HKT Trust and HKT Limited (6823) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening, and welcome to the HKT 2021 Results Presentation. Joining us are Susanna Hui, Group Managing Director; and Evan Wong, Chief Financial Officer. We'll start with the presentation followed by Q&A. And with that, I'll turn it to Susanna.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for attending our interim results announcement for the HKT. During the first half of the year, while Hong Kong continued to see dips in daily infections, and obviously, the local economy also starting to show initial signs of recovery, we are pleased to report that HKT has indeed survived the fight and emerged stronger, and reported resumed growth in all areas as you can see from the first slide here. Revenue improved by 7%, with EBITDA rising by 3% and AFF expanding by 2%. As such, HKT has announced an interim distribution of HKD 0.307, which represents a 2% increase from last year. This solid performance reflects the scale and resilience of our diversified business portfolio, our strong fixed and mobile network proposition, our constant alertness to rapidly changing market dynamics, our responsiveness to evolving customer needs, our digital initiatives, both internal and external as well as our relentless focus on OpEx and productivity. Moving on to the next slide. As the world navigated through the pandemic, people have embraced whole new ways to live and to work, accelerating the digital adoption on all fronts, including shopping, entertainment, payment and medical. Accordingly, HKT has been augmenting its core connectivity services with new digital business in adjacencies showing nascent growth. Examples include The Club, our loyalty platform, which now converged the redeem and shop experience. And riding on our extensive customer base and personalized offers through analytics, hopefully, creating a side flywheel effect to drive traffic and spending going forward. We also have fintech, which includes our Tap & Go mobile wallet, providing payment and financial services to consumers and merchants. Telemedicine platform, our DrGo is also quickly expanding into the medtech digital ecosystem. I'll be able to share with you more details in my presentation later. Turning to mobile first. Our postpaid base continued to expand during the first half to over 3.26 million, comprising a sustained growth of our premium 1O1O customer base and indeed, reflecting the demand for our superior network quality and premium customer service. Our continued efforts in customer retention and deepened engagement via The Club also led to a historically low churn of 0.7%. Despite the persistent roaming hangover, which obviously will not improve until travel resumes, the first half saw strong growth in local services revenue, which improved by 5% on the back of a 3% increase in local ARPU, which honestly more than compensate the roaming vacuum evident in the first half. The ARPU increase was driven by our growing 5G adoption. Moving on to the next slide. As evident from the results here, our efforts in driving 5G adoption are indeed bearing fruits. As at the end of June, our 5G customer base reached 454,000 and continue to grow throughout July, hitting 528,000 by July end, which represents now a 16% penetration. I believe that we have the largest number of customers in the market. And our target is to reach at least a 20% penetration by year-end. Importantly, customer upgrades to 5G led to an ARPU uplift of around $70 as well as new value-added services and revenue opportunities. For example, our csl.5G AR Lens app is acting now as a sales channel for partners and merchants, both online to off-line and online to online as well, in strengthening customer interaction via location-based messages as well as gamifications. We now have more than 390 merchants and over 150,000 registered users who regularly use our AR lens platform to get the latest offers and merchant coupons. If we are to talk about our mobile strength, we need to talk about our strong network proposition. Our market leadership in 5G is indeed a testament to our clear superiority of our 5G network. Since the launch of our 5G in April last year, our 5G network has already achieved a new territory-wide outdoor as well as a very extensive indoor coverage by the end of last year. And we are the first to provide seamless coverage along the 6 major MTR lines. And by June this year, we had extended the entire MTR system covered, including the new Tuen Ma line. And in the first half, we further extended our coverage to the most popular hiking trails and remote scenic sports, which is increasingly important as more and more Hong Kong people turn to outdoor activities during the pandemic. Of particular note is that we are the only mobile network operator using dedicated 2100 megahertz 5G spectrum across the MTR system, while the 4G spectrum is specifically dedicated to 4G users, unlike the dynamic spectrum sharing that the other operators are using. So this will be able to ensure high speed and stability for our 5G customers without compromising the experience of existing 4G users. At the end of the day, the penetration of 5G right now is 16%, as I said. So a huge -- a vast majority of the users are still using 4G. And it's very important to preserve the user experience of the 4G as well. Another highlight of our strength of network is the fact that we have deployed a lot of massive MIMO active antenna over a number of locations, right now, exceeding 300, which is the most among the local operators in Hong Kong. This is in addition to the traditional passive antenna so that the network can support a large number of users to enjoy consistently high speeds concurrently. Turning to the enterprise and public sectors. Obviously, alongside the new 5G opportunities on the consumer front, in terms of encouraging 5G adoption amongst the SMEs, we are also supporting [ other ] initiatives. And in the enterprise and public sectors, we believe that there is a huge potential, in particular, certain verticals, and let me share with you a few of these verticals here. Firstly is the health care industry. We are working with many, many hospitals in Hong Kong to leverage the 5G infrastructure in terms of the Internet of medical things as well as other applications in hospital for remote consultation, mentoring as well as other operation support. As of to date, a total of 15 hospital contracts were signed up. The other vertical is obviously the property vertical. Shopping mall operators as well as property developers are also using 5G to enable smart applications in order to provide a better experience for shoppers, residents and tenants. And right now, we have over 30 smart property projects in progress, which, of course, will continue to contribute to top line and EBITDA in the coming 1 or 2 years. Another important vertical is construction. Customers are using 5G combined with robotic drones, IoT and all that to ensure safety as well as to monitor the progress and quality of the construction sites. Now not just 5G applications, the new normal created has an insatiable appetite from large enterprise customers as far as SMEs to digitalize their front-end and back-end business processes. As a trusted partner, our HKT enterprise solutions team has been winning many projects during the first half, ranging from new infrastructure installations as well as mission-critical digital transformation project as well. Of particular high demand, evident from the first half, are cloud collaboration applications, Security as a Service for instance, multi-cloud and multiservice SD-WAN. And HKT is able to provide a one-stop shop for integrated solutions in order to provide increased differentiation and stickiness for our corporate customers. With service reliability becoming increasingly important, we continue to add new logos to our portfolio as well as witnessing a lot of win backs from our competitors as well. Turning to our international business. as connectivity and cloud intersect, our international business arm, PCCW Global, have been transforming from a traditional global carrier into a technology-led service leader. What do we mean by a technology-led service leader? We have built a software-enabled platform labeled Console Connect that provides direct connectivity between data centers, cloud zones, SaaS applications, virtual machines and IoT devices on an automated, on-demand and secure basis, underpinned by our global transmission layer of submarine cables as well as IP infrastructure. This platform now provides interconnectivity across 50 countries, 450 data centers around the world and 60 cloud zones. And of course, we are continuing expanding. We are now positioning Console Connect as a platform ecosystem to market, to sell and service online. Turning to our broadband business. Despite a significant reduction in COVID cases in Hong Kong, many companies are still accommodating work-from-home arrangement, and many schools and universities still deliver a hybrid of classes online and off-line. This is indeed a new normal for many people here. As such, the broadband business continued to witness keen demand with broadband network revenue increasing by 3% for the first half, reflecting very strong demand for our reliable high-speed fiber-to-the-home, which grew by 7% during the first 6 months. Our Home Wi-Fi router solutions also enable customers to enjoy a quality in-home broadband experience. These solutions have penetrated 22% of our customer base and provided an ARPU uplift of over $90. Also, we are continuously selling our Smart Living home solutions total package to property developers for new residential projects. And we have already signed up 69 developers across 160 projects since launch. And these, again, will be able to contribute to revenue and EBITDA in the coming 2 to 3 years. And talking about our network, we always stress that we have a very strong network proposition, both mobile and fixed. And in fact, fixed and mobile convergence is our strength. So during the pandemic where people spend more time at home, it has been proven that fixed broadband is resilient. Fixed is indeed resilient. As I said before, we at HKT offer a very strong network proposition, and this is our unique differentiation in terms of the fixed mobile convergence. So while our fiber-to-the-home network leveraging on the previous investment that we have made over the past many years, now covers 90% of homes. And we continue to progressively build out our extensive infrastructure. Furthermore, we support the government initiative to expand broadband to rural, remote villages and so on, which is planned to contribute revenue for the next coming 2 to 3 years as well. And in areas where fiber is not permissible, for instance, the old buildings, we have complemented service via 5G wireless to the home, lifting our integrated high-speed broadband access to over 97% of homes in Hong Kong. Now turning to Now TV. Now TV, we have consolidated Now TV starting from, I think, Q4 last year. So during the first half of the year, the key highlight for Now TV is obviously the broadcast of EURO 2020. We have indeed introduced a number of innovative viewing experiences, such as 4K ultra HD, Watch Party feature that allows friends to interact virtually while watching programs on a new -- on the Now Player app. This has, in fact, increased viewership and solicit a lot of exciting response from fans, overwhelming response from fans indeed. And we saw viewership exceeding the previous EURO by more than 72%. And we have also collaboration with our popular homegrown artists from ViuTV, which have also expanded audience base to non football fans. And on top of these new programs, ancillary programs, we have innovative advertising solutions on these fringe programs. And therefore, despite a relatively difficult challenging macro market in the first half, advertising revenue also surged by 48% from Now TV. On the content side, we continue to grow the different contents. And especially in the face of growing selection of D2C entertainment choices in the market, which obviously creates a lot of competition, Now TV is focusing on delivering a tailored content, including some self-curated Now True and Now Studio. And we will continue, obviously, to collaborate with ViuTV as well on some of the local content. At home of sports, we continue to consolidate our leadership position in live sports. The good news is that we have secured a broadcast of Champions League for another 3 years and providing comprehensive coverage of the recently very popular Olympics, talk of the town, which has attracted significant local viewership with success of Hong Kong athletes. We are also achieving greater engagement and stickiness by improving our home menu and enhancing our UI/UX and enabling multiple user profiles as well as rewarding customers with our Club points. We have also continued to grow subscriber base on our OTT platform, Now E, which attracts a lot of millennials and enabling the sale of seasonal parts and events parts, which, of course, together with our broadband and mobile business, provide us with a lot of synergy to cross-sell. Turning now to the new digital business, The Club, convergence of loyalty and e-commerce. Leveraging our extensive telco customer interactions obviously and deep first-party data, we continue to invest in this loyalty program and also expand the currently available product categories from handset, electronics products to nonelectronics products. The Club also provides a digital platform for members to shop and redeem together using Club points and cash and also provides a platform for our merchant partners to cross-sell different products. We are also providing insights into customer -- different customer preferences. And this will be enabling us to offer personalized offers for both telco services and nontelco spending. And recent results shows that The Club has approaching 1 million unique monthly visitors in the first half, which is 3x of that in the previous period. And the GMV also doubled for the period. Aided by insight, we are also -- we have also recently launched a health and wellness program app, which would enable us to supercharge the digital insurance distribution as well. Turning to the next slide is our Tap&Go mobile wallet. Now we are 1 of the 4 platforms chosen to help distribute consumption vouchers in support of the government initiative to help boost the local retail spending as well as promoting e-payment. The number of customer accounts have risen to 3.5 million the end of July. And on merchant side, the smart point-of-sale terminal orders by our merchants have increased 7x as well. Healthtech, our telemedicine platform, DrGo. Since launch, we have now accumulated 218,000 registered users as of now. We continue to drive expansion of partner ecosystems with telemedicine at its core. A lot has yet to be done in terms of increasing the activation as well as encouraging repeated use. So the service scopes now, on top of the GP, also includes mental health consultation and chronic health disease management, for example, hypertension care as well in order to drive up, as I say, user activity and recurring transactions. We have also partnered and pharmaceutical companies to expand channels for customer acquisition. And a health-related e-commerce platform was also launched in June, initially focusing on selling vaccination packages and also body checker packages as well. Turning to the next slide. As a corporate citizen, we see our role in caring for our employees and also the community at large. And in support of the public vaccination program, we provide paid leave for our employees to encourage taking the jab and offer free remote mental health counseling via DrGo as well. During the first half, we also rolled out fiber connections to rural villages. And together with NGOs in Hong Kong, we are also providing wireless broadband to subdivided flats, free of charge. To promote diversity, we offer scholarships for female students majoring in STEM and tech. Environmental protection, a reduction in carbon emission are all important subjects nowadays. And on this front, we completed the installation of solar panels at one of our exchange buildings, and more are to come in terms of installation of solar panels in a lot of other exchanges and design the pipeline. These are just some examples of our CSR initiatives, and we will continue to enhance our program going forward. The highlight. Despite the challenging macro factors over the last 18 months or so, HKT has demonstrated resilience and operational continuity due to our business breadth and scale, our constant alertness to rapidly changing market dynamics, our responsiveness to evolving customer needs. Indeed, we survived the fight and emerged stronger. Near term, we expect customer 5G upgrades and the digitalization needs of our enterprise customers will continue to deliver growth. And medium term, we work hard on unleashing the potential within our digital business, which I have covered just now in order to create value for shareholders. With that, I will pass to Evan to cover the financials. Thank you.

Yes. Thank you, Susanna. Let's first have a recap of the key financial highlights of the group during the first half of 2021. AFF, as discussed, we have shown a growth by 2% during this period to USD 298 million. Our total revenue was also up by 7% to around USD 2 billion for the period, included in which our service revenue also increased by 3% to USD 1.81 billion. The growth is mainly driven by the continuous strong demand on our broadband and local data connectivity services, the encouraging 5G uptake on the mobile side as well as the full consolidation of our Now TV business since this period. This growth momentum has fully offset the negative impact brought by the reduced roaming revenue under the global travel restrictions as well as the volatility in terms of our international voice wholesale business. At the same time, riding on a strong 5G handset sales during the period, our mobile handset sales also surged by 58% to USD 196 million in the first half. So as a whole, the EBITDA of HKT group has increased by 3% in the first half to USD 733 million. And for the net profit, the amount is USD 244 million, remained fairly steady as compared with the same period last year. Looking into the details of our TSS segment. On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see that our local TSS revenue has increased by 5% year-on-year to USD 888 million, in which our broadband and local data business continued to be the key growth driver with the revenue surge by 5% to USD 497 million. On one hand, our superior infrastructure and network has ensured strong and resilient demand from customers under the new remote working and learning arrangement in the society. On the other hand, underpinned by the accelerated pace of digitalization of enterprise customers as well as the public sector, we continue to be successful in securing various material project wins during the period, which helped to fill our continuous growth in our local TSS revenue. And to include in the international business, the revenue of which being affected by the volatility on our international voice wholesales business, our total TSS revenue for the period was USD 1.313 billion. It declined by 1% year-on-year. But given the minimal margin contribution attributed to the voice wholesales business, our total TSS EBITDA for the period has still shown a growth by 1% to USD 490 million if EBITDA margin kept steady at the level of 37%. Turning to our mobile business. Under the global travel restriction, as discussed, our roaming revenue was still underpressured during the period. However, we are still able to maintain our total mobile services revenue at a stable level at USD 459 million, thanks to the encouraging 5G uptake as highlighted by Susanna just now. If to exclude the roaming and IDD revenue, our local mobile service revenue actually has increased by 5% year-on-year. Our postpaid subscriber pool has further expanded to over 3.26 million by end of June, with the postpaid ARPU continue to be on a rising trend from HKD 184 by end of last year to HKD 187 by end of June. At the same time, our sales of handset, as mentioned, has increased by 58% to USD 196 million. And therefore, the total revenue for mobile segment in the first half was USD 655 million, a growth by 12% year-on-year. And the EBITDA also increased by 1% to USD 266 million for the period, and the service EBITDA margin was also kept steady at 58%. On our Pay TV business. Now TV has been integrated into HKT Group since the fourth quarter last year such that it has a full 6-month financial contribution in this period. The revenue and EBITDA of Now TV in the first half were USD 158 million and USD 27 million, respectively. In particular, this advertising revenue has surged by 48% year-on-year, benefiting from the successful broadcasting of EURO 2020 as well as a recovery of spending by certain enterprise customers during the period. Our Now E streaming services have also gained increasing popularity such that our total installed customer base for the Now TV business as a whole has expanded to over 1.35 million by end of June. And if to compare this to the same period last year as reported under PCCW Group, our EBITDA of USD 27 million in current period represents a growth by 7% year-on-year. This shows the initial benefit realized from the operation synergies under our quadplay platform in terms of both marketing initiatives and cost management. If -- to take a closer look at our operating expenses for TSS and mobile business, we are able to achieve an overall OpEx saving by 7% year-on-year on a total basis, thanks to our continuous effort in process digitalization as well as tightened cost control. On the other hand, we continue to invest in certain new and growing digital business platform such as The Club, the fintech as well as the health care platforms so as to drive the medium- to long-term growth momentum of the group as a whole. And also after including the OpEx expenditure as incurred by the Pay TV business, our total OpEx spending for the period was USD 305 million. Apart from OpEx, we are also monitoring on a very close basis on our capital expenditure, such that as you can see, our total CapEx spend in the first half of USD 155 million was fairly steady as compared with the same period last year. In particular, on the TSS segment, we have achieved a CapEx saving by 9% year-on-year with a reduced CapEx amount of USD 81 million. This is the benefit from our extensive local fiber backbone as well as the international cable investment that we have already made over the past years. Such saving is able to meet and address the slight increase in the CapEx spending on our mobile side in the first half in respect to our 5G interval as well as the consolidation of the capital expenditure on our Now TV business such that our overall CapEx-to-revenue ratio has further moved from 8.2% as reported in the first half of last year to 7.7% in this period, which are all well continuing to define within our 10% guidance. On the details of our adjusted fund flows, we have just discussed about our growth in EBITDA and steady capital expenditure. The total customer acquisition costs and license fee for this period has increased to USD 69 million, mainly reflecting the consolidation of the CAC as incurred by our now TV business. And by the same reason, the payment for right-of-use asset, basically representing the rental expenditure, also increased slightly to USD 104 million. But on the other hand, given the lowered market interest rate, in particular on the HIBOR, our cash outflow for the net finance cost paid for the period has reduced by 26% to USD 36 million. And such saving is able to compensate and offset the slight increase in our cash tax payment as well as the changes in working capital for the period, such that as discussed, AFFO or AFF has increased by 2% to $298 million for the first half, translating to an income distribution of HKD 0.307 per each share stapled unit in issue. On the details of our profit and loss account, we have just gone through our revenue, OpEx and EBITDA. Our depreciation and amortization charges has increased by 10% in this period to USD 353 million. On one hand, this reflects the inclusion of amortization charge of customer acquisition costs as well as content costs as incurred by the Pay TV business. And on the other hand, it also includes an increase in our 5G license amortization. And again, due to the lowered market interest rate, our P&L finance cost has also gone down by 15% to USD 72 million. And the P&L income tax has increased slightly by USD 2 million, such that our total net profit for the period was USD 244 million, being fairly steady as compared with same period last year. Then quickly on our gearing position. Our total gross debt outstanding by end of June was around USD 5.56 billion with the corresponding gross debt-to-EBITDA ratio maintained at around 3.4x. Currently, we have a total liquidities on hand of around $1.3 billion, including undrawn bank facilities totaling over USD 1 billion. And we continue to carry an investment-grade rating at BBB and Baa2. Then on our debt maturity profile. Earlier in this year, we have completed the financing arrangement for all the bank facilities originally maturing in this year, such that you all can see we don't have any further immediate refinancing needs at this moment. Our current portion of floating rate debt of the total is around 45%. And our effective interest rate for the first half was 2.5%, which has declined as compared with over 3% in the same period last year. And of course, we will continue to monitor the market situation and the interest rate trend on a very close basis so as to fine-tune and enhance our debt structuring profile from time to time. With this, it also ends the final review for our first half results. Thank you.

Thanks. We'll take the questions now. The first question, how do you balance 5G adoption pace against ARPU lift? What's the mobile service revenue growth outlook for the next 6 to 12 months?

Thank you for the question. Mobile service revenue growth outlook for the next 6 to 12 months, again, as I have mentioned just now, I think roaming revenue will continue to be sort of providing a real vacuum unless, of course, global travel restrictions start to be lifted. So we do not expect that there is a lot of upside from that one. But the local services revenue from the 5G migration, which I said just now again, provide an ARPU uplift of more than HKD 70 per plan, will continue to drive the services revenue growth, which I think that the current growth trajectory that was evident in the first half will continue. Especially in the second half, we'll be able to see some more of the enterprise 5G applications projects to be realized as well. So again, I would say that in terms of the momentum, growth momentum will be able to maintain what we report in the first half.

Thank you. The next question, when do you expect the new initiatives, new digital initiatives such as The Club and fintech to reach scale? And will you report them separately?

I think a lot of these are quite new. So we are, in fact, investing continuously in these new businesses. At appropriate time, we'll be able to sort of carve these out, hopefully, and report the at least operating metrics to all.

Next question. What are the critical factors in the success of HKT enterprise solutions securing new projects and winning back customers?

Again, I think we are -- our unique proposition is that we are not just providing connectivity. We are now providing a lot of end-to-end solutions. And as and when -- and in these days, a lot of customers are indeed migrating to cloud, adopting multi-cloud, hybrid, on-prem and cloud. A lot of these applications, including even the Security as a Service, cybersecurity measures and so on, do require end-to-end solutions for both big corporates as well as the smaller companies. And I think HKT enterprise team is very well positioned to provide end-to-end solutions. I think this is a very unique proposition unrivaled by the other competitors. And also, I think we have built a strong alliance with a lot of partners in the entire ecosystem. So as we can see from the past, a lot of the bigger projects, we are partnering with different service providers, different business partners. For instance, smart parking, we are partnering with a French provider -- vendor as well. So I think the key now is that alliance, collaboration with ecosystem partners and end-to-end solutions to the reliability of our network, reliability of our service.

And then the next question. Do you think the decline in local telephony services will continue? Or is this just a product current tough business environment?

Local telephony as in the fixed line business, I think the trend -- the downtrend will continue. There are a number of factors affecting this. Obviously, one is the generally lower ARPU on the residential fixed line. Two is, obviously, mobile substitution. We have, of course, in the past, used the iTablet to maintain relevance, to continue the relevance at home. But still, I think mobile substitution is a trend. Thirdly, we also see some of the effects of the increasing trend of emigration happening, especially for the past few months. So we see some line termination due to families emigrating abroad. And finally, I think in terms of the SME and the business consolidating because of relatively tough, challenging market environment, that also affects the fixed line as well. This trend will continue, but it will be able to pick up a bit on the enterprise side, on the commercial side when the economy picks up, hopefully, in the coming year or so.