Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Grameenphone's earnings disclosure for the third quarter of 2021. My name is Naureen. I'm the Head of Investor Relations for Grameenphone, and thank you for joining us today. Our presentation, financial statements and additional documents are available on Investor Relations website. You can also start posting your questions in the comment box. We will -- we will address them at the end of our presentation. In case you're unable to post your questions, please feel to reach out to me by e-mail or text. We will now start our presentation with our CEO, Mr. Yasir Azman.

Thank you, Naureen, and good evening, everyone. My name is Yasir Azman, CEO of Grameenphone. Thank you for joining us for the third quarter results announcement. I would like to begin with some industry facts. As reported by our regulator until August 2021, the telecommunication industry has gained almost 8.5 million subscribers, registering a 5% growth from end of 2020, ending with 178.61 million. GP's customer base end of August 2021 was 82.18 million, which is 46.5% of the total mobile subscribers in the country. In the same period, mobile data users have increased by over 13 million, reaching to 115.41 million, which is 12.7% increase from the end of 2020. If I may talk about the highlights of the quarter. We continued our top line growth in the third quarter with a 1.8% growth in total revenue from last quarter -- last year quarter 3. With the addition of 2.4 million data customers this quarter, we see an increase of 9.7% data users from last year. We also retained a growth traction in 4G users, registering a 55% increase year-over-year. We started the third quarter with a stricter lockdown, I would say the strictest one, what we have seen during the whole pandemic starting from March 2020. However, as the quarter commenced, the restrictions were eased significantly. Going to the next slide. We have seen the ease of restriction and declining rates of COVID-19 infection rates and deaths number. If I briefly update on COVID-19 situation into the country, till date, more than 1.5 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported with over 27,000 deaths while over 16 million people have received both doses of vaccine in the country. The past 33 days of the quarter -- in this quarter 3 was actually very strict in terms of lockdown,…

All right. Thank you, Azman, and good evening to everybody. Let me start with a short overview of the key KPIs. In Q3, Grameenphone has continued to deliver a solid financial performance with positive momentum in top line as well as in EBITDA despite the challenges of a strict lockdown that we saw from the 1st July till 10th of August. After this, the overall economy has gradually recovered from COVID-19 with average daily new cases declining to a level of around 1,000 with less than 5% infection rate by the end of September. Followed by the withdrawal of the lockdown, the economic activities gradually resumed while educational institutions have been reopening in limited scale from 12th of September after actually 18 months of closure. However, Grameenphone remained active in the market throughout the quarter with strong subscriber acquisition, new spectrum site rollout and customer-focused market activities. In summary, Grameenphone had a plus 1.9% year-on-year growth in subs and traffic revenue and a plus 1.3% growth in EBITDA in Q3 while maintaining an EBITDA margin of 63.3%. With the continued investment efforts backed by the newly acquired spectrum, GP's CapEx to sales ratio for the quarter stood at 10.4% on a 4-quarter moving average, which was 5.3% on a stand-alone basis. EPS for the quarter stood at BDT 6.34 with a 3.8% degrowth from last year on a reported basis. The degrowth in EPS was contributed by one-off modernization cost in this quarter. Now let me turn to more details on the subscriber base. We have continued our subscriber acquisition drive in the market, resulting into 1.6 million net adds in Q3, along with 2.4 million new data users. The sub base at the end of the quarter stood at 83.6 million, with a 7.7% growth from last year and…

Thank you, Jens. To recap, in the third quarter, our top line growth is being driven by the growth in users and usage, as we highlighted just a while back. Improving our customer experience as a result of network rollout and spectrum deployment will continue to remain key factors behind our growth momentum. And we will continue to pursue our journey in enabling our growth through modernization, evolving business models and competency development and as well as creating a partnership that will help us to cater to the constantly evolving connectivity needs for our customers. With that, I'll hand back to Naureen for Q&A.

Thank you, Azman. Thank you, Jens. Let's start with the first question. I believe, Jens, this is for you. What is the onetime modernization cost? And what is the amount?

Yes. So let me -- maybe, as you recall, also from Azman's speech, modernization is one of our key pillars of our strategy, which we are pursuing since quite some time. Now you also have heard that we have, in terms of -- for this quarter, went into improving our network capabilities, moving into new partnerships here. So this is -- has been a key milestone for us. And this is what the modernization costs referred to. So it's basically transition costs and restructuring costs that we have. I think in the overall level, I think there was a question, too. What I saw here is about BDT 1.3 billion in the quarter as the one-off that we have. And as I mentioned, if you would take it out of this -- in both of the quarters and it's also the previous year-on-year quarter, it would lead to a net profit increase of around 1% year-on-year. .

Moving on, what are the major trends in customer behavior you've observed in Q3 as Bangladesh approaches a near-normal state amid the pandemic? Azman, maybe you can take this one?

Yes, I can take it. When we see that Bangladesh is approaching towards new normal, as I mentioned, we are seeing that the voice minutes are coming back. It's increasing with increased mobility and the recovery in economy and partial opening of academic institutions and obviously, the data usage continues to grow.

Thank you, Azman bhai. We have a related question to the question Jens just answered. There's a one-off modernization cost and what is the amount. We've answered this. What productivity improvements do you expect from such expenditure?

Yes. As we -- going forward, I think it's here about the capabilities that we have encountered with this new. I think Azman answered this already in the speech getting in the details how we want to enhance customer experience going into the digital age that is necessary here. So this part is very much on the capabilities. Of course, there's also a productivity increase. But for this, as you know, we're not allowed to give any forward-looking statements. But of course, we assume this as well. But the key driver here is capabilities and getting into the digitalization and get the right capabilities on the customer experiencing.

Jens, I have another one for you. What's the year-on-year voice growth in Q3?

Yes, that's a bit of a tricky question. As you can see, all our growth is basically now into bundles. Bundles means here, voice and data bundles. If you would look into voice stand-alone, that will be a 14% degrowth. But most of the -- as I said, it's a bit artificial on it because the growth is coming from the bundles where we don't actually separate it anymore.

Another question that I got over WhatsApp. This says, "In the quarter, despite lockdown, the subscriber net add trends for the quarter did not drop, but ARPU did. Does this just reflect the net addition scheme late in the quarter so that there will be a bit of a catch-up for revenue in quarter 4?"

Yes. But just...

Yes. Go ahead.

Yes, because this is -- the ARPU is independent from the subscriber number, right? It's per subscriber. So the drop of ARPU that we have seen is basically driven by the voice drop that we see during the lockdown. Lockdown usually comes with lower minute usage.

Okay. I see a question from IDLC, which is, "What was the later price scenario last quarter?" Well, we consider this competitive information, and we would not like to share this. We will just wait. Okay, I see another question. Do you plan to launch any digital products like your competition, Toffee TV by Banglalink. Azman, would you like to answer? Azman, are you here?

I didn't get the question .

Is there any plan to launch any digital products like our competitors?

We don't intend to bring in our own digital services. We have -- like a long term, we have a bioscope, which is also as it is like Toffee as mentioned here. Our model is to do partnership and bringing services to the customers the best possible on the market.

Thank you both. Let's just wait a minute more. Okay. I have another question. Is there any regulatory update, especially on the BTRC audit? Azman?

We have recently seen some movement on the audit part, and that's basically not in relation to Grameenphone. That's related to the operator Banglalink, which was in the media as well, that BTRC earlier did audit for Grameenphone and Robi, now they started for Banglalink. We are also always in touch with BTRC and jointly, we would like to find out that whether there is a possibility that what we have earlier mentioned for an amicable mediation. However, as we understand the matter is at court and unless and until the court directs us for the mitigation recorded, it will not be possible and supported.

Okay. Let's wait a few more minutes for any more questions. Okay. I don't see any other questions. I think we've waited a while. I don't see any other questions. For those of you who are still online and if you have any further questions, feel free to reach out to me over e-mail or text. We'll get back to you. Please note, we will be available all of next week in case you have to -- in case you would like to meet us for any further discussions. Thank you so much. Thank you, Azman bhai, Jens. Thank you, everyone. Have a great day.

Thank you.

Thank you, Naureen.