NOS, S.G.P.S., S.A. (NOS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning. Welcome to our second quarter 2022 results conference call. Apologies for the delay. It seems there's a technical issue with the webcast stream. So those on the webcast apparently can't here, so they can't hear what I'm saying at the moment. But if anybody is following both streams, then obviously, it's preferable to dial into the conference call. So as usual, we have the full executive committee in the room today. Jose Pedro Faria da Costa, CFO, will give you a brief summary of the results, and then we'll jump straight into Q&A. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you, Maria, and good morning, everyone. I'll go through each slide and I'll mention the number of the slide so that you can follow the presentation more properly. So starting with the highlights of the presentation in Slide #2. Again, this quarter, we continue to go through a very strong operational momentum. We have posted around 130,000 RGU net adds, again, main driver of growth being Mobile, taking advantage of the 5G opportunity. The recovery in the Cinema unit towards 2019 numbers continues at good pace with cinema attendance reaching post-pandemic record levels, benefiting from the normalization of restrictions and also a strong blockbuster movie slate. The strong operational performance in telco and the recovery in the Cinema unit translated into strong financial results in the quarter, with consolidated revenue growth of 8.1%, with the telco unit growing almost 6%. The growth in top line has allowed a 5.4% growth in EBITDA at the group level above last quarter's numbers, the telco unit posting a 4.3% growth. Total CapEx reached around EUR 113 million in the quarter, a lower level than last quarter. As explained before, there was some front-loading of 5G-related CapEx in the first quarter. And finally, we have materialized, in this quarter, our objective of remunerating shareholders in an attractive way with a dividend payment of EUR 0.278 per share, while preserving a solid balance sheet with 2.15x net financial debt to EBITDA AL. Now moving to the operational review on Slide #4. We have posted around, as I said, 130,000 RGU net adds, growing well across all services, again, Mobile being the strongest growth driver, but also performing quite positively. On Slide 5, very strong growth pace on Mobile. We have posted a positive 106,000 Mobile net adds number with 85,000 postpaid net adds and 20,000 net adds in prepaid. Conversions continues to be the engine of Mobile growth. On the Fixed area, on Fixed Broadband, we have posted net adds of 9,000. Also quite positive Fixed Pay TV net adds of 10,000, taking advantage of increased uptake of services in greenfield FttH areas. On Slide 6, following up on Convergents, we have ended this quarter with 1,052,000 convergent and integrated customers representing now at 66% of the fixed base, having added around 16,000 subs in the quarter, same level of last few quarters. On Slide 7, in this last quarter, we continued the recovery in our Cinema units towards prepandemic levels with June being the best month ever since the pandemic relative to 2020 numbers, with attendance being down only 14% versus June 2019, and total revenues being down only 7% versus 2019. There has been an increasingly better performance month after month. In April, we were down 42% below April 2019; in May, much better 25% below 2019; and leading to June only 14% versus June 2019. To these numbers, we have the contribution of a now completely normalized situation with zero restrictions and also a very strong set of blockbusters like Top Gun, Doctor Strange, and Jurassic World, which have attracted the usual cinema customers to return to the big screen. The movie lineup for the second half of the year is quite promising with a lot of very popular movies. Still, we will have a very tough comp in the third quarter since July and August 2019 have the best performing movie ever in Portugal in terms of gross box office revenues. Moving to Slide 9. On the B2C segment, we have continued to launch differentiated offers focused on providing our customers with the best services. This quarter, we would like to highlight that we were the first operator to offer Disney+ in the TV set-top box, this service being available for our UMA TV customers. Also, we have launched a new prepaid mobile SIM card with 10 gigabit and multiple benefits for tourists that visit Portugal. And finally, taking advantage of our music festivals, NOS Primavera Sound and NOS Alive, we have leveraged on these events to provide exclusive benefits for our customers, in particular in the youth segment. On Slide 10, regarding 5G, we have a strategic goal to be the 5G leader in the market. And with that goal in mind, we continue to launch a number of initiatives. We have implemented in Barreiro, the first 5G city, with a pioneer 5G urban mobility monitoring solution, including intelligent waste management, targeting cost and carbon emission reductions. We have implemented a partnership in Madeira Island for the first 5G hospital to provide remote support solutions using HD video connections supported by 5G. We have sponsored the 5G Industry Conference to highlight the importance of 5G as the enabler of Industry 4.0. And finally, we also launched our 5G Hub in Lisbon, an innovative center that will be a collaborative lab for our partners to develop 5G use cases supported by the first core 5G private stand-alone network. On the B2B front, on Slide 11, we continue to position NOS as the core partner for digital transformation, in particular, leveraging on 5G capabilities. And this quarter, we would like to highlight our role in the Cybersecurity Alliance, launched by the National Center for Service Security as a cooperation platform to aggregate and enhance best practices. And also, we have joined Health Cluster Portugal as a technology and innovation specialist. And finally, we joined the European project, 5G Mobix as technology partner, driving forward connected and automated mobility. On Slide 12, following up on our accelerated 5G rollout, we are proud to announce that we were awarded with the first 5G award in Portugal by Ookla, being recognized as the fastest 5G network, ranking much better than our competitors in the speed test conducted, both download and upload average speed score of 305 megabits per second. Also on that front of recognition, on Slide 13, we were recognized by the Portuguese Consumer Association, Deco Proteste as having the best 4G mobile internet network in Portugal, ranking download and upload speed, quality of customer experience in internet browsing and content streaming. Now moving to our technological projects on Slide 15. On the fixed network front, our FttH rollout continues, reaching a total of 2.9 million homes passed. That is around 56% of total coverage, a bit over 100,000 FttH homes passed added in the quarter. Now moving to the financial review on Page 17. We have had, again, very strong group revenue growth of 8.1%, benefiting from a solid 5.6% growth in the telco unit on the back of strong operational activity and also from the recovery in Cinema and Audiovisuals. Roaming revenues had some recovery in the quarter, but still some room to fully go back to pre-pandemic levels. We were down 27% versus the level of roaming revenues in the second quarter of 2019, still better than the last few quarters. We had, in the first quarter last year, minus 34%. First quarter this year, minus 29%. Adjusting for the growth in roaming telco revenues would have still grown 4.6%. That is still very strong core telco revenue growth. All the segments contributed positively for telco growth, consumer growing 2.4%, slightly higher year-on-year growth versus the 2% and 1.8% over the last 2 quarters, showing a positive sequential trend and B2B growing 8.2% this quarter. This B2B segment benefiting only marginally from software resale and equipment resale. So this 8.2% growth this quarter is a strong growth, also in line with last quarter's numbers, if adjusted for these resale revenues. All segments within B2B from large corporates to SMEs contributed well to this performance. And finally, the wholesale strong performance benefited essentially from the roaming in recovery. On Slide 18, consolidated EBITDA in the quarter grew by 5.4%, benefiting from strong telco EBITDA growth of 4.3%, that is in line with the last quarter growth, benefiting from operating leverage and also helped by some efficiency improvements, namely at the customer service level, which compensated the relevant increase in energy costs despite the energy saving measures that were put in place. Group EBITDA growth was also supported by strong EBITDA recovery of the Cinema and Audiovisuals business following the recovery that is taking place. On Slide 19, net income in the quarter was EUR 44 million, driven by the strong performance at the EBITDA level, also benefiting from a positive impact from our sharing JV results due to the continued depreciation of the Angolan currency compensating the higher level of depreciation and negative impact of taxes due to lower level of tax incentives booked in the quarter. On Slide 20, total group CapEx in the quarter, ex Leasings, reached EUR 113 million, a year-on-year increase of around EUR 8 million versus last year, but a strong reduction of almost EUR 20 million quarter-on-quarter. Again, as expected, a strong increase in technical telco CapEx to around EUR 73 million in the quarter, reflecting continued FttH and 5G rollout, being compensated by a slight decrease in customer CapEx, reaching EUR 35 million, a relatively stable number in the last few quarters, around EUR 35 million to EUR 36 million per quarter, supported by the current low levels of churn, higher levels of self-installation, and also benefiting from equipment refurbishments and reinjection. On Slide 21, EBITDA minus CapEx reached EUR 50 million, same level as last year, with increase in EBITDA fully compensating the increase in CapEx. Free cash flow after interest and taxes generated in the quarter reached EUR 31 million, again, slightly same level of last year despite the increase in CapEx. And finally, on the capital structure on Slide 22. Net financial debt in the quarter increased to EUR 1,145 million, following the dividend payment of EUR 142 million in May. This then net financial debt number representing now 2.15x the EBITDA level adjusted for lease payments, slightly above our stated target. We expect this level to go down to below 2x at year-end following the free cash flow generation of last 2 quarters as well as the cash in of EUR 155 million, resulting from the sale of the second portfolio of 350 towers to Cellnex, which has already been approved by the regulator. Average cost of debt was kept in the quarter at 1.2%. Cash and the new credit lines reached around EUR 250 million at the end of the quarter, providing us a very nice liquidity position. And with this slide, we conclude the presentation. And operator, you can now start the Q&A session.

[Operator Instructions] First question is from the line of Terence Tsui from Morgan Stanley.

I had a question just generally around your CapEx and investments. Just more generally, like from an investor standpoint, how should we be judging the returns on your investments from all the high levels of CapEx that you are currently making? Are you expecting to see higher ARPUs in the future or more customer growth or a combination of the both? And then secondly, can you just remind us around your projections for CapEx, just both this year and for future years, how you expect it to trend over time. That would be great. Thank you very much.

Okay. Thank you, Terence. Well, I'll start tackling the last question to try to be a little bit more precise in guiding current levels of CapEx given that we have fully aligned numbers for 2022 in terms of our own projections and consensus, but we have now a relevant discrepancy starting in 2023. So in terms of general story, as you know, as we have been telling you recently, we have had our peak years in '21 and '22, '21 clearly the strongest peak year if we are to include the nonrecurring CapEx related to 5G. Also in '22, we started at very strong pace with 5G deployment. And also, we are having our final year of our FttH sharing agreement. So for this year, we remain with the guidance that we have already provided. So for full year 2022, we should be targeting high EUR 400 million numbers. If you look at the first couple of quarters, if you have them, we had a slightly higher number for the first quarter, a slightly lower number for the second quarter. But if you take the full semester, you can project relatively easily the full year number for 2022. And then after that, we should be pretty much done in terms of having the bulk of the investment relating to 5G. And by that, also we should be finishing our FttH agreement with our partner. So the idea is that we should see, in 2023, CapEx coming down very significantly to the normalized levels we had before the peak years, this '21 and '22. So we should be targeting normalized levels of around EUR 370 million to EUR 390 million. And that is very different from what we see from a number of analysts that cover us. And starting from '25, '26, we should still be able to go below those levels. So that's the way that we see CapEx deploying over the next few years. Again, this is the peak of our investment cycle. And relating to your first question in terms of return of capital employed, basically, we are deploying CapEx much faster than our peers in other European markets and also then our peers even in the Portuguese markets. So you have to adjust for this peak in CapEx. So if you adjust for this, we should see a relatively healthy return on capital employed after this period. And of course, we target that this CapEx will generate more subscribers, more services and more revenues in the future.

Your next question is from the line of Pilar Vico from Credit Suisse.

I have 2 on my side. So the first one is around the acquisition of 3 million own shares this quarter. So could you please help us to understand the rationale behind it and the plan going forward? And the second one would be around if you could just actually please elaborate a bit more around what is behind the Q2 growth given Portugal is not an inflation linking country? And how is the competitive landscape looking ahead of the commercial launch of the new entrants?

Okay. Thank you for your question. In terms of the 3 million shares bought, they are under the remuneration conditions for the company. So they basically are the shares that we need in order to fulfill the needs of our share remuneration plan for the employees of the company. So this is more or less at this level per year. So this represents a cost that is reflected in the P&L through wages and salaries. In terms of our second quarter growth, basically, as we said, this is a function of very strong operational growth. So we are growing a lot in terms of services. We are growing in terms of subscribers. We are also growing in terms of ARPU. On the B2B front, this is also a major area of growth, 8% growth on B2B, and in this case, without the help of any more volatile resale projects. So this is healthy growth that reflects the overall growth of the business in the Portuguese contract. So.

And regarding the competitive landscape ahead of the commercial launch of the new entrants?

What we have been witnessing is a relatively stable competitive landscape. So we are facing the same set of competitors for 3 years now, and it was the date when mass-model came to the Portuguese market. So no news there and still no new entrant as a result of the Spectrum auction. So I would say that the market keeps being very competitive, but stable within that competitiveness. And we have been gaining market share. In Mobile, we have been gaining market share in B2B and that is basically what drives the growth.

We'll now take our next question. Next question is from the line of Roshan Ranjit from Deutsche Bank.

Two for me, please. On B2B, you just mentioned the strong performance this quarter, which I think the recurring type of business really stands out this quarter. And as you mentioned, the kind of lumpy low-margin sales have slowed or, I'm not sure, stopped. Over the last few quarters, you've had a strong track record of delivering on those lumpy revenue streams. Has that been the foundation for this kind of recurring B2B trend? So the question is, I guess, can we expect that recurring business to continue, or are we seeing a slight change in the kind of B2B environment in the market? That would be my first question, please. And secondly, just on the pricing point, you mentioned the 5G plans, and I think that drove the good ARPU growth that we've seen. Looking at the year-on-year growth over the last few quarters, it's been fairly consistent. Does that suggest that there have been minimal price adjustments to date? And should we expect any price adjustments in the quarters ahead? If so, what should we thinking about the timing around that, please?

So thank you for the question. Regarding B2B, what we see is, well, 3 things. One is there is an underlying structural very good solid growth on all segments, and especially based on the growth of the share of non-telco or IT products that we've been selling with considerable success throughout the market. And of course, we expect that trend to continue. Our main bets have been cloud services and 5G-based innovation, and those will still remain our best for growth in the next few years since, if anything, we're strengthening those bets rather than slowing down. And the underlying result is that effectively the growth without the resale business is very structurally strong and very close to the 8% number that we posted in total. We nevertheless believe that these resale businesses are a great opportunity for us to enlarge our perimeter of relationship and the scope of services within customers. And thus, we can expect that we will continue to push that business in order to leverage our structural growth, which we have so far.

In terms of price adjustments, we haven't adjusted unitary prices for the last few months, and we have no plans of doing it over the next couple of quarters. Of course, we are all familiar with the context and the inflation that we are facing across the economy. And as such, we keep the option to adjust prices maybe next year, but there are no plans to do it during 2022.

We'll now take our next question. Next question is from the line of Martin Hammerschmidt from Citi.

I have a question regarding the EBITDA within the telco business. I mean, you've been growing EBITDA over 4% in the first half. And I think if you look at the consensus here for the full year, it implies sort of a market slowdown. Now you obviously faced tougher comps, but if you could sort of help us understand what are the building blocks in the second half, why that growth of the 4% should slow down quite materially, that will be helpful.

Thank you, Martin. Your question implies that you're basically commenting on the consensus numbers and asking us to explain why this is so. And I think the question is if we are comfortable or not with the consensus and if we are able eventually to beat the consensus at this stage. What we can tell you is that the trends that we are seeing in the first couple of quarters are not very different from what we are seeing for the third and for the fourth quarter. We know that there are some cost items that will eventually have a more negative impact in the second part of the year. But still, we are very comfortable with the consensus numbers. And if I can give you one example in terms of, for instance, energy costs. As you know, we have now more or less 30% of total consumption which is on the spot market. On the second part of this year on the last 2 quarters, we will have more percentage of our consumption on the spot market. So this means that probably we have higher energy costs, also on some other cost items that we're feeling some type of inflation, probably the second half of the year is going to be tougher than the first part of the year. But still, we are very comfortable with the consensus numbers. So, that's how we see it.

We'll now take our next question. And the question is from the line of Jerry Dellis from Jefferies.

Two questions, please. First one is, I wonder whether you could explain to us the role of churn in the strong RGU numbers that you reported yesterday evening. So essentially to understand whether the strong RGU growth is coming from better gross intake or better customer loyalty? And then the second question is, I can see that Portuguese telecom operators, including yourselves, have been appealing for some clemency in relation to 5G network coverage obligations for the end of 2023. Is this still something that is a requirement on your side? And what level of dialogue are you managing to have with the authorities on this?

Well, maybe I'll start with the second question by saying that there is no dialogue whatsoever with the regulator that refuses to listen to us. It has been like that for quite some time now. So this is not new. We believe that since the obligations were defined, there was a massive delay in the conclusion of the auction. And consequently, there was a massive delay in the allocation of licenses and the starting of the operation. And as such, the obligations should move accordingly. So basically, things should be 1 year later than originally planned. But still, we still sleep at night with these obligations. We feel comfortable, as we have been explaining, we are well ahead in 5G deployment. And comparatively, probably with the other operators in our market, we are much more comfortable than they are. And actually, they have been much more vocal around this issue than we have, but still, it would be only natural that these obligations should be postponed. In terms of RGU evolution and the role of churn, I can confirm that most of the improvement is coming from lower levels of churn. We are running at historically low levels of churn, which from an economical point of view, it's, obviously, as you understand, much better than by increasing gross adds for the same net result. So most of the good performance in terms of RGU additions is coming from lower levels of churn, yes.

We'll now take the next question. Question is from the line of António Seladas from A|S Independent Research.

My question was already answered partially and is related with your cost structure. And I think that not just cost structure will increase over the second half, but also into 2023 with salaries and wages. And so probably we can talk about 4% or 5% increase in salaries at the level of civil servants. You had mentioned in the past that your salaries will follow the civil servants increase. So I don't know if you want to explain more or to add more information about your prices for 2023. I know that you are also saying that could be a possibility. Nevertheless, I don't know if you want to add more or just...

Well, it's still a little bit early to add more than what I said. As I think you are aware, from a contractual point of view, it's within the contract, the ability for us to adjust according to inflation. So that's an option we always have. And I think it's fair to expect some kind of adjustment given the high level of inflation in this country. But it's still too early. That is something that is not in our plans, as I mentioned, for the next few months. That is something we probably will be discussing in the first conference call of next year.

Thank you. And there are no further questions at this time. So I'll hand back to the speakers.

Thank you very much for being with us today. Apologies for the technical difficulties at the beginning, but I think they were sorted out into the call. Have a great holiday, if that's the case, and look forward to speaking to you in the summer. Thank you.

Thank you. This does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for participating, and you may now disconnect. Speakers, please stand by.