Vodafone Qatar P.Q.S.C. (VFQS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the Vodafone Qatar Second Quarter 2021 Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the conference over to Roy Thomas. Please go ahead, sir.

Hello, everyone. This is Roy Thomas from QNB Financial Services. I want to welcome everyone to Vodafone Qatar's Second Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. On this call, we have Sheikh Hamad Abdullah Jassim Al-Thani, Vodafone Qatar's Chief Executive Officer; Masroor Anjum, Chief Financial Officer; and Pauline Saab, Investor Relations. We will conduct this conference call with management first reviewing the company's results followed by a Q&A. I will turn the call over now to Pauline. Go ahead, Pauline.

Thank you, Roy. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Vodafone Qatar Results Call. Today's presentation is available on our website, vodafone.qa. Please note the usual disclaimer on Slide #2. To begin, I now hand over to Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al-Thani, our Chief Executive Officer, to present the quarterly highlights.

Thank you, Pauline, and thank you, Roy, and QNB for organizing this call. To start, I welcome all of you who are listening in and for those who are recording. Would you please go to the Slide #4, titled key messages. I would like to start off by mentioning that we have finished the first half of the year with 8.5% total revenue growth on year-to-year basis. Our revenue momentum continues to reach the 14th consecutive quarter on year-to-year basis. Top line growth combined with a stable cost structure has resulted in EBITDA being above 40% for the first time in the first half of this year. And the net profit growth of 65.5% on year-to-year basis. The second point I want to touch on today relates to the strong monetization of our investments, which we have made over the last few years in our infrastructure, both fixed and radio access networks. Overall, for mobility, our subscriber base is up on a year-to-year basis, and we have seen an ARPU lift of 3% in Q2 in year-to-year basis. The third point I would like to highlight today that we have continued to gain revenue market share. This outperformance can be attributed to 2 factors. First, the overall strengthening of our core fixed and mobility businesses, both on consumer and Enterprise units; and secondly, the continued focus on innovation to meet the emerging demands in the market. All of that has helped to improve our overall revenue mix, resulting in 1.3% gain and revenue market share. As part of our strategy, we will aim to pioneer IoT and smart city applications by bringing innovative services and solutions to the market. For example, this quarter or the last quarter, we have launched our IoT Fleet Management platform, which has attracted a very positive initial reaction from the Enterprise segment. Lastly, I want to mention that those positive results come despite the challenging environment. In the second quarter, for example, of this year, we saw a decline of 10.4% in total population compared to the second quarter of 2020. As might be expected, the overall market declined by approximately 36% as Q1 2021 affected mostly by the populations decline. And lastly, we are very pleased to share a very good positive news from our side with you. And with that said, I would like now to hand over to Mr. Masroor Anjum, our acting CFO, to walk you through the Q2 results in details.

Okay. Thank you, Hamad, and good afternoon, everyone. Let's move to the next slide and the financial performance highlights on Slide #6. We continued our strong financial performance in the first half of 2021 despite challenging market environment as highlighted by Hamad. We had a strong growth in our top line, primarily driven by postpaid and fixed revenues. At the same time, we managed to keep our costs under control, driven by cost optimization. This led us to report the highest ever profitability metrics for H1 2021. EBITDA growing 21% to QAR 472 million, with a margin of 40.6% and a net profit of QAR 134 million. As mentioned by Hamad earlier, population has been declining. There is a 6.7% decline in population since the beginning of this year only. Regardless of this, our mobility subscribers have increased by 51,000 during this period. Moving to Slide #7, our key financial performance metrics for H1 compared to the similar period of last year. Total revenue grew by 8.5%, led by a very pleasing service revenue growth of 7.8% or QAR 78 million as a result of growth in our fixed and postpaid. This growth is despite lower visitor revenue due to continued travel restrictions in H1 2021 and lower prepaid revenue in an overall declining market. Expenses are higher 1.3% year-on-year, and that is due to growth in direct cost corresponding to growth in revenues. It is notable that despite growth in costs due to network expansion and fixed operational costs, expenses are well controlled and cost optimization helped us to keep the costs stable. Specifically looking at direct cost, it is higher by QAR 13 million year-on-year and that is due to the impact of higher handset sales, while OpEx is lower by QAR 4 million. As a result of cost optimization, our OpEx intensity, which is OpEx as a percentage of our total revenue has reduced from 29.5% to 26.9%. That is a reduction of 2.6 percentage points year-on-year. Higher service revenue and largely stable costs have contributed to the EBITDA growth of 21% year-on-year to QAR 472 million. This is our highest ever half yearly EBITDA. Higher depreciation on CapEx partially diluted by EBITDA gains flowing through to net profit. But nonetheless, we still recorded a very healthy growth of more than 65% in our net profit to reach QAR 134 million, again, our highest half yearly net profit. Now moving to the next slide and looking at second quarter financial performance compared to the similar period of last year. Quarter 2 has also shown strong financial performance with continuing growth year-on-year. Total revenue grew 8.7%, strongly supported by growth in service revenue of 10.6%. Fixed and postpaid being the key drivers. Equipment revenue was lower compared to last year due to one-off demand in Q2 of FY '20 as EHTERAZ app was launched and made compulsory. On the other hand, costs continue to be well controlled and slightly declined year-on-year despite growth in service revenue and higher operational costs resulting from network expansion. This is the benefit of our continued cost optimization. Now with increased service revenue and lower costs, our EBITDA grew by 25%, while net profit grew by 105% despite higher depreciation. Now taking a closer look at the service revenue on Slide #9. Postpaid continuing its growth momentum, up 1.9% compared to last quarter and 8.6% higher versus last year. This is mainly driven by higher ARPU. Our unlimited plans are selling well, helping to penetrate into the high-value segment and the price increase that we did at the beginning of March for some selected consumer plans has also helped. The decline in prepaid is primarily due to decline in prepaid market and lower population. Although we managed to improve our customer base, the quarter was impacted by seasonally lower ARPU. Encouragingly, Q2 year-on-year reduction in prepaid revenue is lowest in the last 6 years, driven by stability in the prepaid market pricing and prepaid portfolio simplification despite lower population year-on-year. Overall, total service revenue increased by 10.6% year-on-year with increasing contributions from fixed and other revenue segments. Turning to Slide #10, mobility ARPU. It is 3% or QAR 2.4 higher year-on-year, resulting from increase in postpaid ARPU, as I have explained earlier, and the higher mix of postpaid customers in overall mobility base. Now moving to Slide #11, the EBITDA margin. This slide shows the growth of our EBITDA margin over the last few quarters, with gray trend line being the reported EBITDA margin and the red line showing EBITDA margin, excluding equipment business. As explained in the previous slides, higher service revenue and lower costs enabled us to reach a reported EBITDA margin of 41.1% for the first time in this quarter with 5.4 percentage points year-on-year growth. A similar growth is reflected in our EBITDA margin, excluding equipment business, which is a true reflection of our core business at 43%, growing 5.1 percentage points year-on-year. These are our highest EBITDA margin levels ever. Now moving to the next slide and taking a quick look at the CapEx. CapEx is QAR 90 million for this quarter and overall QAR 138 million for H1 this year. As usual, this is focused on investment for capacity expansion and coverage footprint enhancement; investments to enhance digital capabilities and products; and lastly, investments to maintain the network. Now turning to the full income statement on Slide #13. We have already covered the major year-on-year movements. Both consumer and Enterprise and other revenue segments have increased year-on-year. The higher depreciation and amortization charge is a result of the elevated CapEx incurred in FY '20. The investments in fixed, 5G and growth insights that we have seen as well as the accelerated depreciation on some old assets that we did in H1 of this year. Lower finance cost is due to lower interest rates compared to FY '20 and extinguishment of a previously recognized liability. Now that concludes my review. I will now hand it over to Pauline. Thank you, everyone.

Thank you, Masroor. I will now start with the Q&A session. Operator, can you please explain to the participants how they can ask questions?

[Operator Instructions] And we take our first question for [ Amit Bharj ] of [ Axione ].

My question is with regards to the revenue for H2 2021, basically the second half of the year. So how do you -- in light of decreasing population, how do you see the revenue and the net profit panning out in the second half of the year? Should we expect any drop as compared to what we have achieved in H1?

Yes. Actually, our expectation is that with the travel restrictions being lifted now and the visas are also opening, we expect the population to grow, and we don't see any reason for our revenue to decline in H2.

Okay. So any guidance that you have in terms of top line growth or net profit growth for H2 compared to H1?

So we don't give any specific guidance, but see, we have grown our revenue in H1, as you've already seen. Our expectation is [indiscernible] we will continue this growth momentum, provided as you said, there is no further reduction in the population.

We take our next question from Ziad Itani of Arqaam Capital.

Congratulations on strong results. So I have a question with regards to the ARPU improvement. Specifically, you mentioned data price-ups on certain packages. Can we get some more details on that? Is it related to 5G offerings specifically? And do you expect this trend to persist towards the remaining of the year? And is there a risk of having competition sort of distort prices? Or it's where regulated, there's a floor. And the second question, you also mentioned that depreciation increased because you're sort of trying to extinguish certain legacy equipments. Once this is done, how much do you expect in savings because it's up QAR 36 million year-on-year in terms of depreciation. So if we want to sort of quantify the impact. Once this is done, how much can we expect in savings? And when do you expect this to be complete?

Yes. So regarding your question -- first question, so we had -- back in March, we have done price increases on certain consumer postpaid plans, not specific to 5G, and that's not a data specific price-ups. Some specific consumer postpaid plans, the price was increased, and we have seen the impact of that in our ARPU as well. And definitely, the price-up has already been done. So we expect this ARPU to continue as far as the postpaid is concerned. Now coming to your second question. So out of the increase in depreciation that you see, roughly 30% to 40% is related to the old equipment, which is sort of a one-off cleanup that we have done in H1. And however, you would also see that we did an extinguishment of an old liability as we no longer see the probability of cash flow. So these 2 things sort of offset each other. So you can assume that the profitability that we have shown is the underlying profitability.

We take our next question from [ Mustafa Amir ] of [ Allion ].

Could you talk a little bit about the Enterprise segment. For the first half, you had a strong growth both in over time and point in time. Could you give us some idea of what is leading this growth and simply what would be a future outlook on it? Hello?

One moment, please.

So growth in this revenue is driven by the growth in managed services revenue in Enterprise and the normal acquisition revenue that we are getting from acquiring more customers on Enterprise side.

I'm sorry, we -- could you like repeat that probably I could not hear all of it because there was some disturbance there?

So the increase in Enterprise and other segment revenue is mainly driven by the managed services deals and as well as the normal acquisitions happening in Enterprise segments, new customers.

So the point in time one, is this mostly related to like cell phones?

Equipment.

General equipment.

Yes. Yes.

Like including the one for the ICT, right?

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our next question from [ Amit Bharj ] from [ Axione ].

This is [ Amit ] again. So I have another follow-up question. So the population has declined, but at the same time, your subscriber base has gone up by 3%. So -- if you can just give us a sense of how much of market share have -- and customer market share have -- does Vodafone have in terms of postpaid and prepaid segments? If you can give us a sense of that.

So we don't have definitely the results from the competition for this quarter. But we can tell you about the overall mobility CMS, and that is around 38% up to Q1 2021.

38%. Okay. So this is as of Q1 '21, and this is based on customer market share, right?

Yes.

And can you give a split in terms of postpaid and prepaid?

So we don't disclose that information for competitive reasons.

[Operator Instructions] It appears there are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back to our host for any additional or closing remarks.

So just to clarify further, my last answer, the 38% that I've mentioned is the overall mobility CMS, not the Enterprise-specific CMS.

Thanks, Masroor. If there are no further questions, we'd like to thank Vodafone Qatar's management for the results update and look forward to speaking to you for the next quarter results.

Thank you, Roy, and thank you all for joining today's call. Please feel free to contact the Investor Relations team if you need any further information or revisit our website, vodafone.qa for further information. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.