revenue by 76%, with a $2.3 million turnaround in adjusted EBITDA. U.K. revenue under John Quinn grew by 15% and, notwithstanding the very challenging path in the Radio market in Canada, Donna Gardner and her team contributed $2.9 million to our adjusted EBITDA in this half. I'm particularly delighted that our balance sheet remains strong even with our ongoing share buyback program and the return to paying dividends. As of December 31, we carried about $0.5 million of net debt, which, together with greater flexibility in our loan facility, provides us optionality for future capital management and growth initiatives. As a result, we're delighted to be able to declare an interim FY '24 dividend of $0.011 per share. Overall, we're very excited about the future opportunities for GTN and grateful for the ongoing support of our shareholders. I'll hand over to Brent to go into more detail.

Thank you, Peter, and good morning, everyone. You'll notice a few new slides in the beginning of our GTN presentation, providing a detailed company overview by operating region and then deeper insight to our business design, covering what we do, our value proposition in each market and the type of customers we service. So from a company overview perspective, ATN is one of the largest broadcast media advertising platforms by audience reach in Australia and is the premium supplier of traffic content to radio and TV stations across the metro and regional markets. BTN has been operating in Brazil since 2011 across a network of 100 radio stations reaching different and complementary audiences. CTN provides a unique advertising platform in Canada by embedding a 10-second advertisement with a live read traffic report. These are produced by our team of professional reporters and delivered to more than 100 partner stations across Canada. Unlike ATN, BTN and CTN, the U.K. outsource the provision of both their content strands, being network drive traffic and travel news service and the entertainment news service, which is provided by our key partner, Bauer Media. The U.K. business does not supply airborne services and they sell fully produced commercials as provided by the client's creative agencies and not 10-second live read ads. The U.K. business offers advertisers access to over 230 radio stations across the country, covering the whole of the U.K. From a business design perspective, a few examples of the value props that exist across our regions are ATN's 10-second advertising messages are embedded in premium content, traffic, news, sports and weather, in prime listening times in all metro and regional markets and not positioned in commercial airtime, making ATN the premium audio offering with high-profile media talent situated across the country. From a BTN perspective, it has a wide coverage reaching more than 27 million listeners per month, strengthening brand awareness and recall during campaigns. Our clients obtain premium positioning as a single advertiser per bulletin, broadcast during a prime time slot. Traffic bulletins are integrated with relevant content and media for the audience. Now from a financial perspective, revenue for the first half fiscal year 2024 increased 5% to $94.8 million. Revenue increased in both the U.K. and BTN, while ATN and CTN reduced slightly after an improved FY '23 performance. When compared to the first half FY '23, Brazil revenue increased 75.8% and the U.K. increased 14.8%, while Canada revenue decreased 4.4% and Australia revenue decreased 4.3%. Revenue from our U.K., Brazil and Canadian operations benefited from favorable foreign currency movements. When measured in local currencies, Brazil revenue increased 60.4%, the U.K. increased 4.9%, while Canada revenue decreased 5.4% compared to FY '23 -- first half FY '23. Adjusted EBITDA, which we define as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization adjusted to include the noncash interest income generated by the financing component of our long-term station affiliation agreement with Southern Cross Austereo, and excludes transaction costs, foreign exchange gains and losses, gains and losses on asset disposals, refinancing losses and gains on lease forgiveness, was $13.3 million compared to $12 million in first half FY '23, an increase of 11.3%. We consider it appropriate to add the financing component of our long-term station affiliation agreement with Southern Cross Austereo to EBITDA because EBITDA includes a large amount of noncash station compensation expense related to the agreement, and by including both amounts in adjusted EBITDA, we believe it provides a clearer view of the financial impact of the agreement. The adjusted EBITDA was driven by an increase of 5% in revenue for the period, whilst network operations and station compensation expenses increased 5.4% due to increased costs related to the U.K. market, supporting the incremental revenue in the first half FY '24. Network operations expense included $1.2 million of costs related to the aerial drone light shows. Included in the operating expense is a one-off cost of approximately $2.1 million related to the transition of the current Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Business and Legal Affairs. Pleasingly, group NPAT increased 46% to $4.4 million in the first half FY '24, which represents an earnings per share of $0.022. Adjusted NPAT, which is defined as net profit after tax adjusted to add back the tax-effected noncash amortization expenses relating to acquired intangible assets, increased 26.4% to $6.7 million. The increase is primarily related to the improved operating performance in the first half, which was partially offset by higher depreciation related to the drone business. As previously announced to the market, the group extended its current debt facility to the 22 December 2025. Other than the repayment date, there were no material modifications to the arrangement. The company has repaid an additional $4 million in bank debt during the first half FY '24, reducing the overall debt to $20 million. Due to the group's strong balance sheet and improving financial performance, the Board has decided to declare an interim dividend for FY -- first half FY '24 of $0.011 per share. The dividend is unfranked. In addition, the Board has adopted a target dividend policy of approximately 100% of net profit after tax to be paid as an interim and a final dividend annually. The policy can be altered at any time based on the liquidity needs and performance of the company and is subject to adjustments for the nonrecurring or noncash items that may impact NPAT. Previously, the company announced that it had initiated an on-market share buyback for up to 10% of its outstanding shares for a period of up to 12 months. Since the beginning of FY '23, the company has repurchased and retired 13.4 million shares, which represents 6.2% of the share base, for $6.2 million. The strength of our balance sheet and increased flexibility in our bank facility now provides opportunity for future capital management and growth initiatives. Before turning back to Peter, I'd just [ like ] to share my thanks to both Scott and Gary for their significant performance and contribution to this organization over many years. I'll now turn back to Peter for an update on the second half for FY '24.

So future results are likely to be highly dependent on the economic conditions in the markets in which we operate, obviously. However, we're pleased with the January 2024 revenue and the overall performance in the first half. All four of our markets continue to be well positioned with solid affiliate lineups, strong sales teams and a very strong competitive position in our largely unique offering. We've got a strong balance sheet with ample liquidity and believe that everything is in place for strong financial performance as economic conditions continue to improve. This ends our composed remarks, and we'll now open the line to questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from the line of Julian Mulcahy from E&P.

Just a couple for me. Firstly, the inventory in Canada was down again. So it's now 2 sequential halves. Is there something going on there? Is there contracts expiring?

I think while Brent is looking at that, I'll have a quick go at answering that. I believe that that's due to the closure of some radio networks that we had arrangements with, that the stations have actually exited the market. As a result of that, obviously, we no longer pay for the inventory that we were contracted to take from them.

So we're at the run rate now? That's all in the numbers?

In terms of -- it's not a material amount of money. But yes, it's -- the flow-through of that is largely in the numbers. And I believe that the impact of that is relatively neutral in terms of the overall numbers in any case.

And on the Australian business, the average price was down. I know price can move around. So is that just a mix thing, or is there sort of some sort of underlying pressure?

No, I think it's predominantly was related to a sort of July, August period in the back end of the half, Q2. There was an improvement in that, the average spot rate across the business, with the activity that Vic's driving in and across each of the geographies that we operate within. So it was more seasonality at that start of the year, but we've set ourselves a target rate for our sellout ratio and our average spot rate. So it's a reflection of those 2 months trading.

And with the drone business, I mean, Bill was very excited about the [ announcement it had ] come through. Do you -- will this build into [indiscernible], or will this be an incremental revenue...

I think at this stage, I think we would say we would encourage shareholders to treat it as an incremental revenue. We're taking a different approach to the drones these days. We're not investing heavily in free shows and providing them to advertisers at no cost. We are doing shows where we believe that there's either a clear positive P&L impact from the show itself or where we believe that it's significantly enhancing the relationship with the advertiser. There's a number of recent cases where we're working with -- in one recent case, a relatively new advertiser to us who has been incredibly supportive of us, and we believe we're showing impact for them in their business, and the use of the drone shows will simply accelerate the realization of that impact. We are doing drone shows in Australia. We have one scheduled as soon as tonight, subject to weather. I think it might be delayed until later given the weather forecast. But these shows are rolling out. We did one at the Australian Open. We've done some Chinese New Year shows. So we're not giving away drones by any chance. We still believe that they are a great enhancement to our advertising proposition. But I guess I'd say we have a stricter P&L accountability around the drones.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from the line of Conor O'Prey from Canaccord Genuity.

Maybe just a question on the two quarters that make up the half. It looks like the second quarter overall was a bit better than the first quarter, improving trends, I guess, in 3 of the 4 businesses, just backing out the revenue provided at the AGM. The one that sort of sticks out was Canada a bit soft. But can you maybe talk through some of the highlights of the second quarter? It looks like Brazil very strong and U.K. returning to growth in that period?

Yes. So across the board, I think it's -- I'd say ATN definitely reflects your commentary, Conor, that the second quarter was driven by Vic in and across the markets at a regular cadence of delivering revenue and sellout ratio per week. BTN has had a successful first half, both first quarter and second quarter. You can see that within the revenue numbers. But as well, they're turning that revenue into profitability, the significant EBITDA turnaround for the Brazil business, which is incredibly positive. CTN had a positive first quarter, but a more challenging second quarter. So probably the inverse of the commentary, Conor, and then the U.K. definitely had a very strong second quarter with improved impacts availability, which dropped to revenue and then through to the bottom line.

And there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to Peter for closing remarks.

Okay. Well, once again, thank you, everyone, for joining us. To conclude, I guess, we're very pleased with our current group performance, and we remain confident about the future. I'll say it again, we've hired a new locally based executive management team. And we believe that's really important in terms of driving the collaboration across the markets and to drive that country in-country P&L accountability. So we're [ terrifically ] excited about what the future holds there. Again, I would like to reiterate our thanks to both Scott and Gary for their really significant contribution to the business over many, many years. So thank you to you guys. GTN's well positioned to continue to deliver solid earnings growth with our new team, our strong country heads in each of our markets, and with clearly a very solid balance sheet that provides us with a high degree of optionality. We look forward to speaking to you again after the fiscal 2024 results. And once again, we thank our shareholders for their ongoing support.

This concludes today's conference call. Enjoy the rest of your day. You may now disconnect.