Viaplay Group AB (publ) (VPLAYB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today's Q2 2026 results conference call. [Operator Instructions] My name is Matthew Hooper, and I will be your host today. Joining me here on the call are our CEO, Jorgen Lindemann; and our CFO, Johan Johansson. Welcome, gentlemen. Our presentation will be followed by a Q&A session on the telephone dial-in line, and you can find our results materials, including the presentation deck and detailed fact sheet on the Investor Relations section of our website. As usual, the deck is for your information, and our remarks and commentary will not follow it slide by slide. Please be advised that today's conference call is being recorded. I will now hand the call over to Jorgen to walk through the results. So over to you, Jorgen.

Thank you, Matthew, and good morning, everyone. So we made further progress along our transformation path in Q2 and the Allente integration is proceeding according to plan. The combination of the Viaplay and Allente groups has created a larger group with more customers, more content monetization potential, and more cash flow generating capacity to deliver our strategic transformation and goals. The combined sales of SEK 10.8 billion for our core operations for the first half of this year is almost 25% higher than what we reported on a stand-alone basis for first half last year. Our combined first half EBITDA before ACIs and IACs of SEK 560 million compares with a loss of SEK 50 million in first half last year. The integration of the Allente Group is running according to plan, and we have now taken the majority of the costs relating to the restructuring. The resulting cash cost synergies are as expected. They are starting to come through and will be at their full year run rate level from the start of next year as planned. There will also be sales synergies, which our teams are exploring fully and carefully in areas such as customer acquisition and retention, marketing and promotion, product packaging and development, content utilization and monetization, and how we make the most of our tech stacks and CRM activities. More broadly, we are making progress with our strategic transformation. On the sales side, our streaming subscription sales were up 7% year-on-year on an organic basis with both our D2C and B2B sales growing. The total Viaplay subscriber base was stable year-on-year and down quarter-on-quarter, as usual due to the seasonally quieter summer sales period. Both D2C and B2B ARPU levels were up year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter due to the growth in the number of premium sports subscribers, as well as the continued focus on value over volume in the extension of our agreement with key distribution partners. More D2C and B2B customers are choosing our sports offering because we have much high-quality, wide-ranging, and year-round offering of the very best sports content. And we have more coverage of major sport this year than ever before. This quarter featured the exciting combination of the English Premier League football season and the Danish Superliga, the Ice Hockey World Championship, the final rounds of the UEFA Club Championships, Formula 1 Motor Racing and golf from the 3 of 4 majors, the Masters, the PGA Championship, and the U.S. Open. Our non-streaming revenues comprise the Allente DTH business as well as our own linear pay TV channel sales to third-party networks. The number of linear platforms and channel subscribers is in long-term structural decline due to the shift in consumer preference to streaming services, but scheduled appointment viewing still has a large and loyal following. The vast majority of the Allente subscribers already have Viaplay bundled with their subscription. So they have the best of the scheduled live and on-demand viewing worlds in their existing subscriptions. The Allente DTH subscriber base continued to decline in Q2, but Allente also -- has also added new content to make the product even stronger and raise prices, which partially offset volume declines. In total then, our non-streaming subscription sales were down 3% on an organic basis. Our total advertising sales were up slightly on an organic basis, which again reflected the combination of strong digital sales through our AVOD and HVOD offerings and growing radio advertising sales, which were offset by the ongoing structural decline in linear TV advertising. Our content offerings remain very attractive, and we will invest further in our offerings. We successfully launched -- we successfully launched several new local productions across our markets during Q2. In Norway, Helvetesuka premiered and has become one of the strongest performing local titles ever on the platform. We also launched Skjærgårdsfeber spin-off from one of the most successful franchise in Norway, Charterfeber. In Denmark we introduced the Danish version of Charterfeber, while Middag på Michelin-restauranterne also stood out as a strong local launch. Our international slate was further strengthened by the premiere of the international hit, Sandokan, which has been particularly well received by subscribers who engage with Outlander earlier this year. Our movie offerings also continued to differentiate the service during the quarter. Standout titles included, Materialists starring the Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal; as well as our Swedish original movie, Det är något som inte stämmer, based on the best-selling novel by Martina Haag. Finally, the other sales line comprises our sports sublicensing business, where we sublicense our sports rights to third-party broadcasters and streamers in our core markets and our scripted content sales business, where we sell our portfolio of original scripted content to broadcasters and streamers around the world. Sales were down 15% year-on-year on an organic basis as reflected the lower volume of scripted content sales in particular. Overall, our core operation sales were up 0.7% year-on-year on an organic basis. When excluding the positive currency effects, our core operation costs were up 2% on a pro forma basis. The primary operating cost driver is content, which accounts for 3/4 of our total cost base. The largest part of this is sports content, where our costs have continued to rise due to the inflation built into our multiyear legacy agreements. As we prolong these agreements on competitive market terms or find alternatives, the inflation will be less in the second half of the year and also increase less next year. We offset some of this increase by reallocating capital to more profitable areas and with SG&A savings, including some synergies from the Allente Group integration. The ongoing transformation, disciplined capital allocation, sales and cost management and the negotiation and extension of key content and distribution partnership agreements on commercial and competitive terms, all the securing of alternative options are the major drivers of our longer-term ambition to deliver a double-digit EBITDA margin in 2028 compared to the 5.3% that we delivered last year on a pro forma basis. Our Q2 EBITDA was up year-on-year when compared to the pro forma number, including Allente Group's result last year, and then this included an approximate SEK 110 million currency tailwind due to the strengthening of the Swedish krona reporting currency. The recently announced sale of the Dutch operations will focus us operationally on the Nordic markets where we have the greatest scale advantages and synergy potential, and we will also provide cash to reduce our net debt and strengthen our financial profile. We remain totally focused on rebuilding as relevant and a resilient Nordic business as possible, one that both entertains and creates sustainable value for our customers, our people, our partners, and our owners. We are doing this by crafting competitive products and commercial partnerships to stand the test of time and enable us to achieve our transformation objectives. We still have a lot to do to deliver our short- and long-term goals, but we are making progress and remain fully focused on making this transformation happen. This is it for my comments for now, and I will now hand the call over to you, Johan, for your comments on our financial performance and position before we take questions.

Thank you, Jorgen, and good morning, everyone. As a reminder, the quarterly fact sheet on our website provides the usual relevant historical and backup information. In the report published today, we have provided the pro forma information for prior periods in 2025 to include Allente Group as if it had been consolidated from the beginning of last year. So this is so that you can see the organic development. The FX effects are shown as usual in the APMs at the back of the report. We have focused the commentary in the report on key sales and EBITDA numbers for our core operations as we discontinued the last of our non-core operations last summer. When it comes to cash flow and balance sheet commentary, we have provided group numbers as we still have a cash drag from legacy content agreements that are yet to expire in markets that we have already exited. The year-on-year FX improvements -- FX movements have big impact again this quarter with approximately SEK 80 million positive impact on the reported core operation sales as the Norwegian kroner in particular strengthened against our Swedish krona reported currency. Reported core operation costs benefited from the net positive FX tailwind of approximately SEK 30 million due to the strength of the Swedish krona against the euro and the dollar in which we have the vast majority of our costs. The net result of this was an approximate SEK 110 million positive year-on-year FX effect on our core operations EBITDA in Q2. We do still have significant currency exposure in the second half of the year, primarily in NOK. So these numbers can still move materially in either direction during the rest of the year. Depreciation and amortization amounted to SEK 152 million for the quarter and included approximately SEK 100 million of PPA amortization charges, which we flagged previously and are the result of the consolidation of Allente Group. The SEK 52 million of items affecting comparability in Q2 primarily compromised SEK 242 million of redundancy and restructuring costs relating to the integration of Allente Group as well as SEK 10 million of currency translation effects. We have previously guided for total integration cost of SEK 270 million to SEK 330 million, with the majority being taken as IAC in the first half of this year. So the SEK 203 million of IAC in the first half of the year was well in line with this. We have almost no associated company income or dividends now that we have fully consolidated Allente Group. When looking at our interest costs, please remember that the cost for the EUR 646 million of balance sheet bank guarantee facility that we canceled in November last year were included in other financial items, not the net interest, whereas now almost all of our borrowing costs are included in the net interest. So although the net interest costs were up year-on-year, other financial items were also significantly down. Moving on to the group cash flow. We reported a minus SEK 52 million working capital development, which primarily reflected the payments that we made for legacy content agreements in markets that we have exited. This non-core operation cash drag, which we talked about previously, is included in the working capital and is expected to amount to approximately SEK 500 million this year, SEK 400 million next year, and SEK 200 million in 2028. The year-on-year swing in working capital reflects the smooth and more stable setup that we have now. The payment terms in our new commercial arrangements reduced the cash flow volatility between quarters. Previously, there were substantial swings to payment timing differences. Our cash flow from operating activities totaled SEK 145 million in Q2, and included SEK 115 million of cash interest cost and SEK 78 million of cash tax costs. We invested SEK 32 million of CapEx in Q2 and reported a positive free cash flow result of SEK 113 million, of which SEK 176 million from the core operations and minus SEK 63 million from the non-core operations. The SEK 187 million cash flow to financing activities included the quarterly amortization of Allente Group related borrowings, which will total SEK 420 million this year and next year as well as changes in the usage of the SEK 2.8 billion RCF, which we have had to drawn SEK 700 million at the end of the quarter compared to SEK 750 million at the end of Q1. The net change in cash and cash equivalents, therefore, amounted to minus SEK 74 million in Q2. When looking at the second half of the year, we do expect working capital to be negative in Q3 and positive -- as the positive effect in the first half of the year will reverse and we expect to be positive in Q4. For the year as a whole, when excluding the non-core operations cash drag, we expect the working capital to be broadly neutral, and we are constantly working on to improve the working capital profile. We continue to expect CapEx to be at or about the same SEK 150 million level for the combined group as last year. Cash tax payments will benefit from the carried forward tax losses that we have and our annual cash interest costs are now running at approximately SEK 450 million. After the scheduled debt repayment of SEK 105 million of total borrowings, excluding the RCF, we are now under SEK 5.8 billion compared to SEK 5.9 billion at the end of Q1. You can see the usual debt maturity profile chart in the slide pack on the website. Aside from the scheduled repayments this year and next, all of the rest of our debt facility mature in 2028. Our financial net debt when excluding leases, were largely unchanged at SEK 5.12 billion at the end of the period compared to just under SEK 5.2 billion at the end of Q1 and compromised SEK 6.5 billion of borrowings and SEK 1.3 billion of cash. Our net debt to trailing 12 months pro forma EBITDA, excluding associated company income and IAC was 4.5x at the end of Q2 compared to 4.7x at the end of Q1. The recently announced divestment of our Dutch operations for EUR 142 million on a cash and debt-free basis will enable us to reduce our net debt once the transaction closes after the various regulatory and other approvals. The further deleveraging of our balance sheet depends on the strengthening of our cash flows through the effective doubling of our EBITDA margin between 2025 and 2028 and the ending of our non-core operations cash drag in 2028. We are making progress and the margin improvement still requires a lot of work, including the work with our suppliers, partners to move all the agreements on to commercially competitive market terms or find alternatives. We are focused on executing all of the various initiatives we have in place to deliver the transformation plan and make the required efficiency gains, including driving sales growth, cost reductions and managing our working capital to be as positive as possible and allocate our investment capital to generate as positive returns as possible. And that concludes my remarks. So now back to you, Matthew.

Thank you very much, Johan, and we are now ready to take your questions. [Operator Instructions] So the first question comes from Kristoffer at Kepler Cheuvreux.

I would like to start with the Dutch divestment there. Can you please talk to us about why you struck this deal now and why it did not happen perhaps 2 to 3 years ago when you were shrinking your footprint? And maybe also talk to us about the time line you mentioned a bit, but also how positive you are on receiving a green light from the regulator, where we have seen some, should say, non-pro-business decisions before from the Dutch regulator.

Yes. So, as you can say, in general, it is part of the transformation that we are making. The same goes also with the acquisition of Allente. So the idea is, of course, to build a very strong and focused Nordic business. And as I said as well, that is also where we have the biggest scale and we can realize the biggest synergies. So we did receive a number of unsolicited offers and in the end decided to take clearly the best price and also where we saw the biggest the certainty and also where we had speed because clearly, the rights is also beginning now in August, September. So we wanted to make a speedy process so that the new owner -- potential new owner can capitalize on those rights as well. And when it comes to the process on the competition authorities, that takes -- there is, as you know, a structure in that and the path which they're laying out how to go about this. So that is what we are following. So that is ongoing, and I will not comment on any historical decisions in Netherlands.

Fair enough. And you mentioned this Nordic story back to the roots where you have a clear right to win, which we think we all applaud, right? Can you give us a bit more on that strategy? Is this back to the old star Viaplay in the Nordics where you have a strong sports portfolio, more seasoned with your own local content like going back to the Viaplay originals or will you continue with this sort of say, non-scripted route you've taken in recent years?

I think important for us is, of course, that our offering is commercially attractive. And that is not only the non-scripted or the scripted or sport whatever. So it is a big variety, whatever is call, of content that we have. It needs to be relevant clearly, and it needs to be commercially attractive yes. So that is the key criteria. And we have linear TV, as you know, we have radio. We have AVOD. We have SVOD offering, the Viaplay offering. We have DTH. We have our broadband offering as well through Allente and so forth. So there's a lot of revenue opportunities that we're having for our content. So that is clearly something which we are exploring, as we say as well, that we have not even explored the sales synergies as well with Allente. So what is it that we can do more together? And how is it that we can capitalize even more on the relevant content that we are producing? So it is like in all other media companies about relevance. And we have a very strong sports position. We have a very strong local content position, and we have a very strong acquired position as well from Northland and so on. And luckily, we have a lot of distribution platforms where we can capitalize on that content as you see with the Nordic business and the revenue coming out of the Nordics.

And you mentioned sports and your strong portfolio, but we recently learned that you lost out on extending the UEFA Champions League rights in Sweden from H2 next year, which I think is a worry for the market, right? So can you please talk to us about how you can mitigate possible impact or possible negative impacts in terms of churn and you not being able to raise prices, et cetera?

I think that is just normal. I don't think that we will be winning all the competition, all the auctions that we're going into. As we also have had in the past, it's about a disciplined approach where you actually understand your business case and when the business case is not supporting increased offers, then you leave it. And that I have done also in the past last time where we see. So that is a discipline you would see us continue to do. And then it is up to us to find alternatives. We have a very strong football offering as well. Don't forget in Sweden alone, we have the FA Cup, we have the Premier League, we have the National team matches and so forth. So there's a lot we have to offer still. And then we will then find alternatives if that is needed, but we will not enter into crazy bidding in these processes and competition we're used to. There might have been others than just Disney in that process as well. So that has always been the case.

Got it. If I turn to the cash flow side, fantastic development in H1, positive SEK 150 million in my model here. And you're guiding for a neutral free cash flow for the year, excluding the non-core cash drag. What I'm struggling to understand is this non-core cash drag and the timing, because if my math are correct, that implies a negative SEK 400 million cash drag in H2, which is very different to the seasonality we're used to in non-core cash drag. So maybe you can help us understand that.

We have different payment schedules for that sort of cash drag. So -- but it is correct that it is the SEK 400 million in the second half of the year for that, yes.

Okay. On streaming subscribers, it was a bit negative in Q2 here with roughly 200,000 outflow. I know there is a seasonality, but it was a bit more pronounced than I had expected. Can you talk about the mix there in B2B and B2C in terms of the subscriber decline?

Yes. I think, as you say yourself, there's seasonality in that as well, like all other years, has been the same. And we continue to see the sport actually continue to grow fairly well when it comes to both the D2C and also the B2B part to be fair. So the campaigns we have with our B2B partners seems to be working very well. So we are happy about that. But it is linked, of course, to many times that when the leagues are expiring, which they did a little bit earlier this year as well due to the World Cup of football as well. So that, of course, had an impact.