PCCW Limited (TH3C.F) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to PCCW Limited 2022 Annual Results Announcement. Presenting today are Ms. Susanna Hui, Acting Group Managing Director and Group Chief Financial Officer; and Mr. Marco Wong, Head of Investor Relations. Over to Susanna, please.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our session in terms of our PCCW results announcement for the year 2022. So obviously, last year was a very challenging year with Hong Kong in its third year of COVID, and we are under continued lockdown in most of the year. And of course, we also suffered from the aggressive interest rate hikes by the U.S. Fed as well as the GDP contraction in Hong Kong leading to a drop of 3.5% for the full year. Now despite all of these headwinds, PCW delivered a very solid set of results, underpinned by the resilience of the HKT business, results of which was announced yesterday, and whilst our OTT business achieved our first full year of positive EBITDA last year and also our Free TV was holding ground amidst this very soft economy. In the meantime, the other highlight during the year was that we completed the strategic partnership with Lenovo for our IT Solutions business, which allowed us to recycle back some of the capital, yet retaining a significant stake in expanding the service business into new markets with enhanced delivery capabilities. And as the whole world opens up and travel resume, we saw business activities picking up rather quickly, getting 2023 off to a very positive start. Now let's look at the OTT business in a little bit more details. In fact, by the growing library of our high-quality locally relevant content, including the Viu Originals and the deep penetration of our local markets in Southeast Asia, we continue to be a leading video streaming platform in the region. We remain #1 for the 12th consecutive quarter in MAUs on muscling global players like Netflix. And we also achieved #2 ranking in both the paid subscribers and overall streaming minutes, which is very evident of our strong engagement with our viewers. If you look at some of our KPIs, we have led market in pursuing a dual revenue model of premium subscription and digital advertising. As such, you can see here in this slide that we have significant growth in both the MAU as well as the paid sub. For the MAU, we recorded a 13% growth year-on-year to 66.4 million, whereas our paid sub increased significantly by 45% to 12.2 million as well. This represented an impressive revenue growth of 45% for our Viu business. With regards to our content, the Viu Originals continue to be very important in driving the engagement and economics and also adding global distribution revenue on top of our platform revenue, which includes the advertising and subscription revenue. Our 2-pronged focus of Viu Original includes not just the Korean drama, which, of course, continues to be very popular across the region, but also locally relevant content. Now with the proven success of the Korean dramas, we have released 10 Korean Viu Originals titles during the year. And the highlight was, of course, a title called Reborn Rich, featuring the headline snatching Korean Star, Song Joong-Ki. And it was indeed these leading titles that won huge popularity across Asia and garnered significant off-line and online attention and brought a significant incremental distribution revenue during the year. As I was mentioning just now, another key prong to our Viu strategy in terms of the Viu Original is that we would continue to invest in unique locally relevant content targeted at the local market audiences, including the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand, Indonesia and so on. So indeed, the expanding library of the Viu Originals enabled us to successfully syndicate its content across the different platforms, which now reached more than 170 markets. Turning to our Free TV business, the ViuTV. ViuTV continued to focus on delivering quality dramas, variety shows and world-class sports events, which helped to drive traditional TV viewership as well as digital viewership as well with digital viewing time increased by 25% during the year on top of the increase in terms of the average prime time ratings, which increased by 6% year-on-year. Digital component is particularly key as advertising spend continues to shift from TV to digital where over 50% of the total advertising dollars in Hong Kong are now spent on digital channels. In terms of advertising, ViuTV's broadcast of the key matches of the World Cup last year also boosted the advertising revenue, counteracting the otherwise relatively sluggish consumer sentiment, which obviously dampened advertising sales in general. We continue to attract a broad and very diverse base of advertising clients across multiple industries with brand engagement and effective advertising solutions and delivering a year of solid revenue of around USD 79 million. And of course, we have spent significant efforts in terms of building a multifaceted entertainment hub focusing on content creation as well as talent management business. This will provide opportunities for us to leverage our talent across all the media platforms and all the media formats, including TV, filmmaking, music publishing, events such as concert and live streaming, et cetera. During the year, our content production -- make a -- Viu produced over 1,700 hours of content for our own Free TV platform, ViuTV. We also co-produced a film, Mad Fate, which was recently screened at the Berlin Film Festival winning dozens of awards at the Hong Kong ceremonies. And we have also included a new live streaming platform make a view in order to allow our talents to be viewed by the international audiences across the world. And obviously, we will focus on content that has regional as well as global appeal to monetize the -- to maximize the monetization of all the content that we made ourselves. Finally, in terms of dividend, the Board has recommended a final dividend of HKD 28.48 per share, which together with the interim dividend of HKD 9.56 per share, would amount to a full year dividend of HKD 38.04 in total. And this represents a 2.7% increase over last year and also reflects the continued 100% pass-through of the HKT distribution received by PCCW. Based on yesterday's closing share price, the yield is around 9.8%. And with that, I will pass to Marco to share with you the detailed financials.

Thank you. In terms of the financial highlights, PCW delivered another year of solid results highlighted by the resilience of HKT and OTT's first year of full year positive EBITDA. Before going to the financial review, I just want to note that the results as well as the year-on-year comparison exclude the part of PCW solutions, which was injected into the strategic partnership with no that was completed in August last year. Our overall service revenue was up by 3% from $4.042 billion to $4.159 billion. Including headset sales, total revenue was up by 2% to $4.624 billion, and EBITDA rose by 6% from $1.504 billion to $1.588 billion. As you can see from the bottom of the table, all lines of business generated growth in both revenue and EBITDA, with HKT maintaining a solid performance, OTT achieving full year positive EBITDA and Free TV steady despite the challenging macro environment. As it was announced yesterday, and I won't going to repeat the details again, HKT total revenue was stable, and service revenue was up by 2%, underpinned by both TSS and mobile service revenue growth, which came from continued strong demand for broadband, further momentum in 5G adoption as well as the delivery of smart city initiatives for the public sector and digital transformation projects for enterprises. As you can see on the right, both TSS and mobile reported 2% EBITDA growth, which combined with savings from corporate overheads and other businesses, led to EBITDA rising by 3% to $1.675 billion and the margin improving to 38%. AFF was up 2.4% to $724 million contributed by higher EBITDA, disciplined CapEx, rental savings, but which were moderated by higher net finance costs. And with its roughly 52.3% stake in HKT, PCW will receive a total amount of $377 million once the HKT final distribution is received. Taking a look at the media businesses. OTT achieved an impressive revenue growth of 36% to $258 million for 2022. And this was underpinned by Viu, which grew 45% to $206 million and now represents the main component of our OTT business. This performance reflected the high-quality and locally relevant content lineup, which was well received by viewers as well as the effective payroll strategy, which led to 45% growth in our Viu paid subscriptions to 12.2 million. The MAUs also expanded by 13% to 66.4 million. And the growth in subscriptions at MAU was quite notable in both Indonesia and Thailand. Our Viu Original productions, which is important part of our content library has also provided international syndication opportunities with it being available on more than 20 video platforms in large markets such as North America, Japan and Europe. And on the back of the enlarged revenue base, OTT reached an important milestone achieving its first full year positive EBITDA of $23 million, demonstrating its operating leverage as well as our continued prudent management of expenses, particularly content costs. On the Free TV side, ViuTV maintained growth despite a sluggish economic environment as the team remains focused on delivering quality content, including dramas, variety shows and world-class sports events including, as earlier mentioned, the World Cup. We are also concentrating on expansion of our digital presence with total viewing -- digital viewing time increasing by 25%. As a result, advertising revenue was steady at $79 million despite a generally weak consumption sentiment. And total revenue grew 14% to $117 million, driven by our [ TS ] management and music publishing revenues. Overall, ViuTV sustained solid positive EBITDA of USD 12 million, representing 3% year-on-year growth. Turning to the expense side. The team delivered 4% savings in total OpEx, down from $769 million to $739 million, with the ratio improving from 17% to 16%. The savings came from HKT, which achieved 12% year-on-year OpEx savings, largely contributed by efficiency gains from our mobile network operations, continued improvements in business processes as well as optimizing sales channels and retail footprints. These savings were moderated by increased OpEx investments at media, which grew 9% to support the continued growth in OTT and Free TV. On the CapEx side, this was lower by 4% to $308 million from $321 million with the ratio improving to 6.7%. The savings came from the reduction in CapEx at HKT especially in mobile, which fell by 10% following the completion of the territory-wide 5G network rollout last year. Future CapEx, we focus on capacity upgrades to meet future demand. TSS CapEx also dropped slightly we're spending to cater for demand for FTTH as well as customized smart city solutions. There was an increase -- slight increase in CapEx for media, mainly for streaming platform enhancements to improve the digital viewing experience. Turning to the capital structure. As you can see, the top chart shows the HKT debt profile. And as we mentioned yesterday, the upcoming $500 million bond due in 2023, was already refinanced through the $650 million bond issued in January 2022. Gross debt was stable at $5.66 billion. The bottom of the chart shows PCW. And as you can see, there is no debt due this year. Across the group, we have a balanced mix of bank borrowings and bonds with the ratio of fixed to floating approximately 60-40, insulating us from the impact of any potential interest rate hikes. Average debt maturity is just under 4 years, and the effective interest rate was 3%. Overall, the group's liquidity is very healthy at $3.6 billion, consisting of $400 million in cash and $3.2 billion of undrawn bank credit, of which HKT accounted for about $2.1 billion. Core gross debt-to-EBITDA was stable at 4.03x and core net debt to EBITDA was 3.78x. That ends my presentation. And if you have any questions, please feel free to contact the IR team. Thank you.

That's the end of the event. Thank you very much.