SKY Network Television Limited (SKT) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, good day, and welcome to the Sky FY '21 Annual Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Sophie Moloney. Please go ahead.

[Foreign Language], and good morning. My name is Sophie Moloney, and I'm your Chief Executive here at Sky. I'm joined this morning by Andrew Hirst, Sky's Interim Chief Financial Officer. Now for those of you watching online, I hope you just enjoyed that short reel with some of our cool content highlights for the year. We had hoped to present from our studio, but the current COVID lockdown has meant that we're here and voice only. So here's the game plan for today. I will shortly give you an overview of the highlights of FY '21 before briefly recapping on our strategy. We'll then look at our operational performance before I hand over to Andrew, who will guide you through our financials. We'll then move to the guidance for the year ahead and give some more color on the outlook we've provided to the market today. As usual, there will be an opportunity for Q&A, and we look forward to taking your questions at the end of the presentation. But before we talk through the headline numbers, some context for the year. We drafted our annual report and this presentation at a time when fans right across the country were enthralled by the Tokyo Olympics. I lost count of the number of times that was referred to as a game like no other. It was a real privilege for Sky to be able to bring those incredible moments, be it a brilliant high or a devastating low to homes, workplaces and commercial outlets right across New Zealand. It was a particular privilege to connect families and friends of athletes with those incredibly poignant moments after all of that gut-wrenching training. And that's a special role we play here at Sky, connecting Kiwis to the content that matters. I also reflect on the Olympics because we, too, it's something of a year like no other. I'm very proud of the strong work of our team and the results we have achieved. So to the headline numbers and 2021 at a glance. I'm pleased to report strong revenue, EBITDA and NPAT that are slightly above our last guidance. These results are in part due to underlying operating improvements and in part from one-off items, which we'll touch on shortly. Our successes in the year included securing strategically important rights continuing to stabilize our value Sky -- valuable Sky Box space and growing our streaming customer numbers. But as I said at the interim, we can and must do better, with FY '22 being an inflection point for Sky. It is particularly pleasing to deliver on reduced operating costs. And in the coming period, you'll see us continuing this important trend as well as returning to revenue growth. And so to our strategy. We are focused on what matters most, our customers. We're clear on our role and what makes Sky special. We connect to New Zealanders with the sports and entertainment they love in ways that work for them right across Aotearoa New Zealand. And we're clear on what success looks like and how we're going to achieve it. Today, we'll give you an update on what we're doing in each of our 4 key focus areas, and I trust that throughout, you'll get a good sense of what we call our bedrock, record and sustained execution and being an efficient, adaptive and profitable business. Moving to Slide 6. We set out our 3-year targets for you at our Investor Day, and we'll reference some of those targets during today's presentation. On -- this slide beautifully summarizes what we've achieved in FY '21. In the interest of time, I won't dwell on those here and we'll instead touch on each area as we progress. I note, however, that the achievements this year set the foundation for Sky's continued turnaround. Turning now to operational performance. And as far as surprise, we're starting with what matters most, our customers. So turning to Slide 8. I start by saying that I'm delighted that we served 955,000 customers across New Zealand. That is an impressive customer base, and we value our ongoing relationships with each of them. You've seen here that we talk about 16% growth in core customer numbers. Now without being tricky, 12 months ago, we had a number of customers who had Lightbox bundled as part of a wholesale deal and the underlying growth demonstrates the growth in paying subscriptions. But let's get to the valuable Sky Box numbers. We are firmly focused on stabilizing net base. And so the improvement in customer reduction from 5.4% in FY '20 to 3.8% in FY '21 is definitely the right trend to be seeing. And of course, the rapid growth in our streaming services as a source of pride for the Neon and Sky Sport and our teams. We continue to do an excellent job of attracting new customers and engaging existing ones. Let's briefly take a look at the movements in the Sky Box space on Slide 9. We report good news in both activations and disconnections. With return Sky Box activations to grow up 15% from FY '20. And on the disconnections front, we've reduced these by 6%, continuing the positive trend of recent years. Both activations and churn are benefiting from the implementation of test-and-learn initiatives that are fueled by rich data insights. And yes, it's fair to say we believe we're only just warming up on this front. On Slide 10, our churn trends are also very encouraging. You'll see we provide data based on tenure as well as total churn. Total churn for the entire Sky Box base has continued the steady reduction we've been seeing over a number of years now, down to 12.2% from 12.6% a year ago and from 15.3% in FY '18, meaning an improvement of 20% in 3 years. The tenure chart focuses on direct customers. With the migration of reseller customers to a direct relationship with Sky, we've added them into the chart from December 2020 based on the length of their relationship with the Sky Box service. I note this simply because we weren't able to do it before now. We also know that the first year that a customer is with us is a critical time, and we've been working very hard to make sure we get the relationship off to a great start. We've been doing this with tailored communication, regular check-ins to ensure they're accessing the content that they simply need and, of course, by ensuring they know about Sky Go. And we've had an impressive 31% improvement in year 1 churn, so that strategy is paying off. It's also very pleasing to continue to report on our strong base of customers with more than 5 years of tenure, which now accounts for 74% of the total customer base. These customers are our quiet champions who loves their Sky and the service we provide, and they represent a core strategic strength. Turning to the next slide. Part of the core value proposition moving forward is our new Sky Box experience. We told you at our Investor Day a couple of months ago that we would deliver a new Sky Box into customer homes in the middle of next year, and we're right on track to achieve this. We've had really strong feedback from existing and potential customers that tells us there's a compelling case for what we are developing, and we continue to use customer insights to inform our decisions. I'm really excited about the possibilities the new Sky Box presents. It will reinforce our role as the preferred content aggregator in the New Zealand market. It is a hybrid box offering our customers great functionality, a superb range of Sky content and access to a range of ads, all conveniently in 1 place with 1 remote. It's a critical next step in our strategy, and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Our objective of adding value for our important Sky Box customer base is, of course, also supported by the rollout of Sky Broadband. It's broadband made for entertainment offered at a special and highly competitive price for Sky Box customers and with great service and quality to boot. I'm pleased to say our marketing strategy is hitting its marks and positive word of mouth is also beginning to build as the speed, coverage and pricing is resonating. It's great to see the trust in our brand and reliability coming through with our loyal customer base. Now it is early days, so we won't be releasing customer numbers in this round. But we're comfortable that we're on track with our targets, including the 3% to 5% attach rate for FY '22. As I noted in my opening remarks and as is set out on Slide 13, we're also happy to report strong growth in streaming. We're adding new customers, and we're keeping them. We told you at Investor Day that the key metrics for streaming are engagement, tenure and growth in customer numbers. Year-on-year engagement for Neon has lifted by 28% and for Sky Sport Now by 15%. While we've seen a slight reduction in average tenure, a number of continuous months customers have been with us, this is actually due to our success in adding new customers throughout the year to grow the underlying customer base. That's delivered total streaming growth of 57%, including 39% to Neon since the merge and 134% for Sky Sport Now. And you'll see when we get to our targets that we expect continued growth. Turning now to Slide 14, our important commercial customers. First up, we do want to acknowledge the impact on many of our commercial customers due to the current COVID lockdown. But looking at FY '21, despite challenges from border restrictions, we've seen gradual recovery, and Andrew will touch on this more later. All of our licensed premise customers are now on value-based, tiered pricing, which means a more actable playing field when it comes to valuing the revenue-generating opportunity our content provides to our licensed premise customers. We've had positive feedback from these customers about the approach, and the more tailored pricing also means an overall increase in ARPU for Sky. It's also opening up opportunities to add new customers in lower tiers. And I'm proud to say that we've signed up around 80 new sports club customers, now making the most of our high-quality sports content in their local communities. And that moves us nicely on to our great content. You've been hearing about our content wins throughout the year, but it's worth reflecting on what we've achieved in FY '21, securing some strategically important deals, such as the NRL, the New Zealand Rugby League, ESPN, Discovery, Foxtel, NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS, to name but a few. These are all significant multiyear content deals. Importantly, they demonstrate we continue to be an attractive partner and reinforce our preferred aggregator role. These partners recognize and value the ease with which we provide access to our significant customer base of high ARPU customers right across the country. But of course, we continue to be disciplined in our decision-making around rights using rich customer insights to understand what customers value as we demonstrated during our Investor Day. Now before I hand over to Andrew, I want to touch on a very important priority, our people. Our focus on being a place where our crew are empowered to do their best work and to be themselves is very important to me. Some of you will be aware that we've had some challenging moments this year in that regard. I believe we are responding in the right way. And my team and I are absolutely committed to Sky being a place where everyone feels they belong and are able to do their best work. Our business is evolving, and we continue to make changes and transform the way we do things. We are making good headway in realigning our business to what matters most to our customers. We've also worked across the full Sky team to confirm our values of being themselves, making someone's day and creating something amazing, which needs to underpin everything that we do. I'll now hand over to Andrew to take you through Sky's financial performance. Thank you, Andrew.

Thank you, Sophie, and good morning, everyone. As Sophie said at the top of the call, FY '21 has certainly been a year like no other, and the events of the last week just served to emphasize the ever-changing environment we're dealing with. As already highlighted, it was a very profitable year for Sky, and I'll take you through the numbers in a bit more detail to give you some insight into the various moving parts. As we said on -- at our Investor Day in June, our FY '21 results were at the top end or slightly above guidance. Revenue of $711 million was towards the top end of guidance, while EBITDA of $186 million and net profit after tax of $47.5 million were both above. Revenue was down 4.7% year-on-year. But once we strip out the direct impact of COVID and other one-offs, the underlying revenue decline was only 3.6%. When compared to the 6.1% decline last year, you can see the progress we have made in stabilizing the revenue position. This will become more evident later when we come to talk about FY '22 guidance as we're budgeting revenue growth for the first time since 2016. Offsetting this 4.7% revenue decline, our underlying operating expenses were down by $27 million or 5% despite stepping into higher content costs in the second half of the year. This reflects permanent savings we've already locked into the underlying cost base as well as further savings in content rights and production costs due to COVID. As with FY '20, we again had a few one-off impacts this year, but these broadly offset each other with no net impact on earnings. We had $10.8 million of nonrecurring income from a gain on sale of OSB of $5.8 million and another $5 million relating to settling the RugbyPass earnout on favorable terms and releasing content provisions where we exited rights commitments on better terms than originally expected. Offsetting this nonrecurring income, we had $10.3 million of one-off costs relating to content impairments and the mutually agreed exit of the former CEO. As a result, we delivered full underlying year -- full year underlying EBITDA of $185.9 million, which compares to $192.4 million last year. This was a pleasing result given we did step into higher content costs in the second half of the year, most notably the new Rugby deal that came into effect from the 1st of January. While the result was encouraging, as we look forward to FY '22, there is more work underway to stabilize and then grow our Sky Box revenues to continue with the growth we've achieved in our streaming services and to lock in further permanent savings to our operating costs. So looking more closely at revenue. As has already been mentioned, our revenue was down 4.7% on last year, which an -- which was an improvement on a 6.1% decline in FY '20. Furthermore, once we strip out the direct effect of COVID and other one-off or structural impacts that I will talk about shortly, the underlying revenue decline was only 2.4%. I will cover off each of Sky Box, streaming, commercial and advertising revenues in a bit more detail on the next few slides. So turning firstly to our Sky Box revenue, which declined by 9% in FY '21 compared with an 8% decline last year. As Sophie has mentioned, Sky Box subscribers continue to stabilize with a decline of only 3.8% this year. However, revenues were impacted by customer losses in FY '20, which meant we started the year with a lower subscriber base as well as a number of one-off or structural impacts that contributed to ARPU reducing by $3.70 this year. These one-off factors caused half of that ARPU decline and included the migration of 34,000 reseller customers from Vodafone to being direct with Sky, which means we no longer recognize debt revenue on a gross basis with an offsetting commission cost, and now revenues are recorded on a net basis. We also offered these migrating reseller customers a one-off first month free to align their billing cycles. Secondly, we saw lower sports penetration than normal for the first half of the year due to the COVID-impacted sporting calendar. And finally, we had fewer pay-per-view events this year as well as reduced revenue following the discontinuation of the Sky Watch magazine. Stripping out these one-off impacts, the underlying Sky Box revenue decline was 5.8%. The pleasing aspect is that many of these one-offs were largely isolated to our first half. And while some did have some run rate effect flow through the second half, the ARPU decline in the second half was much more muted. I also note that we've not increased our prices for Sky Box customers since April 2019, who would normally have rolled out an annual price increase to allow for the inflationary impact on our rights costs, but we opted not to do so and what was already a challenging period for New Zealanders. Now looking at our streaming revenues, which grew by 24% year-on-year. ARPU did reduce from $20 to $17 as a result of the continued change in the mix of our streaming customers, with high growth for Neon relative to other streaming products. ARPU actually fell to $16 in the second half of FY '20 following the acquisition of Lightbox. Ever since seen it increase back up to $17 this year as we put through a price increase in May and also increased the proportion of Neon customers that pay direct rather than through Spark at a wholesale rate. At the same time, we've also grown Sky Sport Now subscribers, which are packaged at a higher price point, and we were delighted to see Sky Sport Now hero throughout the recent Tokyo Olympics. Looking now at our commercial revenues, which were down $3 million year-on-year. You can see from the chart on Page 22, the impact that COVID had on the second half of last year and the first half of this year as we provided discounts and suspensions to affected customers during the COVID period. You can also see the sign of recovery in the second half of the year, reflecting our licensed premise customers returning to normal billing in August 2020 and the impact of reducing accommodation provider discounts from November 2020. As Sophie mentioned, we also completed the rollout of our value-based, tiered pricing model for licensed customers in February 2021. We expect to see continued recovery in the commercial space in FY '22, where the -- obviously, we'll have to wait and see what impact the current lockdown situation brings. Turning to our advertising revenues, which were flat year-on-year. Like commercial, you can see from the chart the impact that COVID in the second half of last year and the first half of this year as well as the recovery in the second half of the year. Sky's market share was steady this year and off the back of growth in the TV advertising market, revenue has largely returned to pre-COVID levels other than the impact of a change in the arrangement with Discovery, which saw them take direct representation for advertising on their channels from February 2021. Now turning to our costs. Total expenses reduced significantly, down by $45 million, an 8% reduction despite the step-up in our Rugby deal in the second half of the year. Adjusting both years for the impact of one-off costs, the underlying reduction year-on-year was $27 million or 5%. The $13 million reduction in programming costs reflects further savings on rights and production costs as a result of canceled or postponed events and reduced availability of entertainment content due to COVID. We also had permanent savings from the nonrenewal of domestic cricket as well as reductions in the cost base of RugbyPass. These COVID-related and permanent savings were partly offset by a $25 million step-up, mainly related to the new Rugby deal as well as other sporting events such as Euro 2020 and the Lions Tour. The $14 million reduction across subscriber related, broadcast and infrastructure and other cost lines, primarily relates to savings from the restructuring carried out in FY '20 as well as a range of other cost-saving initiatives and streamlining of operations. The $11 million reduction in depreciation is consistent with our transition to our lighter capital model. We expect to see this trend continuing, and we'll also see the benefit of our new Optus deal kicking in from December 2021. And as I noted earlier, one-off costs were $10.3 million compared to $28 million last year. On the next slide, we bridge the year-on-year movement in EBITDA. You'll see that we firstly added back the one-off cost of $28 million. So adjusting for these, our normalized EBITDA for FY '20 was $192 million. The direct impact of COVID was $8 million, made up of lower commercial revenues, reduced sport penetration over and above normal seasonality and the impact of lower acquisitions from March to June 2020 carrying into this year and reducing our opening subscriber base. On the cost side, the impact of COVID on the 2020 sporting calendar resulted in rights and production cost savings of $18 million. We've now moved to a more normal, but by no means fully confirmed sporting calendar for the rest of 2021 and into 2022. As a result, we do not expect to maintain this level of savings going forward. Albeit to the extent that the calendar for sport continues to be affected, we would expect further savings relative to our contractual obligations. Our underlying subscription revenue was down $29 million versus last year. This was mainly made up of a decline in Sky Box revenue of $50 million of which $7 million was directly COVID-related, offset by streaming growth of $14 million. Once you remove the one-off and other structural changes that impacted our Sky Box revenues and ARPU that I talked about earlier, the underlying subscription revenue decline was $20 million or 3% versus the 6% decline we saw last year. As part of our ongoing efforts to create efficiencies that rightsize the cost base, we've made a number of structural changes that resulted in permanent savings of $37 million. This includes the full year impact of restructuring activities in FY '20 and the other factors mentioned earlier, such as the nonrenewable domestic cricket and a significant reduction in the cost base of RugbyPass. And finally, as I've already covered, we had nonrecurring income of $10.8 million, broadly offset by one-off costs of $10.3 million. So looking at CapEx. Our FY '21 CapEx of $51 million represented 7.2% of revenue compared to $57 million or 7.6% of revenue last year. Both years were well within our long-term target of 7% to 9% of revenue. Sky Box installation CapEx increased compared to last year from $13 million to $15 million due to the higher levels of new activations. Growth CapEx includes the launch of Sky Broadband with the investment in customer routers and mesh devices as well as some initial spend on the development of the platform supporting the new set top box. Our enhancement CapEx included upgrading our broadcast capabilities and digital streaming as well as investment on personalization and customization capability. And one final point on CapEx. The sale of OSB means we will avoid at least $50 million in future CapEx spending over the next 5 years. So in summary, our message on capital investment is that we continue to transition to a lighter capital model, reweight our spend towards growth initiatives and our preferred approach to -- is to partner where it makes sense to do so. Looking now at cash flows. We were pleased with the level of free cash flow generated for the year of $69 million, which compares to $23 million in FY '20. I note that for both these figures, we have excluded the movement in net working capital in order to get a like-for-like comparison. And that's because we had the unusual situation with the cash on hand at June 2020 of $111 million was inflated by a significant level of payables at that time relating to sports rates where the values were still being negotiated at year-end through an equitable reduction process. And just to put that into context, we had -- this year, we had a cash outflow of $39 million relating to a reduction in these payables versus an inflow last year from an increase in payables of $18 million. Cash outflows for interest, tax, CapEx and lease payments were all in line with expectations in the prior year, albeit I note we had lower interest costs as a result of repaying our retail bonds. And tax payments were higher this year because we had 1 extra tax payment, which was delayed from FY '20. On the 31st of March, we repaid our $100 million of retail bonds out of cash reserves and also received the first $7 million of proceeds from the sale of OSB with the second installment of $7 million due in September 2021. As a result, we closed the year with $35 million of cash, together with our -- and together with our $200 million undrawn debt facility, we have significant funding headroom going forward. As we turn now to guidance for FY '22, it's important we caveat this with the continued uncertainty regarding the impacts of COVID with the current lockdown situation only serving to highlight this point. Notwithstanding that, for the first time since 2016, we're expecting revenue growth in FY '22 with guidance of $715 million to $745 million being above the $711 million level this year. As we've already discussed, we do have a step-up in our programming costs in FY '22, which, together with the absence of the nonrecurring income we had in FY '21 means we will see a reduction in our EBITDA and net profit after tax. This means 2022 becomes an earnings inflection point, reflecting this new program and cost base before we generate revenue growth and further operating cost savings over the next 2 or 3 years. This is reflected in our EBITDA guidance for FY '22 of $115 million to $130 million and net profit after tax of $17.5 million to $27.5 million. In order to help you navigate through the noise of COVID and the various one-offs in both FY '21 and FY '22 as well as step -- as well as the step-up in our programming costs, on the next slide, I'll take you through a high-level EBITDA bridge from FY '21 to FY '22. I would note that guidance excludes any impact from the potential sale of property. As you'll be aware, we are exploring options to maximize shareholder value through a possible sale of the 3 properties on our Mt Wellington site, with a corresponding leaseback of our main studio and technology facilities. This process has been delayed by the current lockdown as site tours have not been possible. We expect to be able to update the market by the time of our AGM in October. So as we step into the lower level of earnings and cash flow generation in FY '22, we expect to reinvest operating free cash flow into growth initiatives such as the new set top box. However, the Board continues to consider capital management options, including the potential for dividends in the context of our strong balance sheet as well as options for the use of proceeds from any asset sales such as property. And finally, for me, as I mentioned, we thought it would be useful to provide a high-level bridge from FY '21 to FY '22. I note that as we've bridged to the midpoint of our $115 million to $130 million EBITDA range, many of the buckets here are also averages. The key things to take away from this slide are that the net impact of COVID is an $11 million reduction. Next, we have $15 million of net costs in FY '22 that include one-off events such as the Tokyo Olympics. This was originally scheduled to occur in FY '21, so the delay means it will now impact our FY '22 result. The content renewals cost increase of $39 million includes the full year impact of the new Rugby deal, together with the impact of other recent and expected sport and entertainment renewals. Importantly, for the first time, our streaming revenue growth is expected to outstrip the decline in Sky Box revenue, reflecting the continued move to stabilizing our Sky Box subscriber base and the expectation of further growth in streaming. So together with the revenue from Sky Broadband and the continued recovery in commercial, this is a key factor behind the expectation that revenue will return to growth in FY '22. We are expecting further permanent operating cost savings of $5 million to $10 million in FY '22, although we will be reinvesting some of that in marketing investments to support growth in Sky Broadband and customer loyalty, retention and acquisition initiatives in Sky Box. So as I said before, our FY '22 EBITDA guidance of $115 million to $130 million becomes an inflection point, fully reflecting our new programming cost base as well as including $15 million for costs for one-off sporting events before we see the full impact of revenue growth and further cost savings kicking in over the next 2 or 3 years. That was all I'm supposed to cover on the financial results and outlook, but there will be a chance for you to ask any questions you might have shortly. I will now hand over to Sophie to wrap things up.

Thanks, Andrew. So to finish, on Slide 31, we have repeated the 3-year strategy targets we shared with you at our Investor Day. We've also added our 1-year target for FY '22. So you can see the progress we expect to deliver in the year ahead. Now as we've mentioned, we're at the positive inflection point in Sky's transition, and these targets will allow you to track our progress in delivering on the revenue growth and cost reductions we have firmly in our sights. For this year, that includes revenue growth of up to $35 million. It also includes further permanent operating cost reductions of $5 million to $10 million for this financial year with additional permanent cost savings to be achieved in FY '22 that we will see the benefit of in FY '23 and beyond. And of course, we will deliver our new Sky Box within our CapEx envelope. Now as I said at the top of the presentation, we're clear on what success looks like and how we'll achieve it. We have a laser focus on executing brilliantly on our plan. And as I wrote in my annual report to shareholders, I'm hugely optimistic about the future for Sky and remain deeply determined to deliver for our customers, our partners, our crew and thereby, our investors. With that, we're now happy to take your questions, and so I'll hand back to the operator.

[Operator Instructions] We will take our first question from Arie Dekker from Jarden.

First question was just in relation to the stabilization of revenues and just sort of what you're factoring in for Sky Box customers. So I guess maybe the first wave part of tackling it is there was a $50 million decline in FY '21. You've called out $7 million, I think, related to COVID. How does that reconcile in your EBITDA bridge to the $29 million decline in FY '21? Is that net of streaming gains? Is it?

I'm going to take that first, if you like, but I might get Gareth to jump in as well. The $7 million of the $50 million is obviously directly COVID-related, Arie. There's also the impacts of the one-off and structural impacts that I talked about as well as part of that normalization because obviously, we had a bunch of other things that were unusual in FY '22 -- oh, '21, sorry, around some of the migration impacts of the resale of -- from Vodafone to Sky and the other things that I called out there.

So the Sky Box decline in FY '22 in the EBITDA bridge of $16 million, I mean, is that a -- I mean, what -- is that a revenue -- midpoint revenue estimate for Sky Box decline revenues? Or what costs would be netted off the revenues to get that $16 million EBITDA impact?

That will be a revenue number.

Okay. So yes. So what you're saying is that essentially, you're comfortable that -- assuming some -- a midpoint somewhere between $10 million to $20 million of Sky Box decline and revenue ex broadband in FY '22?

Yes.

Okay. I mean that's obviously quite a marked reduction from sort of the $50 million we've seen in the last few years. And I guess the second half run rate on subloss was -- I mean, it's still -- it's a big improvement on recent years, but it's still sort of -- I think it was [ 11,000 or 12,000 ]. What are the key drivers of sort of that more positive view in FY '22?

Maybe if I can...

It's a combination -- no, you go ahead, Sophie, yes. Go ahead.

Sorry, I was going to leap in and say, I do think, Arie, the stabilizing we're seeing, some of that is that we're getting to those very loyal customers. We talked about the 74% in the last more than 5 years. But it's also we're actually just getting better at our craft, getting better understanding what content matters and engaging with our customers in a much better way. So I think the test-and-learn initiatives, which Corrie talked about during our Investor Day are really starting to show up, that first year retention. So as I said, we felt like -- and as we talked about Investor Day, we're only just getting started. So we expect to see those benefits continuing and growing just financial. Andrew, did you have anything more salient to add on that one?

I was just really going to call out, I suppose, that our churn run rates going and coming out of FY '21 are actually pretty good and a lot of it is driven by a lower churn, Arie.

Right. That's good. Yes. Okay. That's all for that one for now. And then just on the costs and recognize that you've obviously already gone through and taken a decent amount of permanent costs out. You're sort of looking to do kind of, I guess, somewhere around half of the 3-year target savings in FY '22 in terms of further permanent cost savings. Like have you -- at what point will you sort of look through the business and, I guess, see if there's more opportunity, I guess, on that front because -- I guess, particularly around the programming costs and, I guess, there's a bit more coming with the Rugby League, the overall cost base is very high and that $10 million to $15 million, even as a percentage of, I guess, nonprogramming costs isn't that high. Is there an opportunity to look at whether that 3-year target could be extended and more cost savings down?

Yes. So I'll leap in, Arie. I suppose the first thing to say, that's a minimum, and we obviously always want to make sure that we outperform. And so my response to that is, yes, we're going to be very focused. And we're looking at everything that we are doing across the piece in terms of what we're producing, and it's all about what value does it drive to customers. So I just reiterate that this is a minimum that we want to be achieving. And I'm obviously going to be pushing the team to outperform.

Sure. Okay. In terms of the commentary around capital management, including dividends, I guess I just sort of want to differentiate and so we'll see if there's a differentiation in what you're saying between sort of where you're at on the operating side of the business versus potential divestment proceeds. So I mean, obviously, there's the prospect that you could release a significant amount of cash out of property sale. And I guess what would be just a partial leaseback given that you're only looking at leasing back Studio 1. So are those comments at this point sort of related to the -- potentially being capacity to release some money contingent on that exit? Or are you also sort of saying that your confidence in the stabilization of the business, which is obviously subject to, still, a material drop in earnings this year is driving your consideration of capital management and dividends?

Okay. I think it's probably more the former, Arie. I think we are stepping into a year -- we generated $69 million of free cash on our result this year. We're looking at a lower level of earnings next year. We're still with positive cash flow generation, but it will be a lot lower. So I think what we're signaling is the operating cash in the business or operating cash flows will be invested into growth. But as you say, to the extent that there's proceeds from, for example, a property sale, I think that's where the Board would look to options around return potentially. We've -- obviously, we still got a very strong balance sheet with no debt and a sizable debt facility, but I think it's probably the right way to differentiate it. I think obviously, we need to execute on the property sale before we can say any more than that. And it has frustratingly been somewhat stalled by lockdown. But if it goes the way we think it will, I think that's where it will hit. There would be a good chance that some of that money might be available.

And in the mix, you've also mentioned reinvestment outside of, I guess, what you're doing in broadband, which has a little bit of, I guess, capital investment required sort of upfront and the set top box changed over what -- obviously, you're going to have to make a call on how quickly you sort of roll that through the base in that. Outside of those 2 things, are there any sort of meaningful investment initiatives on the cards?

They'd be the 2 biggest. Yes, nothing -- I think we've come through a period where we've invested in the capability in the business over the last 2 or 3 years. So that sort of piece of our capital play has been largely done. So it's largely those 2 that you called out. And broadband is not that significant. It's not -- set top box is probably the biggest.

Yes. And so just my final question, I mean, agree that you're on track for mid-'22. Just any comments you can give on sort of the approach you're going to take on rolling that out.

At the moment, we're -- so we're looking to deliver it -- yes, that's calendar year '22. We will be delivering it, I should say. In terms of the go-to market and price of the box and things, Arie, we're still working that through with customer insights on the look and feel and the design. We should be able to share some pretty cool stuff by the time of the AGM, but no further direction of travel at the moment in terms of that go-to market for our customers.

We will take our next question from Phil Campbell from UBS. Aaron Ibbotson for Forsyth Barr.

Can you hear me?

Yes, Aaron.

Perfect. Yes. I have 2 questions, if I may. So the first one is just to get a head around programming costs or content costs for FY '23, I guess. You referred to the Olympics, et cetera, as sort of one-off or event costs. Thinking for FY '23, am I right in assuming that the NRL, there will be a step-up there that's largely offsetting the "one-off nature of the Olympics?" And then will there be another Olympics in '25 -- '24, '25? Or is that too early to talk to?

So on the -- so the new NRL, there will be a half year impact as we stick into that deal. But I would need help from Andrew and Gareth in terms of your query around the offset. Certainly, from my perspective, it is less than the Olympics in terms of that step-up. But Andrew or Gareth, is there anything further we can share at this stage?