MultiChoice Group Limited (MCG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello everybody, and welcome to the MultiChoice FY '24 Results Call. This is Meloy Horn. And on behalf of the group, I'd like to welcome you and also introduce the representatives of MultiChoice. With me on the call today is our CEO, Calvo Mawela; and our CFO, Tim Jacobs. I also would like to, before we proceed, just acknowledge Chris [indiscernible], who has walked this journey with us for many, many years as moderator of our results calls. Chris sadly passed away recently and may his soul rest in peace. We're sorry to his colleagues and his family for your deep loss. So, to start today's proceedings, we'd like to play you a video to remind you what we're all about. And thereafter, Calvo will start his presentation. Thank you very much. [Presentation]

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our results presentation. To start, let's turn to Slide 5. I want to begin by thanking all our teams at MultiChoice for their continued commitment to our vision of enriching the lives of millions of people through entertainment and technology. We have long held this view and in recent years have carefully invested in our strategy of enabling our customers to stay within our platform, while enjoying the services and products they need beyond just video entertainment. We continue to innovate partner, and invest to grow from our core linear video business by developing and scaling adjacent streaming and interactive entertainment services. Simply put, for our customers, it means Africa's most loved storyteller is fast becoming the entertainment platform of choice. We like to imagine this as concentric circles around our customers, a platform catering for their entertainment needs, from financial services that allow them to afford and pay for their entertainment to the technologies required for access, and of course, a choice of video and interactive entertainment options which our customers can enjoy in their homes or increasingly in their hands. The increased penetration of smartphones is changing how we consume and engage with content. We see this as an opportunity to increase our presence beyond the current 21 million households and into countless more hands across Africa. This is what the strategy looks like for us as a business, but for MultiChoice customers, our strategy means we are catering for their entertainment needs, whether they are in their homes or on the move. With DStv as your home of entertainment and the ultimate aggregator, we bring you a lean back experience with the option to stream, one place to browse, buy and consume all your content across all your devices. Through Showmax, we are bringing you a stream focused service with great local originals and the best of international content as well as mobile only Premier League sports. All are available to you anytime, anywhere. With this reminder of our strategy, let's turn to Slide 7 to focus on our progress. Our results for financial year 2024 demonstrate a resilient Group performance in challenging macro conditions. They also highlight our ambitions as reflected in the success of the new growth initiatives, where clear strategic milestones were achieved. Despite a ForEx impact of over ZAR 4 billion, which is more than the last four years combined, we have delivered a trading profit margin of 26% in our South African business and maintained positive trading profit for our business in the rest of Africa for the second consecutive year. Our teams deserve special thanks for delivering close to ZAR 2 billion in cost savings, in addition to reducing Decoder subsidies by more than ZAR 1.5 billion, allowing us to navigate the current macro environment and safeguard cash generation. This solid results in our more mature operations provide the foundation we need to confidently drive growth opportunities in places like Showmax, Moment, and SuperSportBet, which have now all progressed from being strategic ambitions to revenue-generating businesses with great growth prospects. The Showmax story is particularly exciting, and Slide 8 shows us why this past year was a pivotal year for Showmax. Having officially concluded the partnership with Comcast in April 2023, the long awaited relaunch took place in February this year. The launch included several notable achievements. We successfully launched across 44 markets on the continent, initially focusing our marketing efforts on South Africa and Nigeria, with markets like Kenya and Ethiopia to follow. We transitioned the entire tech stack to Peacock's world class platform and customized it for localized requirements like the support for low bandwidth devices and data saving functionality. We partnered with telco operators to provide our customers with maximum entertainment for minimum data cost. We migrated almost 100% of the eligible customer base to the new Showmax platform and 88% of those migrated had reactivated their accounts in the seven weeks to year-end and we enjoyed record breaking subscriber growth in the month of March. Key to the early Showmax success has not only been its world class platform and user interface, but also its valuable partners, incredible content, and great pricing. During the year, Showmax ramped-up its local content streaming to 59 originals, popular shows that drove viewership into the Tracking Thabo Bester, The Mommy Club, Adulting, and Real Housewives. This is the beginning for the new Showmax and the positive impact it will have on our business. We look forward to sharing more successes as our streaming journey continues. Showmax and all our entertainment services benefit from our Group's ongoing and increasing investment in African content, which our customers greatly value. We are the largest producer of original content on the African continent, increasing our investment at a time when most international streamers seem to be slowing down their investment outside of their core markets. At the same time, we continue to license some of the best international content globally through our long-term content partners. But let's turn to Page 9 for more on content. We produced in excess of 6,500 hours of local content again this year, accounting for over half of our general entertainment spend, and our local content library now has up to over 84,000 hours of content, 12% more than last year. Six years in the making, Shaka Ilembe was the highlight of the year and became Africa's biggest TV series ever. Shot entirely on location in South Africa, this epic production was created through the skills of over 8,000 people and watched by millions. Across Africa, we launched three new proprietary channels in Ethiopia, Uganda, and Mozambique, while also producing content in Africa's fourth most spoken language, Oromo. In addition, we unveiled a supercharged Africa Magic offering. We continue to leverage popular shows like The River, Gqeberha, and Sibongile & The Dlaminis, and we re-engage -- re-energize our youth content slate with Youngins, Wyfie, and Roomies, all of these in a targeted effort to meet the growing demand of audiences for local content. Investment in local content directly or through co-productions, will continue as one of our key differentiators, the other being sport, which we cover on Slide 10. SuperSport's headline broadcast during the year included the men's Rugby World Cup in France, the men's Cricket World Cup in India, AFCON, the FIFA women's World Cup in New Zealand and Australia, as well as the women's Netball World Cup in Cape Town. We also hosted the second SA20 cricket season, with peak audiences increasing a fair 35% from the great success last year. The FY '24 renewal cycle was a successful one. Given our track record in successful delivery, we were able to renew access to popular sports events to continue to add value to our subscribers and differentiate our services. Popular renewals included the Champions League, SA Rugby, IPL Cricket, the Tour de France, the PGA Tour, and UFC, to name a few. All of these ensure we continue delighting our customers with arguably more live sport than any broadcaster in the world. We offer over 34,000 live events to choose from, including an 8% increase in local sport content, and it's no wonder that over 30 million customers follow us on social media for their sporting news and highlights. Through SuperSport and our partners, we are truly a world of champions. Turning to Slide 11, I want to end my strategic overview on two key initiatives that I am particularly proud of. The first ever all-women crew to cover a global sporting event, the women's Netball World Cup. As part of our Here For Her campaign, it reflects our focus on growing the coverage, support, and popularity of Women's sport across Africa. Our SuperSport Schools business is also going from strength to strength. This year saw us doubling the registered base, displaying more than 49,000 hours of live programming across 43 different sporting codes, covering 900 sports festivals, more than 1,100 schools, and over 14,500 teams. As you can see, content is truly at the heart of what we do. Bringing our customers the best in local and global general entertainment and sport available in their homes and in their hands across the continent sets MultiChoice apart from its competitors. True to our vision, we continue enriching lives through entertainment and technology. So, let's turn to Slide 13 for a closer look at the performance of our various businesses. This year has been like no other in terms of economic turmoil, and we are not alone in feeling the challenges of a down cycle and weaker consumer environment. Loadshedding in South Africa remained a key challenge in the past year. Not only did we experience more loadshedding days, but also higher levels as the chart on the right shows. The negative impact on our business and its revenues cannot be underestimated, something we clearly saw through the pickup in subscribers' activity in April and May this year as we enjoyed an extended period of no disruptions. Against the backdrop of high inflation and interest rates, the rising cost of living, and disrupted power supply, we had to navigate carefully balancing decisions to safeguard cash and profitability with the need to future proof our business by investing in new opportunities. Our strategy reflects the need to cater for the challenging consumer habits in the world of video entertainment. Younger customers moving to streaming or seeking additional interactive entertainment while they watch their favorite sport are just two examples. To us, it seems that the tougher economic climate may have accelerated some of these changing preferences, making it even more important that we move ahead of the times. At the moment, it is quite hard to tell exactly which trends are cyclical and which ones are structural, but the one thing we know for sure is that nobody else has the variety of content we have for the customers we serve. This, coupled with our research capability and years of experience puts us in a great position to understand their entertainment choices, to identify their needs, and ultimately, to tap into additional growth opportunities. The graph on Slide 14 reflects our strategic ambitions around these opportunities, to build a portfolio of digital products layered on top of the traditional linear base, to drive ongoing top line growth at a time when the linear business in South Africa is starting to mature. Our strategy to grow these additional revenues is no longer only a vision, it is gaining real traction. We are in the fortunate position that we don't have to choose between linear and streaming. In some markets where broadband and data is more readily available, streaming will continue to grow, and in others, our linear offering remains the cheapest option to watch video. At MultiChoice, we continue to deliver entertainment options and supporting services aimed at being Africa's entertainment platform of choice. Turning to Slide 15. Although linear pay TV is maturing globally and also in South Africa, it remains the mainstay of our operations. It is, therefore, critically important that we safeguard this business, which provides a solid cash-generating business from which to launch new services. We are pleased that the initiatives implemented by the South African leadership team to drive retention of the premium bouquet are paying off. Although the subscriber trend is still downwards, it is decelerating and training to a stability, as you can see in the top left graph. Below that, the graph at the bottom left shows the positive impact of the team's decision to recalibrate the pricing and value proposition of the GSTV business play packages. This led to a 32% increase when comparing the monthly revenues in August before the change with those in March and was an important underpin to the revenue growth in GSV commercial. The middle graph at the top reflects the DStv stream's great traction since its relaunch with active customers up 139% since July last year. The biggest benefit is that over 90% of the DStv stream subscribers added in the period are new subscribers who have not subscribed to our services before. Extra Stream which solves the one-stream limitation via mobile was [ loaned ] with great success early this year. This gives us confidence to launch our new proximity control option later on, which is set to offer additional streams within a household. NMSIS, our insurance business continues to enjoy strong growth with active policies increasing a healthy 19% to 3.3 million. This segment reported an impressive 35% increase in revenue, just shy of ZAR 1 billion mark. We are also pleased with the ongoing traction of DStv Internet which almost doubled its customer base and reported a very pleasing 160% growth in revenue year-on-year. Slide 16 shows the key KPIs of our South African linear business. We have already discussed the impact of weak macro and load shedding on our business, resulting in increased pressure on subscriber number activity and viewership. Due to a strong focus on retention, the decline in active subscribers in South Africa was limited to 5%, and the active base now stands at 7.6 million households. As a group, we have largely focused on the 90-day subscriber metric since listing in order to provide a subscriber number that looks through the monthly volatility in the base. However, management is increasingly managing the business on the base of active subscribers to optimize retention and activity rates from month to month in a low-growth environment. As a result, our commentary is now focused on active subscribers, but we still provide the 90-day subscriber numbers in our [ Appendix ] for continuity. Although the premium bouquet is trending towards a stable base, given the targeted retention efforts, the premium customer tier, which includes the premium and [ Compact Plus ] bouquet was again break down by the pressure on the Compact Plus base, which is much more susceptible to macroeconomic [ pressures ]. The mid-market compact base, which is most exposed to the macroeconomic challenges, was down 9%, while the [indiscernible] market tier was 2% lower due to pressure in the family base, the impact of load shedding and reduced the quota subsidies. Despite the decline in active days, ARPU held stable at ZAR 281, benefiting from average price increases of 5.6% following inflation. The past year presented a tougher state of macroeconomic conditions for the Rest of Africa business since 2016. In February, the official and parallel [indiscernible] rates reached peaks of ZAR 1,600 and ZAR 1,900 to the U.S. dollar, respectively. With several other African markets, also subject to extreme currency depreciation. The teams in the rest of Africa stepped up to the challenge of maintaining profitability by implementing revenue supportive measures and technical savings. This included the launch of Family Plus in Angola with stronger content to entire upgrades, forming partnership with telcos to drive the streaming base and delivering strong festive campaigns. The launch of GOtv SUpra Plus in August provided DTG subscribers with the same value in price as the DStv Compact offering. This package gained great traction, providing ARPU support of around $5 to $6 more subscription and the prospect of a multimillion dollar revenue uplift in the year ahead. To account for a high inflation environment, we increased prices across the region by 27% on a weighted average basis. Although our general policy is to increase prices only once a year. The acute currency challenges have forced us to put through two price increases in 4 of our African markets. The team also implemented specific initiatives to reduce costs, especially around Dakota subsidies. Given the ramp-up in [ Dakota ] subsidies last year around the FIFA World Cup and taking the current macro dynamics into account, it made sense to scale back to safeguard cash generation, we removed subsidies in Nigeria and Angola altogether. We also saved on content and other general costs, which allowed us to deliver a trading profit of ZAR 1.3 billion. In a year that follows the FIFA World Cup year, especially one like last year, when we added 1.4 million customers, some downward pressure on subscriber growth is to be expected. But the drop of 13% this year was more severe, resulting in a closing base of 8.1 million active customers at the end of March. While the mid-market was up 18%, the mass market base dropped 20% hit by macro [ tailwinds ] and cost of living crisis across Africa, but predominantly in Nigeria. FTDs were down 17 days, not only because customers are taking selling, but also as a result of power outages in Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe, impacting on their ability to watch television. Blended ARPU came in just above $9. We responded well to the challenges and kept the segment profitable. In the short term, these challenges are likely to remain, but over the long term, we retain our belief that Africa represents a significant growth opportunity for us. Slide 19 reflects on the preference of KingMakers offer 9% on sport betting business. Despite the impact of a challenging macro environment in Nigeria, KingMakers continue to deliver positive underlying operating momentum. The online business in Nigeria grew strongly with monthly active users up 37% year-on-year and online gross gaming revenues up 26% year-on-year in constant currency, while the agency business was more affected by the economic condition. The business delivered organic revenue growth of 5%. On a reported basis, revenues came to $147 million and delivered an EBITDA profit of $2 million. The product and market market expansion plans remain fully funded with king makers retaining a cash balance of $113 million at the end of December 2023. KingMakers launched the SuperSport bet business in South Africa in January 2024. It's pre-game shows and live feed integration with SuperPicks as well as the playbook review show were key drivers for uptake and user engagement. Growth was further supported by SuperSport bet becoming the official bidding partner of local soccer clubs achieved Orlando pilot. On Slide 20, we reflect on Irdeto which has now become the global market leader in managed security services for video with a 22% market share. Strong execution and new customer wins has allowed you to more than double its market share over the past 7 years. This year, Irdeto also had significant success in combating piracy, which is rising globally, especially in the streaming space. Outside of media security, in data solutions for connected industries like building momentum, shipping its first clear solutions to one of the largest fleet operators in this market has resulted in the Connected Transport division, more than doubling its revenues supported further by innovative solutions for the online gaming industry, revenues from new services line increased to 35.7%. Overall revenues increased 17% year-on-year and the trading profit margin came to 23%, saw a good performance all around by Irdeto. After being founded the year before, Moment launched its operations this year and is rapidly gaining traction. Having reached a milestone of processing $85 million in payment volumes year-to-date by the end of March, the number has increased to more than $250 million by Irdeto. Moment played a vital role in the recent Showmax relaunch, stepping up to fill in a critical payment gap by taking local and cross-border card payments in 44 markets. Not only is it supporting Showmax, but in January this year, Moment also started taking up payment volumes from DStv. It already accounts for a significant share of payment volumes which enables seamless payments for customers and more savings for us. Today, moment already accounts for more than 30% of DStv's payment volumes and enabling more seamless payments for customers and saving us money at the same time. In a busy [indiscernible], there is a [ cloud ] critical licenses in South Africa with more underway, and they built an extensive Pan-Africa network that will be enabled for our use in the coming year. Along with other founding backers, we recently contributed $8 million to Moment's C+ funding round in which they raised $22 million of funding at a post-money valuation of $82 million. Our stake in the business is 26%. That concludes our operational overview. I'm [ clearly ] proud of the achievement of our business over the last year, especially considering the magnitude of [ external ] challenges that we had to counter. The teams did an excellent job to manage things that they're under their control, deliver for our customers and grow our new initiatives. I would like to invite Tim, our CFO, to take you through our detailed financial results.

Thank you, Calvo. The past financial year has been a tough one on the macroeconomic and in particular, currency front for many businesses globally. However, our team showed resilience, and we were able to execute very well on things under our control. We made the necessary interventions, not only to see us through this challenging period but also to position us well for the years ahead. The benefits of rightsizing the business will stand us in good stead once economies start recovering, and currency start stabilizing. On Slide 23, I would like to start with the four key financial highlights. In South Africa, we delivered a 26% trading margin, well within the mid-20s guided range. This was despite substantial pressure on the top line caused by consumer weakness and the fact that we are predominantly a fixed cost business. In the Rest of Africa, we were able to increase the trading profit from ZAR 900 million last year to ZAR 1.3 billion and maintained profitability for the second consecutive year. This is a very strong performance if one considers the significant currency pressures, which I'll discuss shortly. These profits came as a result of our teams delivering cost savings of ZAR 1.9 billion. This is the highest savings amount since listing, well above our original full year target of ZAR 800 million and the revised stretch target of ZAR 1 billion set at the interim stage. In a year where we focused more on retention than growth due to economic conditions, we made tactical decisions to reduce our spending on the code subsidies. By raising Dakota prices and unbundling content from our sales offers, we were able to save an additional ZAR 1.5 billion. I will unpack this in more detail later on. Turning to Slide 24. We were able to grow our trading profit of our core business by 38%, before the impact of additional investment in Showmax and currencies. The waterfall chart on this page provides a high-level view of the various elements that impacted our trading profit performance. Looking at these from left to right, in the comparative period, we generated ZAR 10 billion in trading profit. Through pricing discipline, tactical trade-offs between subsidy and growth and a relentless cost discipline, we have delivered a ZAR 3.8 billion organic improvement in the core business. We invested an incremental ZAR 1.4 billion into our new Showmax business, which comprised customizing the new Peacock platform, hiring key staff to fill the new structure, developing our new brand and marketing for the relaunch. We're happy to make this investment as directionally it is how consumers prefer to consume content globally and will drive sustainable and long-term returns. This translated into an organic comparable trading profit of ZAR 12.4 billion, an increase of 24% over the prior year. Unfortunately, we experienced unprecedented depreciation of currencies across most of our core markets, resulting in ZAR 4.5 billion in foreign exchange losses, which materially dampened our operational performance. After factoring this in, the reported trading profit closed 21% lower than last year at ZAR 7.9 billion. With that context, we turn to Slide 25. As a business operating in 50 markets across the continent we're typically affected by currency weakness every year. However, this year was quite different. And the graph reflects the sheer magnitude of the impact of foreign exchange losses on this year's results. In short, over the 5 years since our listing in 2019, we incurred cumulative foreign exchange losses amounting to ZAR 4.3 billion. This is a sizable amount by any standards, but it pales into comparison to the ZAR 4.5 billion loss that we had to absorb in this year. Importantly, it is against this background, combined with the high impact of inflation and interest rates as well as power challenges on consumers that we believe our financial year '24 results should be evaluated. Moving to Slide 26 and a recap on our headline numbers. The top line improved 3% on organic basis supported by a strong discipline around implementing inflationary price increases across our markets, offset by a decline in active subscribers as mass market customers in countries like South Africa and Nigeria, prioritize basic necessities over entertainment. Revenue declined 5% on a reported basis, owing to the significantly weaker currencies across our core markets. On a trading profit level, we delivered strong organic growth in the core business. But as already explained, the end result on a reported basis was weaker due to the currency impact. Consequently, adjusted core headline earnings, the Board's revised measure of the underlying performance of the business that now includes losses on cash remittances, declined by 20% to ZAR 1.3 billion. Free cash flow was also impacted by lower profitability, which combined with the ZAR 1.7 billion platform investment in Showmax resulted in a material decline year-on-year. On Slide 27, we look at subscriber numbers and subscription fees, the largest contributor to our top line. The chart on the left shows our active subscriber base which was down 9% due to severe macro pressures that Calvo has already explained. Subscription revenues on the right were down 7% on a reported basis and up 2% organically. In South Africa, subscription income was 5% lower as the benefits of price increases was offset by lower subscriber activity as reflected in the lower reported active days. In the Rest of Africa, we benefited from a weighted average 27% price increase, which outweighed the impact of the decline in subscribers and yielded a 10% organic improvement. Local currency weakness in the rest of Africa impacted negatively on U.S. dollar revenues. However, when converting this to rand for reporting purposes, the weaker rand-U.S. dollar rate provided an uplift. Momentum in ShowMax revenues was impacted by the disruption relating to the relaunch of the business, including the discontinuation of products like Showmax Pro. Turning to Slide 28. We unpack our revenue performance by segment and type. The pressure on South Africa revenues due to load shedding and consumer pressure has already been covered as is the decline in the Rest of Africa. Our technology business Irdeto experienced healthy growth of 7% on an organic basis or 17% on a reported basis, given the uplift of translating its U.S. dollar revenues into Rands. This was due to improved OTT revenues as well as strategic wins in the managed services space. Gaming and connected transport revenues also grew strongly, benefiting from a diversified portfolio of products and innovative solutions. Showmax delivered a 22% increase in revenues to ZAR 1 billion. On the right-hand side, advertising revenues delivered organic growth of 3%, supported by the continued growth in the Rest of Africa and partially offset by the impact of a tough economic cycle in South Africa. On a reported basis, the impact of the significantly weaker Naira shared ZAR 431 million of revenues and resulted in a decline of 7%. NMSIS, our insurance business increased its premium income by a healthy 35% to almost ZAR 1 billion. Other revenue increased due to the income from technical staffs accounted to Peacock as well as higher sublicense activity. This was offset by lower revenue from Dakota sales, owing to our tactical decision to reduce subsidies. Slide 29 provides a summary of our segmental trading margins, some of which we already commented on. The South African trading margin came in at 26%. The 7% margin delivered by the rest of Africa reflects continued upward momentum and was a very strong result given the circumstances. The debtors margins normalized to 23% due to the nonrecurrence of the FIFA World Cup. The business had to contend with $11 million less in high-margin group revenues while profits were also impacted by USD 3 million in restructuring costs as it continues to rightsize this operations for a changing media landscape. Trading losses in Showmax increased from ZAR 1.2 billion to ZAR 2.6 billion all relating to the additional investment in the relaunch. On Slide 30, we provide our standard trading profit bridge for the rest of Africa. The business enjoyed a substantial benefit from its disciplined approach to pricing by implementing inflation increases across core markets. This year was particularly difficult with inflation running very high in large markets such as Nigeria and Angola. To preserve profitability and cash flows, we were forced to implement two price increases in four of our markets. The subscriber losses explained earlier had a negative ZAR 1.4 billion impact. This was offset by management interventions that included ZAR 500 million of cost savings and a reduction in the code subsidies of ZAR 1.6 billion. We also in 4 of our markets. The subscriber losses explained earlier had a negative ZAR 1.4 billion impact released across several markets. The combined impact of all these efforts translated into a ZAR 5.7 billion trading profit on an organic basis, representing a margin of 23%. once the unprecedented ZAR 4.3 billion impact from currency depreciation was factored in, the reported trading profit closed on ZAR 1.3 billion, reflecting a 7% trading margin. Moving to Slide 31, where we analyze our operating leverage and cost savings. As you know, our objective is to generate positive operating leverage by ensuring that we keep the organic growth in operating expenditure below the growth in revenue. Through our active interventions, we managed to achieve a 4.3% positive operating leverage. A key underpin to this result was the ZAR 3.4 billion in specific cost reductions. As part of our annual cost-saving objective, we delivered ZAR 1.9 billion in savings with a major step-up in the second half. Major contributions to the savings came from renegotiated contracts for international general entertainment content and sports rights as well as the reduced cost price of Dakotas negotiated with suppliers. In addition, we saved ZAR 1.5 billion on Dakota subsidies, some as a result of a normalization in volumes and a post fee for World Cup year, but the bulk of it due to tactical decisions to reduce Dakota subsidies across the board. Turning to Slide 32. Let me explain this decision and its impact to you in more detail. With a number of currencies in key markets depreciating aggressively through the year, it was critical to rethink all of our spend, and this included tactically reducing Dakota subsidies. We also removed the fully installed option on the Explorer in South Africa and unbundled the sale of Dish kits from the sale of Dakotas in our Rest of Africa markets to allow customers to reduce the overall cost of equipment. We were able to drive better unit economics by negotiating lower purchase the purchase prices with our suppliers this year. Combining Dakota savings generated in the general course of business following elevated subsidies for the FIFA World Cup last year, and those from our tactical strategic decisions resulted in a net benefit to the group of ZAR 2.2 billion. The successful relaunch of our DStv Stream product means that customers now have access to DStv at a more affordable price point and without the need for decoders. This lower cost has resulted in new streaming customers accounting for a much larger share of new customers in South Africa as we show in the middle graph on the top row. And ultimately, this also helps to reduce Decoder subsidies. The graph below it shows the reduction in the level of replacement boxes sold in South Africa from 55% in the prior year to 46% this year. This means a higher percentage of our boxes are going to new customers, which drives incremental revenue rather than existing customers merely upgrading on a subsidized basis. Given the higher upfront costs due to lower Decoder subsidies, evidence in the rest of Africa suggests that better quality customers are entering our platform. This is reflected in the top right graph in what we refer to as the resting equated percentage. It shows that measured on a 3 months after sign-up, 70% of subscribers on average tend to settle or rest on a higher bouquet compared to 59% in the previous 3 years. We are also seeing the early signs of a better quality of subscriber being acquired through improving survival rates, also measured 3 months after sign-up. On Slide 33, we reflect on adjusted core headline earnings, the Board's revised measure of underlying performance, which now includes the impact of the losses on cash remittances, net of taxes and minorities. This metric reflects a decline of 20% year-on-year to ZAR 1.3 billion, a substantially higher realized hedging gains and smaller losses on cash remittances were more than offset by lower trading profit. In financial year '23, we incurred losses on cash remittances of ZAR 1.9 billion after minorities. This reduced to ZAR 900 million in financial year 2024 due to a narrow gap between the official and parallel Naira rates compared to the previous year. Core headline earnings, which excludes losses on cash remittances was down 38%, mainly due to the additional investment in Showmax and the lower net contribution from Irdeto in South Africa, partially offset by improved results in the Rest of Africa. Slide 34 provides an update on our free cash flow. The waterfall graph highlights the key cash flow movements during the year, which we unpack starting from the left. In the comparative period, we generated ZAR 2.9 billion in free cash flow. The lower EBITDA resulted in a ZAR 2.5 billion lower cash amount this year. Payments of ZAR 1.7 billion were made to Peacock for customization of the platform ahead of the relaunch in February. Content payments came in ZAR 700 million lower owing to better pricing negotiated for general entertainment and sporting contracts and the business benefiting from prepayments made in the prior year. We also benefited from a ZAR 1.2 billion improvement in other working capital, which includes the benefit of timing of supplier payments. That resulted in free cash flow of ZAR 600 million for financial year '24. Turning to Slide 35. Although retained earnings reflects a positive balance of ZAR 16.2 billion, we currently have a negative equity balance of ZAR 1.1 billion as a result of IFRS related noncash accounting adjustments. These adjustments can be explained as follows. We are affected by the foreign exchange impact on the translation of the U.S. dollar-based intergroup loan sitting between MultiChoice Africa Holdings and MultiChoice Nigeria. This loan is split between a portion that is treated as an equity investment in the business and is referred to as quasi equity and the loan portion referred to as the non-quasi loan. When we revalue the loan at year-end, the adjustment flows up to the group, resulting in a negative impact on the profit and loss and consequently, reserves. This is not new accounting treatment. However, considering the Naira moved from USD 465 at March 2023 to USD 1,308 at March 2024. The adjusted adjustment has now become material. The second adjustment arises from a put option in our agreement with Comcast, which permits them to put their 30% shareholding to us at fair market value on the seventh anniversary of the Showmax launch date. IFRS requires us to initially measure the put option at fair value with the resultant entry being the recognition of the put option liability and a corresponding adjustment in equity upfront. It does not factor in the probability of the put being exercised and is merely an accounting entry. The fair value came to ZAR 2.7 billion at year-end, creating the corresponding drag on reserves. As part of our cost program and interventions to preserve cash and given the changing circumstances of the group, we reviewed all our major OpEx and CapEx spend. One of these was the tech modernization project, which has been running for a number of years with the objective of upgrading our current systems to best-in-class global systems. Four modules have gone live with two modules still in development. We reassessed the project and the material cost to completion over the remaining 4-year period. We also consider the uncertainty in relation to the outcome of the Canal+ offer, which may impact on systems should the offer be successful. We concluded that our current system architecture is sufficient for our current needs, and we terminated the project. This has resulted in a once-off ZAR 1.2 billion write-off. Combining these noncash accounting adjustments affected the equity reserves by ZAR 8.5 billion. Regardless of the negative equity position, our balance sheet provides financial flexibility to fund the business. Let's take a closer look on Slide 36. Our reported cash holdings declined marginally from ZAR 7.5 billion to ZAR 7.3 billion in financial year '24. It includes the payment of the ZAR 1.4 billion per [indiscernible] dividend in September as we upstream the cash from the South African business to the group. We retain access to ZAR 4.1 billion in undrawn group borrowing facilities which, combined with the cash results in total available funding of ZAR 11.4 billion. Existing short-term cash commitments and illiquid cash mainly in Nigeria, amounts to ZAR 4.5 billion. This leaves ZAR 2.8 billion available in cash, providing sufficient financial flexibility to fund our business. Following the drawdown of the remaining ZAR 4 billion term loan, our debt position has risen from ZAR 8.4 billion in FY '23 to ZAR 12 billion in financial year '24. After including our satellite leases, our leverage ratio is 1.53x well within an acceptable range. This concludes the overview of our financial performance. So let's turn to Slide 38 for our outlook for the year ahead. As we look into the coming months, there are a few things that we'll be focusing on. First, there is the mandatory offer from Canal+ for our shares at ZAR 125 per share. This deal is subject to regulatory approvals with a long stop date of the Eighth of April 2025. Details regarding this proposed transaction is available in the combined office circular, which was released on the fourth of June and is available on our website. Given ongoing uncertainty around economic recovery across the globe, and our footprint in particular, we'll be looking to drive further business efficiency and have set ourselves a target of reducing costs by another ZAR 2 billion this year. This, combined with ongoing retention initiatives, should provide an underpin for us to keep the trading profit margin of the South African business in the mid-20s and maintained profitability in the Rest of Africa. As Calvo explained in his overview, we have several revenue streams to drive future growth. Our focus in the year ahead will be to accelerate the scale of Showmax, SuperSport bet in South Africa as well as DStv insurance and Internet businesses. In addition, Moment will be looking to launch its B2C payments platform to expand its capacity across the continent. So these are our plans for the year ahead. True to our vision, we'll continue to enrich lives through entertainment and technology. That concludes our presentation for today. We are happy to now take some questions.

[Operator Instructions]. The first question that we have comes from Jared Hoover of RMB Morgan Stanley.

A few questions from my side, please. And I thought I'll just start with South Africa. As you mentioned your guidance for FY '25 is for flat trading profit margins, which basically implies that you expect your cost growth to be offset by top line growth or by cost-out initiatives. So I've got two questions on that. One, on top line, one on cost out. So on the top line, I mean, you've been losing subscribers across all three of your categories. So it really looks like you're relying on cross-selling your ancillary products like DStv stream, Insurance, Extra Stream, et cetera. So the question is, is how big do you think that opportunity is? And what time line do you think you can get there? And where do you expect 2025 assay revenue to largely land? And then my second question on the cost side. It looks like about 40% of your costs are dollar based, and those dollar-based costs have been hedged at a [ ZAR that is ] 20% higher than FY '24. So it looks like you're going to have a material cost headwind in 2025 in South Africa. So can you just help me understand what the opportunity is there to take out more cost than the ZAR 2 billion that you're guiding for? Okay. I'll stop there and then I'll follow up with one or two more.

Yes. Thank you very much for the question. In the slide as revenue top line growth. What we have done is we have increased our prices in line with just above inflation in this slide in financial year. That's the first thing. The second thing to mention is that as we have mentioned that we are looking at DStv Insurance, DStv Stream and DStv Internet which are gaining good change. Those are the new areas of growth that we think should be able to help us to grow our top line as well, but I'll let Tim also explain it.

Yes. So guys, we see quite a significant opportunity to continue to accelerate the scale of our insurance business and our DStv Stream. Both of those, we relaunched or we put in a significant amount of effort over the last couple of years. DStv was relaunched in this last financial year. We've seen 139% increase in subscriber numbers from July through to financial year-end. And we think that, that's something that combined with our bundled Internet products can really start accelerating. On the insurance side, we've seen an accelerated growth in that business. And what's been really pleasing is that the growth has come from a lot of the new products that we've added to the mix. So we've seen pretty solid device insurance growth, and we've also seen exceptional growth in the life insurance products. So now that we've got these products on for the full year, we really are looking to continue with their growth trajectory. I think the second part of the question was what do we do around the cost side. So clearly, we set ourselves an ambitious target at ZAR 2 billion, right? That's more than double what last year's target was and higher than the ZAR 1.9 billion that we've achieved in '24. What we have in terms of this ambition is we actually have a multiyear cost reduction program. We've approached the difficulties that we see in the market on the basis that if these difficulties continue for a period of time, how can we rightsize this business and take into account the significantly weaker currencies, customers under pressure. And so we are setting this target, not necessarily just in the context of FY '25 but actually is a multiyear program where we basically try to resize our business over a 3-year period. We are fairly confident that this is achievable. We've already identified savings not just in the '25 year but also going into both of '26 and '27. It's not fully -- we haven't fully baked in more of the potential opportunities that we're looking for. We're still -- in the outer years, we're still probably about 50% [ off ] in the year 3 in terms of identifying cost savings but we've approached this very systematically and very disciplined. And we're not -- this is not a wish list. This is an itemized commitment that each of our CEOs and CFOs in each of our business units have identified, and we believe strongly that this is something that we could deliver on.

Okay. Great. And then my follow-up questions, the one on Showmax. I think you put up a slide where you had the free cash flow, outflow related to Showmax, I think it was ZAR 4.1 billion. It looked like that includes some prepaid assets. So into 2025, I think you did guide that the trading profit losses are going to be higher than in 2024. But I just want to understand firstly, where -- roughly where that would land on the trading profit side for Showmax? And two, how does that compare to the free cash flow outflow we should expect for Showmax into 2025? And then very lastly, on your balance sheet, I think it was Slide 34 or Slide 35. It looks like you've got about ZAR 2.8 billion of call it unencumbered or available cash, plus about ZAR 4.1 billion in headroom on your facilities. So combined call that ZAR 7 billion, but my understanding from your CMD was that you need about ZAR 5 billion on your balance sheet for intra-period working capital swings. So I guess the question really is what is your level of comfort around the liquidity at MultiChoice to be able to handle any material downside surprises in 2025. I'll leave it there.

Okay. So look, on the on our Showmax business, I mean, I think let's start there, very clear. I think we're in a position at the moment where, as you guys can see, we are busy with many moving parts in terms of how these numbers are playing out and we very specifically did not give a specific guidance for where Showmax is going to end up this year. But what we can share is the following, right? We need to start off with the physician that Showmax is going to effectively have a time shift in costs. Again, that is because we launched Showmax a little bit later in the year than what we had initially anticipated. So in financial year '24, we originally were thinking that the launch was going to happen a couple of months earlier. And because of brand late, there's a couple of time shifted costs. One, we'll see the depreciation of the investment that we made in the Peacock platform. That depreciation charge will come through, number one, and it will be for the full year. We'll be running the new platform in the new markets with additional content spend, and that will be for the full year as well. And we just have a net run rate as we started to capacitate the teams, that run rate will also be running for the full year. On the other side of that, of course, we have quite strong ambitions as we build out additional capacity in the payment channels and in our partnership models to accelerate the growth in the top line. So at this point, we're not giving specific guidance other than we expect an annualized -- this annualization and this -- because of the late launch, we expect to shift some of those peak losses that we had anticipated in FY '24 into FY '25. Okay. So the second question is related to liquidity, I'm not actually in touch with where your reference point came from in terms of the working capital movement. No, no, no. I'm off there. So Jared, sorry, you asked the question. You said we've got ZAR 2.8 billion of cash after commitments, and we have ZAR 4.1 billion in facilities, that's correct. And then -- what was your reference point about working capital needs?

I think it was at your CMD last year. I think it was specifically in the strategy section, if I'm not mistaken. And you had a slide and you basically said that you'd like to maintain about ZAR 5 billion of cash on your balance sheet for inter-period movements. I mean maybe that's changed from last year to this year. But I mean, if I take that into consideration, and that's my starting point, it would seem to me that, I mean, you don't have much margin of safety on your balance sheet if there were to be a material downside event. So maybe the [ ZAR ] blows out. Maybe there's another depreciation in one of the African countries or maybe the consumer becomes a lot more constrained across your footprint that would necessitate you're holding more cash on your balance sheet?

Yes. So look, I think in Capital Markets Day, that is a little while back. And I think when we -- there were a couple of things that were top of mind when we did that -- when we did the Capital Markets Day. We were busy with the FIFA World Cup which obviously had a slightly higher working capital investment cycle. That investment cycle is now released. And you guys will know that tends to be a significantly higher work capital investment year than any other year that we have. I think that where we're going to make sure that this cash facility is enough is around incredibly disciplined cost application. So we've set ourselves a higher -- a much higher target for this financial year. You will see that in the second half of financial year '24, we were significantly higher in terms of how the split of run rate costs were being delivered. In other words, the cost savings in the second half of the year was significantly higher than the first half of the year. And we're looking to continue that run rate into the into financial year 2025. So we have a number of programs that discipline needs to continue, and it needs to continue throughout the course of this year.

[Operator Instructions]. The next question we have comes from Jonathan Kennedy-Good of Prescient Securities.

My first question is on your tactical choice to reduce the Decoder subsidies. How much of that decision impacted the decline in subscriber numbers for the year? And how should we think about Decoder subsidies going into FY '25, would you reinstate some of those subsidies if you continue to see subscriber loss? And then secondly, on content costs, which look to be, I think, fairly flat. Given the loss in subscriber numbers, is there any kind of variability that you can benefit from i.e., a variable portion of content costs? Or is that largely fixed and not honor to subscriber cost per unit basis.

No, thanks for the question. I will try to answer the question on subscriber decline holistically. Firstly, is that nobody likes [ segregated ] trend, especially on subscribers. But we should bear in mind that we sell [indiscernible] product which is linked to economic cycle and which is also dependent on the people's discretionary income. Those are the two points that I would like to mention first. The other two points went low teens that we [ have better ] slowdown in growth every year subsequently for FIFA World Cup, and this year was no different. The customer losses this year was good towards the mass market where activity levels and ARPU contribution is much lower. But looking specifically at the factors that contributed to the negative growth of this year. The first one was [indiscernible] to reduce Decoder subsidies which impacted new additions to our subscriber numbers. The second one is that in order for us to offset the impact of high inflation in our markets, we've had to increase prices on average in the Rest of Africa back to 7%. We estimate that these 2 factors combined accounted for about 20% to 40% of the decline. But the most significant [ factor ] in thinking growth was the macroeconomic cycle that we've already explained in our presentation, also made was by the impact of disrupted power supply in South Africa, Nigeria and the likes of Zambia. I'll hand over to Tim to speak to the content costs.

Okay. So thank you for the question. Most of the larger content renewals for sports have been concluded recently. So it will take a while before the next round of negotiations comes up. The opportunity to reduce cost of international content through -- while there is an opportunity to reduce the cost of international generally standing content, mainly through renegotiations. And the areas that we see this potentially playing out is through more efficient scheduling. So in other words, using [indiscernible] content more effectively. And that means that we don't have to do additional content spend. The more effective sharing of content and measures to drive optimization. We typically do this through our content hub in general entertainment. Again, we see a big opportunity to really make a lot of efficiencies in the content that we use on both the linear platforms and the Showmax platform. So differences between window and strategies and making sure that we're not just doubling up on the spend on both sides. So we've been spending quite a bit of time really going and looking at the curation of the content on each of those platforms and making sure that we get the most from the spend that we are making in the business. And then lastly, we see a significant benefit of supply through the Comcast deal. So that's -- those are NBCUniversal DreamWorks, Universal Studios, Sky and Peacock and we're planning to make sure that we maximize that across -- again, across all of the platforms. The one unknown that we do have, of course, is what happens on the foreign exchange rates. But as Jared noted, we've been using periods of weakness in the strength in the ranch as I say, over the last 6 months to continue topping up on our forward cover. We've managed to actually complete hedges for all way out to April next year. So at least for the financial year 2025 at 1 stage, we had quite a big exposure with uncovered positions, but those have now largely been -- well, they fully covered out to -- for the next financial year. And we've done that at roughly about [ 18.80 ] for the next 12 months as we sit here today. So slightly higher than the [ 18.75 ]. I think that's included in one of our [indiscernible] in the deck. We've added a couple of more months at [ 18.80 ]. So at least we have certainty around where our dollar costs and cash flows are going to end up. And now the opportunity, of course, is to start reducing spend around that. And in particular, the other area that we think we see as a strong area of savings is, of course, in some of the CapEx programs, you have seen that we took a big impairment charge this year on the [indiscernible] program. But equally important is what it represents. So that program in our forecasts had some significant spend over quite a long period of time. And because we were able to -- because we decided to close down the last 2 modules that were still in development phase and had still a significant time line to completion that means that those cash flows will no longer be -- will no longer be incurred. And that will give us some relief on the CapEx program.

[Operator Instructions]. The next question we have comes from John O' Bradley of Absa.

I have just three, starting with Showmax. Firstly, just to clarify on the cost run rate, you did ZAR 3.7 billion this past year. Is it fair to say we should expect this to ramp up quite significantly in FY '25. And if you could give any clues over the sort of profile over the next 1 to 2 years, that would be very helpful. And then still on Showmax, but looking at your revenue targets, I think at the Capital Markets Day, you've talked around $1 billion achieving that in sort of the next 4 to 5 years. I mean, just your thoughts on this target, it's still achievable in that same time frame. And then lastly, on your pricing strategies across both South Africa and the Rest of Africa. I mean, we've seen quite a steep step up in price increases. And at the same time, this year, we've obviously seen the subscriber base weakening quite a bit. Are you planning to maintain the current pace of price adjustments? Or could that ease given the subscriber pressure.

Okay. So let me start with the cost run rate. So I think, firstly, I don't know that we necessarily are going to accelerate from the levels that we saw in FY '24. I think our first target is to at least look at matching the cost run rate savings each 2025. But we have got as a -- we have got a multiyear program at these more innovated cost saving levels. So we're making -- and of course, if we can put any of those savings forward into the 2025 year, we'll certainly be doing that. And these savings are kind of across the board. You'll remember that we also spoke a little bit in the past about certainly satellites that start coming up for renewal. The Rest of Africa satellites come up during the course of 2025. So we're looking to start renegotiating and bringing the capacity that we need to use on those satellites down. And we see some significant savings that starts to be generated out of that. So again, we've got -- we're expanding the target of where we're looking for these savings. We're getting into some of the big ticket items like satellites and so these give us some opportunities, I think, to make sure that we can keep this run rate of savings at least for another couple of years. Your second question was around Showmax and whether we're still on track for $1 billion turnover. I think key to that was going to be the launch of the Peacock platform. We've done that, as Calvo mentioned. What was really successful there was that we overshot on being able to migrate all of the customers that were eligible on the old base across to the new base and 88% of those customers that really reactivated by March. So we're now using the off season to start working on developing out additional payment channels that will be critical to starting to see that acceleration in subscriber numbers once we see the start of the Premier League. So that's something that we're looking very forward to. And at the moment, we're not seeing any change in that ambition and the time line for that $1 billion turnover. The last question relates to pricing strategy.

Yes. We are still very clear that we'll [ follow ] inflation in the markets that we operate in. We think it's a discipline that we need to continue with. And we have had engagement with our teams in country and they feel very comfortable that the pricing line with inflation is the best way -- is the best outcome for us from a financial perspective. So we'll continue with that. And we understand this economic cycles that will go through. But as things improve, our product, we still believe very strongly that -- it offers great value for our customers. We have the best in local, the best in sports and the best in international and families need this for entertainment going forward.

I think what is also important, right, is when we look at the -- when we look at our base and we have to look at why are people churning off our base. One of the things we look at quite strictly and quite deeply is the performance of the content on the platform. So we have a look at our channels, the stuff that we put out there. All of the channels over the last 6 months have improved in ranking. And we're still seeing a significant increase in the number of minutes that get watched so for the number of local content towers that we produced instead of about 33% of total broadcast hours. That's been watched about 46% of the time and so that tells us that the movements that we see in the subscriber base are not linked to the content offering. The value proposition is still there. But obviously, the one thing that we've always been disciplined around with the pricing is you can't price according to the exchange rate movements. So when you've got years like the one that's just happened, where you get a significant currency movement, you've got to be quite disciplined in your pricing close to inflation because ultimately, that's over time is how you call back the big impact, the big financial impact of these exchange losses on translation. So I think to Calvo's point, the teams are fairly disciplined at the moment. And what we are doing is trying where we can to split up the inflation -- bit inflationary price increases into more than 1 increase to limit the immediate shock of a big bill increase on a customer. So we're trying to balance that and find the best way through what is very clearly a very difficult situation for customers on the ground.

Thanks very much. Tim, just on the first question, just to clarify, sorry, the question specifically on the costs within Showmax I think you did about ZAR 1 billion revenue and sort of losses of it was ZAR 2.6 billion implies a cost of about ZAR 3.7 billion in the year. So just your thoughts around how that cost moves. I mean does that ramp up significantly into FY '25 and then sort of into FY '26, does it stabilize from there. If you can give any sort of guide on that.

We expected to see is effectively an annualization of the costs into '25 and so kind of a peaking of the cost base, and then it's stabilizing from there. And the growth in the revenue number will effectively bring us back to breakeven with the end of '27 as the target date for that.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have one final question from Jared Hoover.

Just a follow-up from me on your cost out targets. I think you mentioned ZAR 2 billion the number for 2025, and you've just spoken about a renegotiation of some of the Rest of Africa transponders. So first question on that, is any of the renegotiation of your Rest of Africa satellite baked into the ZAR 2 billion cost saving? And second question on that. If not, are you able to give us a sense of the amount of capacity that you're looking to take off those transponders and would that be linear, for example, if you're taking off 30%, can we assume that there'd be a 30% saving on your Rest of Africa transponder costs.

I think, firstly, our targets for cost savings include all of these items that we mentioned. So it includes the transponder savings. We obviously don't want to give too many details because these are still subject to negotiation, right? And our satellite providers are obviously quite sensitive about the fact that we are looking to reduce this capacity. So we don't want to go into too much detail until we will be able to close out those discussions with the satellite providers. So if you guys will just bear with us, we'll obviously come back to the market and give you details once we're able to do that. But the volume or the transponder capacity reduction stay material. The compression technology that they get applied is quite meaningful. I think we expect him to be able to take a number -- quite a large number of transponders out of service, if we get our negotiations right.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions on the conference call. I will now hand back to management for questions on the webcast platform.

Thank you, Dune. We have two questions here on the online platform. The first one is from Jared from [ All Weather ] asking some information about the bit step in [indiscernible] Rationale and whether this is investment by Irdeto. Yes, Jared, that's correct. It was an investment by Irdeto. And I think given that this is a very small transaction, maybe to best to get back to me and I can provide you with further details. Then we have another question from Carl who say I want to -- please comment on the implication of the [indiscernible] and plans, how much management time needs to go to the process of cooperating with them on the regulatory issues? Or is the work of the Board separate to that of management. So on that one, maybe just to explain, I mean, the defendant Board has already expressed an opinion about the offer. So the Board is not involved with the process any further. In terms of the cooperation agreement, there's ongoing discussions -- there are ongoing discussions at this stage to address things, market structure, et cetera, from a regulatory perspective. So we have our regulatory and legal teams, specifically focusing on this work stream. And as soon as we have more information to share with the market, we will get back to you through the appropriate channels. So that's the two questions that I have on my side. I think that brings an end to today's session. And I would like to hand over to Calvo to conclude.

Thanks, Meloy. Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you find our feedback useful and we would like to invite you to reach out to our IR team if you have any further questions or need more information. Thank you for joining us today, and goodbye.