Métropole Télévision S.A. (MMT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good evening, one and all. I'm sorry. We can't meet each other in person for the presentation of the 2020 results. As usual for these presentations, let's start with a short video about our activity for the past year. And then with my colleagues from the Executive Board, Regis Ravanas, Jerome Lefebure and Mr. Larramendy, we will come back and comment on the 2020 results and the 2021 outlook. [Presentation]

All right. Well, after this presentation of the video, let's come back to the 2020 results. 2020 was a very peculiar year. So in the year 2020, we tried first to do -- think strategically, but also to grow our activities. So an agile response to the crisis in order to adapt our news outputs with more news, which performs relatively well. The creation of new programs you saw one to Tous en cuisine and the intensification of crossovers between our various media, Regis Ravanas will tell you more about its radio with also TV and digital. And from the beginning of March, we launched an extensive savings plan from late February onwards, in fact, in order to adapt the group. Consolidated revenues, of course, we had a major decline of EUR 127.4 million for all advertising revenues of all media and EUR 55.1 million for non-advertising revenues, and there's also a base effect here for the whole group. And we implemented a set of savings programs with operating expenditures down by EUR 169 million, EUR 67.6 million for programming costs, all of our programs. We had committed to a EUR 100 million savings program compared to the budget of 2020 because of the postponement of the soccer euro. So we had over EUR 100 million compared to the budget. And for the actual 2019, that did not include the euro, we delivered EUR 67.6 million on programming costs. Taxes were reduced by the cancellation of specific taxes and also the decline in business for around EUR 30 million and other costs, EUR 71.6 million, EUR 24 million to EUR 25 million, of which, because of personnel costs for all categories of staff together. So performance shares, profit sharing, headcount reductions, both in terms of base and scope. We can come back to that with Jérôme Lefébure later. We had 3 structural operations. iGraal that was closed during COVID in the first lock down with a transformation of our equity stake into 2 things. First of all, with GSG shares, which is a digital marketing group from Germany, and we are now the leading shareholder for them. And also a remainder of EUR 35 million in cash that we received during the first lockdown. Then we accelerated the innovation capability in streaming with the development of Bedrock and that of Salto, Bedrock, internationally, in order to attract international customers. And so we brought RTL Group into the capital. So it's a 50-50 structure that we deconsolidated in order to be able with RTL Group to access a larger international customer base. And on home shopping, we made this model more sustainable, thanks to the merger that we had with the home shopping operator that also acquired TF1's business and merge the 2. So we deconsolidated HSS. And at the end of the year, now we only have a listing fee and a license. So we still broadcast home shopping programs on our TV, but without any risk. And we still have best of TV, but we have agreements for a potential exit later. Regarding group EBITA, it was EUR 270.7 million. It's the second highest level ever compared to the situation last year where we were at EUR 284 million. Operating margin, 21.3%, plus 1.7 percentage points. We aimed for 20% originally. We also had net profit of EUR 276.6 million, which will be the second highest ever. The highest was after the sale of TPS after 10 years in business that created a big capital gain for the group. We exited in 2005. And we invested in a number of sectors like M6 Mobile that we also divested from, MonAlbumPhoto, Mistergooddeal, [indiscernible], the Board of Football Club. So we rotate our equity, and now we recycled our equity and digital marketing. The capital gain for iGraal is just shy of EUR 100 million, and HSS, the capital gain and the Bedrock, all that combined accounts for EUR 123 million, EUR 124 million. And that -- it goes down to the net profit. Some of that is in cash. And so that's why we could have that net profit, which materializes an effective and renewed strategy regarding diversifications. And I'll get back to that later, of course. Key figures for 2020. Consolidated revenue is down by 12.5%, both because of scope effects, but also decline, especially in sales by 11.5%, which is in line with market trends, which is what David Larramendy will explain. Operating expenses were down by 13.6%. So overall, consolidated EBITA dropped by 4.8% for the full year. And net profit because of the reasons I mentioned earlier, increased by 61% to EUR 276.6 million. The operating margin for the group, I'll remind you, is slightly over 21%. The decline in revenues related to the COVID context and the exit from the consolidation scope, offset by cost reductions. Here, for all business lines in the group, you can see the split for television. We offset all of the decline in advertising revenues with a decline in costs. So the television business had EBITA that grew by EUR 2 million compared to the previous year, EUR 224 million will get back to that, EUR 225 million to be precise. Radio is based on fixed costs. So I can't pass on the decline in revenues as much as possible, but it offset that with a big reduction in OpEx. So good performance, matching the decline in advertising revenues by EUR 24.3 million with a decline in EBITA of EUR 8.2 million. Same thing for Production and Audiovisual Rights because movie releases were -- there were a fewer of those. And so fewer promotion expenditures and less amortization of movies that were produced because of the non-release, but better use of the catalog. So despite of a decline in revenues of around EUR 13 million, the decline in earnings was -- EBITA was only EUR 1 million. For other diversifications, we'll come back to it. There was a scope effect. The diversifications that we kept had an EBITA that improved slightly, but there's the effect of divestments that I talked about, which leads to a decline in EBITA for EUR 12 million, especially for iGraal. For the others, well, Jerome will comment on them later. In total, our EBITA declined slightly by a few million compared to the year 2019. Now looking at ratings, well, I'm sorry that time Thomas Valentin is not here, but he's a contact case. But he just tested negative. We didn't have time to establish a link with him. But audience ratings for television were very good because we had 3.58 hours. So almost 20 minutes more than last year, whereas streaming platforms only grew by 15 minutes compared to the previous year with a daily coverage of 44 million individuals. So television as a medium is doing very well during difficult periods. For the 4+ audience share, we increased our audience share slightly to 14.6% for all channels. And for the commercial target, our share remained more or less flat at 22.7% versus 22.8% for the group at a time in which we slashed costs. I'll focus on that. Whereas the public television sector saw its costs remain stable, and revenues were guaranteed plus a public subsidy of EUR 70 million for public TV and radio. We had to face the decline in advertising revenues like all other private groups. So our colleagues at TF1 or M6 in the competitive sector, well, that shows the good results that showed all the efforts that we made. Whereas the public TV sector had guaranteed revenues. As regards to the elements explaining such performance, when it comes to the M6 channel, we had initiatives that paid off, like during lockdown or during the holidays with the Cyril Lignac Cooking Show Tous en direct. Objective, Top Chef worked very well. The 7:45 news segments worked very well. And now they have between 3.5 million and 3.7 million viewers in January or February. So very high ratings. Same thing for the 12:45 news segment. And Scenes de Menages, it's the favorite sitcom in the country. It's the most watched with an average in January of around 4.5 million viewers, and for the whole year 2020 of 4 million. Historical brands and franchises were very successful. You can see them here. So in particular, if you look at the Top Chef season, that just started, the new season, we had the best start ever or at least since the first season for Top Chef. So the big franchises like Le Meilleur Patissier, [indiscernible] Top Chef, La France a un incroyable talent, all confirmed their firepower on the M6 channel. For DTT ratings, there was an increase for W9's audience as the third biggest channel behind TMC and BFMTV because it's in our news channel. And we are #2 for women under 50 and 3.8% 6ter. We sell the 2 channels together in Puissance TNT. 6ter is at 2.8%. And it overtook C8 for women under 50. For the season, we're talking about, which is a great performance, given all the investments that were announced on competitor channels. And Gulli, that's one of the goals we set ourselves when we acquired the Lagardère channels. We wanted to improve performance of Kids TV, but also on women under 50 and Gulli confirmed its power with 1.7% for the commercial target. Regarding DTT channels in the group, that was the best year ever for W9 in spite of the big cost reductions on programming. 6ter, best year ever for women under 50. And Gulli, best year for women responsible for purchases with children for this target -- women responsible for purchases with children, which is a big chunk of the commercial target. Gulli is competing with France 4, which is back to screening cartoons, whereas the authorities justified keeping France 4 alive with educational programming, whereas now they're mostly airing Cartoons. So we hope that the authorities are going to either finally pull the plug on France 4, which was the initial plan to save money, or turn it into an educational channel, which is what public television promised, which is not the reality at all now because there's a total dearth of educational programs and is competing head on with private Kids channels. For paid channels on DTT, Paris Premiere performed very well, it grew its audience. As did Teva, they're quite profitable, thanks the to their distribution agreements and their mixed status. So they have distribution revenues as pay-TV and also advertising revenues, adding to their offering. They're perfectly positioned. One for high income segments for Paris Premiere, and Teva is very popular with women. So a very good performance, especially in terms of profitability. 6play, of course, had record viewership with 1.3 billion videos viewed in 2020, plus 10% year-on-year, 16.3 million active users every month. On average, there are between 1.3 million, 1.4 million, 1.2 million users a day on 6play, which is a streaming complements to our main channels. And we also have specific programming for 6play to flesh out what we are on our channels. And so a great targeting also, that's very interesting. For Radio, I ask Regis Ravanas, who's the Head of the Radio segment to talk about audience ratings.

Good evening, one and all. A word about radio audiences, as you saw, that was a complicated moment for radio for 2 reasons: first, because of the absence of mobility, no commute, so it's more difficult for people to consume radio. When people are not driving, they're not listening to the radio. And we also had to save money as in the rest of the company in order to offset the decline in revenues. In spite of that, we were able to increase our audience share. We are the only private groups that grew. Our competitors are down. So we could make audience share -- monetizable audience share gains. We had 18.5% audience share in 2019. We're now at 18.8% for the whole group. If you look at the station by station split, RTL had great performance with its highest level ever, 13% as the best year in its history. And we are the biggest private radio station in France. Fun Radio was a bit more complicated. As I said, for music radios, music stations for young people, so we were down. However, in the last few weeks, we saw that things are recovering, given all the work, the editorial work done by the team for Fun Radio. RTL2 is very well positioned, especially on the 25 to 49 age segment. It's very efficient, and we maintained our audience share, whereas music stations saw their audiences decline, which is extremely reassuring. Audience performances are bolstered by the synergies that we had, as Nicolas explained, with the other channels in the M6 group, especially with the cross-promotion of our segments. We had advertising for radio on M6 TV and vice versa. You -- we also had shared programs like Ca peut vous arriver, which is a hit on RTL, which is now becoming a hit on M6. On W9, we've also got Double Espresso, which is the morning show for RTL2. On ne repond plus de rien, the new show by Karine Le Marchand, Laurent Baffie on RTL. Also aired on Paris Premiere. And on the right-hand side, you can see talents were now both on TV channels and radio stations like [indiscernible], Karine Le Marchand, Julien Courbet, who also host capital at the same time as he's on RTL, head of the economic department of RTL is on Paris Premiere. And there are many, many more such examples. Back to you, Nicolas. Thanks, David.

Good evening, everybody. Now the advertising year was the special year. We've had 2 quarters that were really down. The first one was minus EUR 10 million. And then Q2, minus EUR 40 million. And then the second half, we saw -- that we were back to growth, EUR 11 million during the second half for Q3 and Q4. Thanks to a good month in December. Now those that suffered were mainly -- well, traveling for tourists. They were severely hit, and it's still the case. And then fragrances, then the carmakers and other sectors like retailers or telcos and telephone operators, which have continued to invest massively in our channels. Now then we've had a decrease annually, approximately EUR 130 million, and to be broken down into EUR 100 million for our own channels and a bit less than EUR 30 million for TV channels, I mean, and EUR 30 million for the other digital vehicles and digital media and radio stations. Therefore, EUR 980 million is our revenues for the year. And the market share for the group that is advertising market share is stable, more or less. We think there's a slight growth at 27.4% for the whole market.

Thank you very much. David will be back later on. He will tell us more about 2021 and the first trends in the outlook. Now let's have a look at the different businesses, and the different divisions and their performance. Now if we look at television to start with, the result is satisfactory, of course. Because as you can see, the total decrease in revenue for the TV business, well, that's not just advertising here in terms of decrease in revenues. We have also distribution revenue and 6plays as well. And we have 8.5% decrease in the revenue for the full TV business, which was totally offset because we have an increase in EBITA by 1%, up to EUR 125.6 million. Therefore, we have kept our profitability in absolute terms, and we've increased our margin rate. Then as far as revenues for radio are concerned, now we have more fixed costs. And therefore, it's more complicated. What has happened is that the revenues were at minus 14.2% for the radio business, that is it's mainly advertising that we're looking at, and it's been offset with a slight -- or a certain cost reduction program. We've had EUR 22 million of EBITA versus EUR 30 million rounded off figure for last year. And that's for the 3 radio stations, RTL, RTL 2 and Fun Radio, as Regis said before. Then production and Audiovisual Rights, as I said before, we've had fewer releases at the cinema. The cinemas were closed. Yet, we were the distribution company in France that had the greatest number of releases at the cinema. We encouraged the people to go to the cinema. And it's worked really quite well when this was possible, of course, between a number of lockdowns, the 2 lockdowns. Revenues are down 17% at EUR 62.4 million, and EBITA down EUR 1 million to reach EUR 13.8 million. And we've had some nice successes. Now unfortunately, Toto stopped too early, EUR 1.1 million de Gaulle, EUR 0.9 million, and that is EUR 900,000 and some sales like The Gentleman with EUR 600,000, and we have a lineup. We hope that cinemas will reopen soon because we have more to come at the cinema this year, quite a lot that has been produced with the big hits that will be available during the second quarter. And we've used the catalog that we have, [indiscernible], with -- we've seen an increased consumption from the catalog of films. And this justifies what we had -- the business we had at SND that is we create assets being the developers by developing production and also partnerships with producers to have long-term rights to be distributed in France, but internationally as well. And we've bought catalogs so as to be able to manage our business correctly. Now other types of diversifications, we've continued with the turnover of our portfolio with the deconsolidation of HSS as of the 1st of October. And iGraal in March 2020 and. Then the 6 mobile, the contract of which ended end of June 2019. And then there are continuing activities. And so digital services, best of [indiscernible] cuisine, et cetera. And then best of TV that we have kept, as I said before, at 51%, M6 creation, which stems from our advertising house. And then EBITA is up with a good cost control, with the effect of consolidation resulted EUR 13 million versus EUR 25.3 million last year and a drop of 30.8% of revenues. So we still have value that we've created in the group, an amount of value. Bedrock at 50% with RTL Group. And in the books, we have EUR 14 million in terms of equity investment. We want this to be the tech company, the leader in streaming in Europe. We have, I mentioned before, with a book value in equity investment, which is EUR 95 million. And that's the GSG, even though the digital marketing business suffered in 2020, of course. And by the way, it's the business that we sold or that we merged that is iGraal, that suffered most because there were quite a lot of tourists. It was about tourism and the couponing business. And also digital marketing business they had in Germany and other countries suffered less. And therefore, with a slight lag effect, GSG is following their trajectory. And then Stephane Plaza that we own at the tune of 49% is doing well, as I said before. We've increased this business in 2020, and we open new branches, and we have Salto as well. Now let me tell you a bit more about Salto. Salto did really well when it was launched, the performance was good. The consumption levels are good, and consumers like it. And the road map we have -- well, we're ahead of our road map. We have 20% of the OTT subscriptions at Salto. And we hope, and we're waiting for Bouygues Telecom. We're waiting for that to be available in April that is to use the Bouygues Telecom network. And we hope we'll be able to use the other networks as well to develop Salto. We are very happy. Their share in results of minus EUR 9.6 million. The loss for Salto for the full year in 2021 will be EUR 100 million more or less. And our share in that, when we deduct the taxes, would be EUR 25 million more or less for 2021. And therefore, this will have an impact on the net profit of the group. And of course, we have to remember that Bedrock is going to be deconsolidated. Jérôme Lefébure now is going to quickly go through the financial statements.

Yes. We will start with the statement of comprehensive income. And well, you know the first lines, the top lines, we've been talking about those at length. So let's have a look at operating income or revenues. And before that, as you can see on the 31st of December 2019, we restated these financial statements in compliance with IAS 1, which is such that you have to review your financial statements after allocating an acquisition goodwill, which is what we did this year with Lagardère, the Lagardère goodwill. And therefore, this being done, we have reallocated goodwill to items that we can amortize that is brands and groups of customers or portfolios of customers. And therefore, we've had an added exchange by EUR 1.1 million we and mechanically, the impact on the net profit as well, which is EUR 0.8 million for 2019. Now this line, if you look at income and expenses, operating income and expenses, we have EUR 13.2 million in 2020 instead of EUR 10.5 million, therefore, EUR 2.7 million increase, which is due to the fact that now we have an annual amortization of part of the assets that we vote from Lagardère that in annual repeat volumes will represent EUR 3 million or EUR 3.3 million annually. That's for the operating income, reaching EUR 381 million this year to be compared to EUR 274.9 million last year. No comments on the financial earnings. But as Nicolas Tavernost said before, we've had 2 major transactions that have had an impact that is on us. Bedrock, which we own 50% with another company and the launch of Salto that have had an impact on the group. And therefore, the share in the financial statement shows a loss of EUR 11.1 million this year and a gap of EUR 15.5 million, which is explained by Salto, the share of which of their revenues is EUR 11 million before tax and Bedrock in the tune of EUR 4 million, more or less. So all of the other stakes that were presented before are all profitable and contribute in a positive way to the profit of our group. The tax level is going down, and that's because the current operating income has decreased a little by EUR 13.7 million as we saw before. And as we know as well, the tax rate in France went -- was down in 2020. And therefore, we have a tax level, which is -- or tax burden, which is lower now. That's where we have a difference of EUR 13 million in tax. The net profit is EUR 276.6 million for 2020. Therefore, a sharp increase due to the capital gains in our strategic transactions. If we look at the balance sheet now, as I've just said, I don't want to be too long to talk about goodwill because this goodwill is restated in the 2019 column. And we've reallocated a bit more than EUR 60 million of this goodwill to noncurrent assets that we can amortize. And therefore, the main explanation for this EUR 64 million increase for the current assets is due to this goodwill allocation. And on the goodwill line, this decrease is due to disposal of assets made during the year. No major impact on current assets, except from the impact of the activity. And as you probably know, if you look at the dues and debts this year, it was drawn by the level of revenues at the end of the quarter. And we have, however, managed to optimize our financial structure. If we look at liabilities now and how we finance the group, as you can see, there's a sharp increase in group equity with a level that reaches EUR 1.060 billion this year due to a number of things. The revenues this year, EUR 272 million. And also, we have equity and performance shares and the deconsolidation transactions for HSS that have had an impact, plus the absence of dividends paid out in 2020 for -- 20 -- for fiscal year 2019, which is why we have an increase in equity. And if you look at noncurrent and current liabilities, those are the effects of deconsolidation connected to our strategic transactions. And then if we look at the cash flow statement, I'd like perhaps to say something about operating activities and repeat transactions to calculate our free cash flow and the free cash flow for the group has gone from EUR 270.2 million last year to EUR 272.3 million. And this is something we intended to do through the crisis to be able to have a good free cash flow level by slowing down on non-necessary investments and by optimizing working capital requirement and operating earnings, the objective is met. And we have a cash conversion, which is even improved this year by a bit more than 100% to be compared to 95% last year. The other important thing about the cash flow statement, as I said before, is that there was no payout policy in 2020, no dividend. And if we look at the EUR 20 million line that is contributions to joint venture current accounts, we've offset the growth in Bedrock and Salto as well, and this throughout 2020. And therefore, if you look at cash for the year, we've improved by EUR 151 million. And therefore, at the end of December 2020, the group has a net cash flow position that is positive by EUR 87.2 million. We had a bit less than EUR 100 million in negative net cash flow at the end of 2019 after the acquisition of Lagardere. And finally, during the AGM on the 20th of April, we're going to pay out a dividend of EUR 1.5 per share. So as to have a payout ratio of 70% more or less, if we look at the net income for the period. And this is a bit more than the iGraal capital gain contribution, and we can, therefore, use the generation of cash and our solid financial position to have a higher dividend this year due to the fact that we didn't have any payout in 2020 for fiscal year 2019.

Thank you, Jerome. Well, very quickly, the main avenues for 2021. Of course, we need to leverage the advertising recovery, which may not yet be there, as Regis will explain. We hope that with the decline or the end of the health crisis in H2, we hope that there's going to be a strong recovery, but what we can see is that as soon as the crisis ends as we had it or -- apparent and the crisis as we had in 2020, the recovery is strong. Television and radio as a medium benefits strongly from the recovery. So we will benefit the most from the resumption in consumption in France. Then we also had the launch of Salto. We are confident about its start. We will carry on leveraging synergies between radio and television. This is now underway. It's happening in good conditions. And I hope -- well, if the results for the radio stations -- and the reason why we have the best-performing radio stations is that they are part of the group and that can leverage the editorial advertising and commercial strategies. We need to execute the synergy plan with the kids TV division, Gulli, but also Canal J and TG. And so we're executing the program we had set ourselves. Targeted advertising, that's still going to be a relatively marginal market and a test bed for 2020. We signed 2 agreements to allow for targeted advertising, one with Orange, the other one with Bouygues Telecom, so that we can accelerate the market testing and pilot experiments in 2021. But the true development is really going to happen from H2 onwards and most likely in 2022. And we also, of course, want to get from the authorities that there is a rebalancing in the operating conditions against international platforms. It's good that they have production obligations, but these should be of the same nature as the legacy operators in the future smart decree. They won't have the same obligations. So you can have catalog purchases for the international platform, something we don't get. So we want to have useful partnerships, the same as we have with a lot of producers so that they can invest more in production. So you absolutely need to rebalance the agreements between broadcasters and producers. And that shouldn't be a rent situation for them that they can leverage a minor production agreement. And so that prevents legacy operators from growing unlike what is happening in other European countries. So we had good 2020 results in spite of the crisis. We're not out of the crisis in 2021. So there are going to be further efforts to be made, but the group was there and delivered on this challenge. And we benefited from the strategy that we implemented some years ago in terms of synergies and choices in investment for TV, radio and diversification. And now with my colleagues, I'm ready to take any or all questions you might have. And I hope that we'll be able to hear them.

[Operator Instructions] Our A first question from Annick Maas from Exane BNP.

The first question is about the programming costs. How are you thinking about it for 2021? You had great results this year. So how many -- how much of the cost is going to be recurring for 2021? And you talked about the 2 contracts for addressable TV. I would like to know how the contracts are structured? And for how long? What are the variables? And what are you going to communicate about in the budget?

Well, regarding the programming cost components, well, 2021 is going to be a sports year because there's going to be the Euro Cup football that has a mechanical effect on costs, but also on revenues, I hope. Well, we're going to have extra costs for this sporting competition in 2021. Regarding the cost objective for all programming, it's going to be halfway between 2019 and 2020 in terms of cost, notwithstanding the EUR 25 million that I talked about for the Euro 2021. We're aiming for halfway costs between 2019 and 2020. And as the group was able to prove, we'll have -- to prove, we'll have flexibility in terms of costs, depending on advertising successes or not. We have very good audience momentum for all of our channels. All channels are performing well. The big franchises are performing well. So all franchises will be there. And once again, we have some flexibility compared to our goals in terms of revenues. So to answer your question, it will be somewhere between 2019 and 2020. And depending on the pace of the rate of increase or not of our advertising revenues. Keeping in mind that we are conservative for programming costs in the first quarter. Although we were conservative, we still have some big franchises and big nice ratings for the first part of the year. For targeted advertising, we're not going to give you the details of the contracts that David signed in its -- there's going to be a fee in order to get access to the data and modems from ISPs. And so these are distributor contracts. And so we'll renew them when we renew other distributor contracts. And those are contracts we signed with Orange and Bouygues Telecom. That's all I can say at this juncture, and there are some operators that we haven't signed contracts with, i.e., Free and SFR.

We have another question by Conor O'Shea.

I have three questions. The first one about advertising revenues in the first part of the year, in Q1. Are you expecting a decline in Q1 year-on-year? And to what extent at this stage? What you have in mind? Secondly, regarding the dividend and whether you're going to pay such a dividend over the long term? You didn't pay out the dividend this year and regarding the EPS. So what's your dividend policy from 2021 onwards? And third question, your main shareholder released a statement saying that they wanted to -- that they are currently thinking about market consolidation. And so they approached other players on the French market informally. So what do you know about those developments? And can you comment at this stage?

Thanks for these 3 questions. Regarding the advertising activity for Q1, all we can say is that January, February were down. Well, the month of February is not over yet. So the decline for the -- there's a decline for the first 2 months of the year versus 2020 that started well, by the way. March, of course, will have a favorable base effect as the crisis started on the 11 or 12th of March with the effects on the advertising revenues. So we hope that there's going to be a significant improvement in March, but I'm not yet able to give you cumulative figures for Q1. However, we are adapting our costs and trying to adjust them to market realities. The second question. I didn't quite understand your question about the dividend. The dividend up because net income is up strongly. That's the reason -- that's the capital gains from diversifications. And so in 2021, we'll see what our dividend policy is. Our payout ratio was always between 65% and 80%. And depending on the net income for 2021, we'll see whether we'll stick to that payout ratio or whether we increase it. So we haven't yet decided on a dividend policy for 2021. We have a robust financial situation. As was explained, thanks to our solid cash position compared to 2020, which was a sort of crisis year that we were able to emerge from. Now regarding statements and communication by our controlling shareholder, RTL group. Two things: firstly, we always said, and RTL group always said that to compete with international platforms, you either had to be internationally strong, which is difficult given their reach or strong locally. So in a given country, however, yet, now since 2002, French politics with the Frequency Awards in 2005 and 2012, the policy was to fragment the landscape between publishers and broadcasters and producers amongst broadcasters. And so roughly, there's a need for consolidation, both amongst verticals and horizontals. That's an observation. Given competition from platforms, if television in here, I'm talking about, television. And that's also true for radio. If you want to return to growth, it is possible in France to achieve that. The rules will have to change. They will have to be adapted the general rules in the sector, the relations with producers or relations between broadcasters or the antitrust systems or market evaluation by the competition authorities. Their rules need to be adopted. Now there are a number of options, and our reference shareholder decided to take a quick look at the options that it could use to strengthen the French landscape. So they are going to evaluate their options very quickly. And they will reach a conclusion or not. They are controlling shareholders, RTL Group. And they only, they will decide whether they will follow one of the options and remain a reference shareholder for the M6 Group. As a manager, what I can tell you is that M6 Group will be a key player in market consolidation. Hence -- well, consolidation cannot happen with our M6 Group. It's also necessary and not -- it is sufficient to adapt the operating rules for the sector. I've said that year after year, but it's more and more true. When you've got growth rates for digital advertising of 50%, when streaming subscriptions grow by 40% or 50%, you can't let the legacy players, which fund most of production, you can't leave them without growth. So we take our own initiatives. We created Salto, we created Bedrock for streaming. We are developing production activities, especially in cinema, but not just. We also have Golden Studio. We have partnerships with producers. But that's not enough because the size effect will be significant, very significant. And if we don't want international streaming platforms to call the shots in the broadcasting landscape, they will buy all the rights, they will dictate the situation. They will stop releasing movies in theaters. And so if there's no consolidation on the one hand and if there's no adjustments in regulations on the other hand. And that's also true for radio. Just want to side about radio because Regis Ravanas, who's the head of the radio department. He's right in pointing out that radio is severely -- commercial radios are severely impacted. The budget for all private radios in France is less than the radio France budget. So we need to find a balance. We have quotas and obligations for radio, and they're not matched by prerogative. So we need to adjust the rules and give support, and we'll probably need concentration and changes in anti concentration rules on this market. That is all I can say, and so our reference shareholders said that they were looking at options, and that's what they're going to do very soon.

Another question by Julien Roch from Barclays. Mr. Roch just disconnected. We will move on to the next question by Jérôme Bodin from ODDO BHF.

Two quick questions, add-ons to what was asked already about the beginning of the year in terms of advertising. You said that the beginning of the year was a bit difficult. Do you think that the main downward driver is curfew? If curfew is lifted, do you think that the market will go up again? That's -- and then about advertising trends, is there a gap between TV and radio as was the case in Q4? Is that still the case in Q1? Or has that been reversed? Another question about consolidation. To echo what you've just said in the statement, you talked about the creating of a strategic committee in the Supervisory Board. I wanted to understand is that an initiative that runs parallel to what RTL Group is thinking about? Or is that a delegation from RTL group? Is that parallel or a consequence? And will there be RTL representatives on this strategic rethinking committee?