Tele Columbus AG (TC1) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the quarterly results call of Tele Columbus. [Operator Instructions] May I now hand you over to Leonhard Bayer, who will lead you through this conference.

Thank you very much, and good morning also from my side. It's my pleasure to welcome you in the name of Tele Columbus management team to our today's conference call following the release of our third quarter results for fiscal year 2021, which ended on September 30. This call is limited to 60 minutes. In case of any follow-up questions, Manuel and myself are available to discuss. I'm here today with Daniel Ritz, our CEO; and Eike Walters, our CFO. Now I would like to remind you that if any lenders or rating agencies on the call right now, that there is a public conference call in which only publicly available information will be discussed. I would therefore ask you to refrain from questions containing information not belonging to the public domain. The conference call is intended for capital market participants only and not for press representatives. If any journalists are on the line right now, we would highly appreciate if you were to leave the conference call now. Press representatives are welcome to call my colleague Sebastian Artymiak to discuss any outstanding questions. Please be aware that there might be a delay between the slides and the webcast and the voice transmission. Having said that, it's now my pleasure to hand over to you, Daniel. The floor is yours.

Thank you, Leo. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. A warm welcome also from my side to our Q3 conference call. I'll kick it off with key messages, followed by operational update and KPIs. Eike will talk about financial performance, and I'll be back with outlook. In terms of key messages. Operationally, the third quarter saw quite a few similar trends to prior quarters with a few notable exceptions. What remains the same is continued momentum in Internet and Telephony net adds where we added 5,000 and 4,000 RGUs, respectively, in the quarter. Now it's worth noting that the share of high speed tier is above 500 Mbits in our Internet gross adds more than doubled quarter-on-quarter to now 3.2%. And also remind you that at this stage, we have 1 gig available to DOCSIS 3.1, predominantly in Berlin. So that figure actually even is higher in the city of Berlin. We're -- also worth noting that we're now accelerating with the funding that has arrived, our FTTH upgrade projects, we signed projects covering 13,000 homes connected for FTTH to upgrade in the quarter. Mind you also that this is project signed, so they're not delivered yet. That will take a bit of time until they are then delivered and also start producing results. What remains the same. Unfortunately, that our CATV challenges persist, where we have 22,000 RGUs loss in the quarter thereof, 12,000 organic and 10,000 related to a database correction with no revenue impact. Premium TV net adds declined by 1,000 in the quarter. This is driven by the discontinuation of our VOD offering join, which is actually negative for RGUs but EBITDA supportive. In terms of financial performance, the Q3 core revenues, excluding construction revenues, decreased by 2% year-over-year. There are quite a few counterbalancing effects underneath that 2% decrease, an almost 5% year-on-year growth in Internet revenues, which we think is quite noteworthy. However, that was overcompensated by declines, and that's similar to previous quarters in CATV and Telephony. What is new in this quarter is that we also declined in B2B year-over-year on the revenue line, but just as you see later in the slides that actually was supportive on the gross margin because the decline was predominantly in low-margin construction -- sorry, hardware revenues. Q3 reported EBITDA is down 4.2% against the prior same quarter last year, driven by on the one hand, fewer revenues such as outlined and also higher OpEx as we are now ramping up our Fiber Champion strategy in terms of hiring people and also transformation-related non-recs that brought EBITDA reported down. You can also see the first indications of us ramping up in Q3 CapEx, which is up more than 25% year-over-year, driven by a strong year-over-year increase in network infrastructure as well as IT and operational investments. However, we wanted to ramp up even more. And you will see later on in the outlook that we are slightly reducing our outlook on CapEx because while the funding is available, ramping up takes a bit of time. And yes, so we didn't spend as much as we intended to spend in the third quarter and also in the fourth quarter. So that will take a bit of time. At strategic level, worth noting that we have successfully onboarded Telefónica as our first wholesale partner on our network. They're active. It's working, and these processes are stable. So that's the first major achievement there. The delisting has taken place that you're well aware of and also Kublai now owns to the best of our knowledge, 94.8% of the shares in Tele Columbus. Turning to operational update and KPIs. Internet RGUs, I already mentioned. You hear see the sequential development. I'd like to point you to the first bullet there when we compare the first 9 months of the year to the first 9 months of the prior year. So then you see that we are actually more than doubled, almost doubled -- no, sorry, added more than 50% of Internet net adds during the first 9 months of this year with 19,000 compared to 13,000 in the same period last year. If you look at the comparison of the quarter to the quarter of the prior year, this is slightly misleading because we have some COVID-related effects that made Q3 2020 higher than it actually is. And so therefore, the year-over-year comparison is slightly misleading, we should compare first 9 months of this year to the first 9 months of last year. Telephony, we saw a stable sequential and year-over-year development. This is largely linked to IP as we are only charging for outbound usage of Telephony and not for the access itself. Here is what I already mentioned in the summary upfront, you see that the higher speed tier is above 500 Mbits, eating into the share of gross adds, which is very positive. You also see that the lowest speed tier of up to 20 Mbits is getting less and less. And also, as I reminded you, the high speed tier is above 500 Mbits are available only part of our footprint. So that percentage of gross adds in that relative -- in that particular part of our footprint is even higher. And we continue doing that. And you saw maybe the press release yesterday in normal past hours that we're also now we're rolling out DOCSIS 3.1 there, and we're doing more of that in the months to come. This is in parallel to our fiber upgrades. This is the less good part of the picture. TV RGUs where the challenges persist. We lost 22,000 RGUs in the quarter, as mentioned, of which 12,000 are organic and therefore, slightly, or I wouldn't say better, but less bad than the prior quarters and 10,000 related to a database correction without revenue impact. Premium TV already mentioned, minus 1,000, that doesn't look nice on the RGU side of things, but actually is EBITDA supportive due to the discontinuation of the VOD offering. Don't worry, we'll get back with a new VOD offering as part of our future premium TV platform, which is currently being evaluated and will be operational at some stage in the future. ARPUs, I would say, are broadly stable on Internet and Telephony blended, slight decline to the prior quarter. However, that is the average that, that's driven by Telephony ARPU decreasing whereas the Internet ARPU is indeed stable. And if we see continuing trends of what I just showed you of the high-speed tiers eating into our gross adds share, then that at some stage will also start to increase. TV RGU Is stable largely. So we're losing RGUs, but at least the ARPU remains stable. NPS, so we're getting better, but it's getting tougher to get even better because we're now firmly in positive territory for 5 or 6 quarters, you see especially telesales that has shown a very nice trajectory in terms of NPS improvements, also customer service. Also the outside world is recognizing that we're not perfect, but getting -- but we're getting better. So that's positive. Here, we have to think about the balance of investments going forward because for instance, the tele sales, are already at 54% NPS positive. There are decreasing margin returns. So we'll have to think about how we allocate investments. There are clearly other areas to require more investment and also weighing on NPS, such as technical service quality, but the touch points and the journey NPS is already pretty good, I would say. Here on B2B, as mentioned upfront, a 9% -- 9.3% decline on the top line for the quarter this year compared to the third quarter of last year. However, if you look at contribution margin in absolute median euros, a slight increase. That means a significant increase of more than 7 points in terms of contribution margin percent of revenue. This is driven, as I mentioned, by a revenue decline of mainly low-margin hardware and actually higher margin voice revenues. We expect the no growth and actually declined to continue also in the fourth quarter for B2B. Here that the 2 mentioned fiber announcements. So these are projects that have been won and actually have been won in competitive tenders. So that shows that we have now a very positive trajectory on winning concessions or prolonging, extending concessions, so sizable footprint, 5,000 in Halle and Merseburg and 8,000 in Dresden, 2 of our important cities in our footprint where we will be bringing FTTH to the tenants of those buildings in the years to come. With that, I'll hand you over to Eike for financial performance.

Thank you, Daniel. Hello, and good morning also from my side. On this page, you can see the revenue bridge or the overview of the revenue development and the underlying trends per category. As usual, the light blue bar describes the reported numbers and the dark blue bar describes the development of our core revenues, which are the revenues, excluding construction business. Daniel said it already, Q3 core revenues decreased by 2% year-on-year to EUR 114.8 million, while reported revenues decreased by 2.9% as low-margin construction revenues declined as planned. The recent trend continues and the operational trends also mirrors in the financials and the revenues. The TV business remains challenging. So EUR 2.8 million less than Q3 2020 of what 50% of this decrease is really driven by bulk and 50% is driven by the individual customer business. The first time let out the split for Internet and telephony. So we separated both and you can see that in Internet revenues, we were able to grow our business, and this also overcompensated the losses in Telephony. Telephony, we are able to increase our revenue base but we are operating with a very low ARPU there. And this brings down the revenues. B2B also said, so this is also declining compared to Q3 2020. But there, we had the significant hardware sales. So this is positive to the margin. We had a couple of quarters now in a row where we stabilize the service revenues of B2B, but the revenues here shrink, but also the cost shrink compared to the Q3. The other revenues, this is largely driven by sales from program providers. So feed-in fees. We have more content providers under contract and this helps us on the revenue side. With that, I would like to come to the next page, which is the EBITDA bridge and the comparison with Q3 2020. So you can see the mix picture shown by the different colors there. green and red is mix. The Q3 reported EBITDA is down 4.2% to EUR 52.8 million, and fewer revenues higher OpEx. This decrease is majorly driven by the aforementioned decline in revenues and other income is driven in a one-off effect. This is driven by the release of accruals that helped us in this quarter. The other direct costs are higher due to a very low comparable base in Q2 -- Q3 2020, where we have capitalization effects with regard to fees for the use of foreign grids, which we applied first time in Q3 2020, and this is the reason why the comparable base was really low. And so the underlying business trends there is stable, no cost increase. The higher personnel expenses due to a higher number of FTE on board. Of course, we said it already in the previous quarters, we started the transformation already. We hired new people for IT, but also for the enabler of overhead finance, but also at our technician area, our subsidiary, RFC. So the field technicians are hiring more people. We have some higher marketing experience and also the increase in the non-recs are seen in judge from our perspective, positive because this is a clear sign that we complete the cost in order to start the transformation to the Fiber Champion. With that, I'd like to come to the net income. So net income improved by around EUR 3 million year-on-year, which is positive. The EBITDA decrease in normalized EBITDA and also in reported EBITDA, of course, negative to this. But very positive to mention is we benefit from the lower interest expenses as a positive result of the deleveraging happened earlier this year. Fewer taxes concludes this slide. So we are still negative, but we were able to do better than in Q3 2020. My last page is the CapEx. The CapEx in Q3 is up by 25% to EUR 42.2 million. This is driven by a very strong increase in network infrastructure for deployment and capacity measures. So we are investing into our network and into our assets in order to become the Fiber Champion. Also remarkable is the increase in IT and operations, where we invested definitely more. And this is a good sign again to us because the Fiber Champion transformation has begun. The budget constraints doesn't hold us back anymore and operational improvements can now happen. With that, I would like to give back to Daniel.

Thank you, Eike. So on outlook, as you remember, we have updated our guidance for the full year 2021 with second quarter. Now we are confirming what we said there in terms of revenue, EUR 465 million to EUR 475 million, as well as reported EBITDA of EUR 190 million to EUR 200 million. However, as mentioned upfront, we are reducing our full year guidance for CapEx by EUR 10 million down to EUR 175 million to EUR 185 million. This is not the cost-saving approach from the past, but rather, this is because we are not able to ramp up as quickly as we were hoping. So it takes time to mobilize and to ramp up. And therefore, we're expecting now to spend EUR 10 million less in CapEx for this full year than we said in Q2. And this concludes our presentation. When I look at the third quarter overall, I would say, as I've mentioned, operationally, largely similar trends, some positives compared to the second quarter. The prior quarter actually B2B down, but only in terms of revenue, not in terms of gross margin, and yes, overall, I think we're on the right track as far as mobilizing for our Fiber Champion strategy requires with the exception that it takes a bit longer than we anticipated in terms of ramping up the CapEx spend.

Thank you, Daniel, and thank you, Eike. And with that, we're happy to take your questions. Aurelia, please.

[Operator Instructions] And the first question is from Lars Dueser, Deutsche Bank.

Yes. I have a few questions this morning. First of all, I see that the reported EBITDA came in at EUR 53 million, which brings the 9 months number to EUR 153 million. And if I then take the midpoint of your full year guidance at EUR 195 million, it implies basically Q4 of only EUR 42 million, and I was wondering if that indicates that we will see a material step-up in non-recs in Q4 or whether the guidance now can be deemed conservative on that level?

Yes. Lars, maybe I'll take the question. So you asked specifically and maybe you are familiar with the history of the company in regards to the non-recs. This is really no part of the non-recs, and this is not written. So reported EBITDA will be under pressure also in Q4. And this is judge our perspective very positively because we invest in the company. We would like to hire more people. So this -- non-rec, this is really on personnel expenses. We would like to invest more in marketing. We would like to invest customer service, but also in order to start the transformation or to continue with the transformation, we maybe also need some external advisers to help us to increase capacity internally. But this is not the game you are maybe used to from the past from Tele Columbus. This is really building up cost, yes, in a way that we would like to increase our business. But this is not working or financial engineering and modeling with the non-recs.

Got it. And would you say then that Q4 is a relatively good run rate for the quarters ahead when it comes to reported EBITDA because it will be a quarter probably where you will have invested much more in these functions you want to improve. Or do you think that Q4 won't be representative?

Yes, as you know, we are rather shy with forward-looking statements. But what I can say is that we invest in order to increase our revenues. So we need to start the transformation. And then after a certain time, the revenues will increase and the cost base absolutely compared to what we have seen today should be in a better level.

Got it. So there's obviously the transition and lag effect, right? Because you will now get hit with the OpEx in Q4 already, but that's an upfront investment, if you like, and then hopefully, the revenues will follow in the quarter perhaps. Is that a fair take?

Exactly.

Got it. And the second question, if I look at cash CapEx, including the lease payments for the first 9 months, they were at EUR 110 million. So that basically implies that you will spend, call it, EUR 70 million in Q4 to get to the EUR 180 million at the midpoint there. That's unusually high. Is that because there was any deferred element which has to be paid in Q4? Or is it just because you are ramping up much more now in the last quarter of the year?

It's really the latter. So we are really pushing into it. We started a couple of FTTH projects. We are starting capacity measures and also measures internally, so IT and operations and which costs which can be capitalized. We are investing significantly into our IT infrastructure, and this will happen in Q4.

Got it. And then last but not least. Do you already provide some sort of flavor where we are headed to with regards to CapEx next year? Or is that something you only provide at the outlook when you report the full year numbers?

Yes. I would like to stick to the usual we have done in the past. So we would like to give the outlook together with the Q4 communication.

And there are currently no further questions. [Operator Instructions] And the next question is from Aaiza Ali, Barings.

Just a couple of questions. Firstly, on the CapEx ramp. do you think the pace that you were anticipating, is there anything structural there that we need to be aware of, as in it's hard to find staff or hard to source or transport or anything to that effect that drives that delay and we would see that unwind? Or is it just purely that you were optimistic in your budgeting? And then secondly, in terms of the cost that has to go into the business still. Could you give some kind of flavor -- I appreciate that you're not giving forward-looking statements, but could you give us some kind of indication on whether there's actually quite a lot still to do there in terms of rightsizing the cost -- or building the cost base for future growth? Or whether a lot of that has been done already?

Yes, Aaiza, Daniel here. Look, so on the first one, this is predominantly overoptimistic -- excited, overoptimistic budgeting. So when you come from a period of drought and you suddenly have the funding and the support available, you get very optimistic and that the company just takes time to switch gears. So that's -- the supply chain is not affecting that. However, that's something that we need to keep in mind for next year because lead times for orders have increased significantly in many areas, and that effect, not just Tele Columbus, but I guess the telecom operators as well. So we have to factor that in and order early in order to be able to spend the CapEx for next year, but that's not a major factor for this quarter. In terms of cost base, look, so Eike had already mentioned a few areas. So there is more ramp-up to be done on personnel, because one, we come from a phase where we had gaping holes in our organization that we were not able to fill due to the funding constraints. So there's catching up to be done. But there is also, of course, growth related personnel build up. Give you 1 illustration, if you want to do a lot of -- and this is what we want to do, do a lot of FTTH upgrade projects and new builds, then you need a lot of fiber planners, right? And that's a very scarce resource these days. So that's an area that we're building up and ramping up. There's also more marketing spend to come because we have ambitious gross add targets for the years to come. So we also need to do some catching up there. Then there are things related -- cost base related to basically cost of goods sold. So when you're ramping up volumes, you also -- you have higher outsourcing costs written for call center. So to answer your question, what you see for the full year 2021 is not the cost base that you should anticipate for the future because 2021 is a split year where the first half, we're still operating under the constraints of the past. And I would say a bit of Q3 and some -- and a lot of Q4 actually relates to the shape of things to come. That's as much as I can say at this stage without going into too detailed numbers and giving forward-looking statements.

No. That's very helpful. Daniel, actually, can I just ask 1 more on the Telefónica Deutschland agreement?

Yes.

Just in terms of how we should be thinking about that now that it's operational and working as planned, are we -- is the way to think about it, is there going to be a gradual migration of Telefónica Deutschland picks up onto your network, and so we should see that kind of ramp up and build in coming quarters? Is that the way that should play out into numbers? And will you be splitting that out too for us to be able to see or no?

Yes. Look, so at this stage, so we've launched, it works stably. That also confirmed to us by Telefónica Deutschland. The third and the fourth quarter are very much, I would call, a hypercare phase where both companies want to make sure that what they have put in place actually works and the processes are properly functioning. And I think you'll see more ramp-up to come in 2022. I cannot comment on Telefónica's plans because I don't know them. And even if I did, it would not be appropriate for me to talk about that. So that's a question you should ask them what they have in mind. But of course, we see continuous development at this stage. We will not be able to report the numbers in isolation because it is only 1 player on our network at this stage, and we cannot disclose numbers on behalf of Telefónica that they don't disclose themselves. That would not be appropriate.

[Operator Instructions] And we haven't received any further questions. So I hand back to the speakers for closing remarks.

Great. Thank you, Aurelia. And yes, with that, I would like to hand over to Daniel for closing remarks, please.

Thank you, Leo. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for joining our Q3 conference call. As mentioned, the transformation that the ramp up has started, and we look forward to good results coming from that in the quarters to come. And we look forward to seeing and hearing you again with our Q4 results and then the guidance for full year 2022 in a couple of months. Thank you. Stay safe, stay healthy.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect now.