Earnings Labs

Shenandoah Telecommunications Company (SHEN)

Q4 2013 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 28, 2014

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Shenandoah Telecommunications’ Fourth Quarter and Year-End 2013 Earnings Conference. At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later we will conduct a question-and-answer session and instructions will be given at that time. (Operator Instructions) As a reminder, this call maybe recorded. I’ll now introduce your host for today’s conference, Adele Skolits. You may begin.

Adele Skolits

Management

Good morning, and thank you for joining us. The purpose of today’s call is to review Shentel’s results for the quarter ended December 31, 2013. Our results were announced in a press release distributed after the market closed yesterday, and the presentation we’ll be reviewing is included on the Investor Page of our website at www.shentel.com. Please note that an audio replay of the call will be made available later today. The details were set forth in the press release announcing this call. With us on the call today are, Christopher French, our President and Chief Executive Officer; and Earle MacKenzie, our Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. After our prepared remarks, we’ll conduct a question-and-answer session. As always, let me refer you to Slide 2 of the presentation, which contains our Safe Harbor disclaimer and remind you that this conference call may include forward-looking statements subject to certain risks and uncertainties. These may cause our actual results to differ materially from these statements. Shentel provides a detailed discussion of various risk factors in our SEC filings, which you’re strongly encouraged to review. You’re cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. Also, in an effort to provide useful information to investors, we note on Slide 3 that our comments today include non-GAAP financial measures. Details on these measures, including why we use them and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in our SEC filings. These reconciliations are also provided in an appendix to today’s slide presentation. I’ll turn the call over to Chris now.

Christopher French

Management

Thank you, Adele. We appreciate everyone joining us this morning. We had a great year capped by a great fourth quarter. During the fourth quarter, our financial performance showed strong growth, driven by increased numbers of wireless subscribers and an improved product mix, as well as increases in average revenue per user in the Wireless and Cable segments. We are very pleased to announce that during the quarter, we finished the 4G LTE upgrades to our wireless network. With this significant capital investment now completed, we expect 2014 capital expenditures to be approximately $74 million, a 27% decrease from 2013. On Slide 5, you’ll see the fourth quarter 2013 net income increased 36% to $6.7 million, compared to the prior year, attributable primarily to continued growth in the Wireless and Cable segments. Adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization or OIBDA for the quarter increased 12% to $29 million. Revenues were $78 million in the fourth quarter, a 4% increase from the prior year period. Revenues increased chiefly as result of wireless subscriber growth, increased smartphone fees and enhanced product mix. Our Cable segment revenues also improved, as a result of an increase in the number of revenue generating units or RGUs and higher average revenue per customer. Our 2013 financial highlights start on Slide 6. Total revenues for the year increased to approximately $309 million, up 7% as compared to 2012. Growth was driven by wireless subscriber growth, increased data fees on smartphones and improved product mix. In addition, RGU growth, video price increases and customers opting for higher speed data packages in the Cable segment, contributed to revenue improvement. Adjusted OIBDA grew 11% to $118.6 million. Turning to Slide 7, we experience substantial improvements in operating performance in 2013. Operating income increased 60% to $55.4 million, while net…

Adele Skolits

Management

Thank you, Chris. I’ll begin on Slide 11, which shows our earnings per share or EPS with and without some 2012 adjustments related to the prepaid settlement, cable goodwill impairments and other non-routine items outlined further in the appendix for this presentation. Diluted EPS before adjustment rose from $0.69 to $1.23 or 78%. After adjustment, EPS rose from $0.84 to $1.25 and this equates to a 49% increase. Slide 12 shows our growth and profitability in OIBDA. In the top line, you can see that we had over $3.1 million or 33% increase in operating income for 4Q ‘13 over 4Q ‘12. For the year December 31, 2013, operating income was up $20.7 million or 60% over 2012, and the rest in this table, I’ve adjusted for the significant non-cash or non-routine items. If you can see, for 4Q 2013, adjusted OIBDA is up nearly $3 million over Q4 ‘12 or 11.6%. For the year ended December 31, 2013, adjusted OIBDA was up $11.8 million or 11.1%. These improvements are consistent with the longer term trends. On Slide 13, I’ve provided the long-term view of adjusted OIBDA. Over the last five years, adjusted OIBDA has grown by $46 million. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 10.3%. The rate of growth has been higher in recent years. The chart on the right shows that the Wireless segment has contributed consistently and significantly to this growth. And that the Cable segment has shown substantial improvements in recent years. The Wireline business has generally held steady as a result of fiber sales offsetting the loss of telephone access lines and access revenue. To better understand the force describing the results in our three segments, I’ve provided the fourth quarter OIBDA results by segments on Slide 14. Adjusted Wireless OIBDA has increased…

Earle MacKenzie

Management

Thank you, Adele. Good morning everyone. Slide 19 shows growth of postpaid wireless customers and the penetration of smartphones for the years 2011 to 2013. We ended 2013 with 273,721 postpaid customers and grew the penetration of smartphone by 10 percentage points in 2013 to 75%. Penetration was up 3% from 72% at the end of the third quarter. Approximately 62% of the postpaid smartphones are LTE capable. That is 47% of the postpaid base. During 2013, we were proactive in giving over 40,000 WiMAX phones out of the network and replacing them with LTE phones. We still have approximately 21,000 WiMAX phones and have set the goal of having them migrated to LTE by the end of 2014. Moving to Slide 20, we had a very strong fourth quarter with 6,054 net postpaid adds, compared to 4,025 in the fourth quarter of 2012. The fourth quarter of 2012 included 1,700 iDEN conversions, compared with no iDEN conversions in the fourth quarter of 2013. This is the best postpaid fourth quarter in our Wireless history. We attribute this success to the aggressive sales incentive and low churn. Rather than waiting until Black Friday to pick off our holiday sales promotion, we started early in November before our competitors. We married the promotion activity with a message in our market that we had great LTE coverage. We believe the reduction in churn to 1.69% was a result of the end of the disruptions due to the network vision construction, and our networks are running well resulting in historical lows of blocked and dropped calls. Another indication of the positive impact of completing network vision and the aggressive promotions is that we saw a significant improvement in our port-in versus port-out activity. I mentioned during our last call that during our network…

Adele Skolits

Management

This concludes our prepared remarks. Ashley, would you like to review the instructions for posing a question.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Ric Prentiss of Raymond James. Your line is open. Ric Prentiss – Raymond James: Thanks. Good morning.

Christopher French

Management

Good morning. Ric Prentiss – Raymond James: Couple of questions. I apologize I joined in progress, another business earnings day. I must admit, I was very pleasantly surprised by the margins in the Wireless business, particularly given the strong amount of net adds, and that you were doing your own advertising about the presence of your LTE network. Can you talk a little bit about how you were that successful, and should we expect margins to go up from here even?

Earle MacKenzie

Management

As far as from the operations side, we did see, which is normal for us in the fourth quarter, a larger percentage of our sales came through non-Shentel controlled channels. And as we’ve discussed before, the cost of acquisition for a non-Shentel channel is covered by the net service fee. So it is certainly advantageous to us from a margin standpoint when we have a surge coming from those channels. We did spend the advertising, but the amount of the advertising that we spend in the fourth quarter was not significantly different from our normal fourth quarter. But one of the changes we have made is that we are shifting dollars from kind of traditional advertising to digital advertising, doing more through digital sites, and we’re finding that, that can be pretty effective at targeting customers.

Adele Skolits

Management

Obviously Ric, the ARPU improving and particularly the shift from Assurance to Boost and Virgin mobile customers has a positive outcome as well for the bottom line. Ric Prentiss – Raymond James: Great. And then you mentioned how you had gotten to positive net porting in at least three or four of the last months against all of your major competitors, including T and Verizon. As we look into now two months of 2014 under your belt, competitive dynamics have changed I think fairly dramatically here. How has your porting experience been in January and February, and what are your thoughts about the current competitive situation?

Earle MacKenzie

Management

The good news for us is that the porting has not changed dramatically from what we saw in the fourth quarter. I think that we haven’t gotten into quite the same throws and arrows [ph] I think in some small markets that you’ve seen in some of the major markets. At this point, we have not launched Framily. It’s only available through Sprint stores and not through affiliates and third-parties yet. So we are still primarily selling the unlimited plans. And we do get some questions when customers coming to our stores asking why they can’t get Framily. But we’ve been able sell through that. So we continue to be able to pretty much stay to our game plan and have not seen a dramatic impact of some of the things that we’re reading about in the press. Ric Prentiss – Raymond James: And are customers asking for the equipment installment or the device financing plans?

Earle MacKenzie

Management

They are, but we are not seeing a tremendous amount of demand for that. Once again we can’t offer that yet, because we will not carry the paper on that. That actually will be carried by Sprint. And Sprint is still working out the processes of how to actually do that. So at this point, we’re not selling either the Framily plan or the lease to purchase plans on the phones. Ric Prentiss – Raymond James: Great. Thanks. See you guys next week.

Earle MacKenzie

Management

Thanks, Ric.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions) Our next question comes from Neil Macker of FBR. Your line is open. Neil Macker – FBR Capital Markets: Good morning guys. Two quick questions. The first one is on Clearwire section. We’re seeing Sprint looking to deploy that in more rural areas. Are you guys speaking to vendors about deploying to that size and to enhance 4G in your area? Any update on your thinking there?

Earle MacKenzie

Management

We’re continuing to monitor what Sprint is doing. We believe at some point in time, there are some areas within our footprint that it would make sense to deploy Spark, but we have made the decision that we’ll kind of use of 2014 as an observation year. We will do maybe some work as far as from site acquisition work, but really not looking to make any expenditures on that until at least 2015. Neil Macker – FBR Capital Markets: And in terms of like the area, are you looking at like 25% of your footprint, 10% of your footprint. What’s your sort of thought right now on that?

Earle MacKenzie

Management

We have over 500 sites, and we kind of identify that it probably would make sense in approximately 100 of those. Neil Macker – FBR Capital Markets: Okay. So that’s 20% roughly here. Okay. And then we’re still seeing some promise with the Sprint network interference in some optimization. Are you seeing any spillover effects on that? And any sense of when your adjacent areas, I know we’ve talked about this in past, the areas between TCA [ph] and your footprint in Baltimore and Chile, one of those areas will be fairly built out by Sprint?

Earle MacKenzie

Management

As far as our own network, our optimization is going quite well. As I mentioned earlier, our blocked and dropped calls are at historic lows. So I think that we have done a good job, I give my engineers a tremendous amount of credit. We actually did our own optimization, we did not form that out, which is part of the difference there, but our customers are still expressing some displeasure when they travel outside of our footprint as far as their LTE usage. We are encouraged that Sprint has seen to pick-up momentum as far as completing their 4G build-out. And we’re optimistic that by the end of the year, they will have built out the LTE to the borders and the customer experience will be dramatically improved. Neil Macker – FBR Capital Markets: Okay. That’s all we have. Thanks a lot.

Christopher French

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. I’m not showing any further questions in queue. I’d like to turn the call back over to management for any further remarks.

Adele Skolits

Management

Thank you for participating. Our 10-K will be released on Monday. If you need further information please feel free to give me a call. Have a good weekend.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen thank you for your participation in today’s conference. This concludes today’s program. You may all disconnect. Everyone have a great day.