Earnings Labs

Telecom Argentina S.A. (TEO)

Q1 2013 Earnings Call· Tue, Apr 30, 2013

$11.18

-0.36%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+1.46%

1 Week

-0.79%

1 Month

-8.07%

vs S&P

-10.43%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone, and welcome to the Telecom Argentina First Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. Participating on today’s call, we have Mr. Stefano De Angelis, Chief Executive Officer of Telecom Argentina; Mr. Guillermo O. Rivaben, Head of the Mobile Unit; Mr. Adrián Calaza, Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Pedro Insussarry, Finance Director and Mrs. Solange Barthe Dennin, Manager of Investor Relations. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Mr. Pedro Insussarry. Please go ahead.

Pedro Insussarry

Operator

Good morning to everybody. On behalf of Telecom Argentina, I would like to thank everybody for participating in this conference call. The purpose this call, as Karenna has just mentioned, is to share with you the consolidated results of the Telecom Argentina group that correspond to the first quarter 2013 ended last March 21, 2013. We'd like to remind you that for all those that have not received our press release or presentation, you can call on our Investor Relations office or download them from the Investor Relations section of our website located at www.telecom.com.ar/investors. Additionally, this conference call is being broadcasted through the webcast for feature available in sub-section and you can also replayed through the same channel. Before we continue with the conference call, I’d like to go over some Safe Harbor information and other details of the call as we usually do in our quarterly conference call. We’d like to clarify that during the conference call and Q&A session, we may produce certain forward-looking statements about Telecom’s future performance, plans, strategies and targets. Such statements are subject to uncertainties that could cause Telecom’s actual results and operations to differ materially. Such uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the effects of public emergency law and complementary regulation, the effects of ongoing industry and economic regulation, possible changes in demand for Telecom products and services, and the effects of more general factors such as changes in general market or economic conditions, in legislation or in regulation. Our press release dated April 29, 2013, a copy of which is being included in the Form 6-K report to be furnished to the SEC, describes certain factors that may affect any forward-looking statements that we may produce during this session. Furthermore, we urge the audience of this conference call to read…

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

Thank you, Pedro. Good morning to everyone. Please refer to Slide 5, where we show the business highlights for the first quarter of the year. On the Mobile Business, the postpaid segment experienced an outstanding performance (inaudible) two-thirds of the quarterly net-adds and contributed to a consistent VAS revenue expansion. At the time, we continued streamlining our customer acquisition and our retention cost. Regarding the fixed business, it is worth mentioning the [data fair] which is evolution has funded a strong year-on-year growth rate, thanks to the solid position into our corporate client market. In rotated broadband services, we continue announcing our value proposition with compelling offers and focusing on the upsell of our broadband services that increased our (inaudible) and helped to control charge. When it comes to our financials, we are being able to sustain revenue growth even with limited nominal price adjustment. Moreover, we continue to deliver healthy cash generation reaching P$1.4 billion in the last 12 months. Thanks to the fixed cost on policy came to deliver the impact of incremental costs mainly coming from direct and indirect level expenditures. Please turn to Slide 6, to comment on the Mobile business performance. Our progress in smartphone phase and mobile Internet services continues to deliver solid set of results has been passed to consolidate revenue share this year. postpaid clients expanded by 7% year-on-year and in first quarter represent more than two-thirds of our work further in net debt expanding for 53% of our domestic mobile subscriber base with a 3% year-on-year expansion, in total 19.1 million access lines. Mobile ARPU showed a 13% year-on-year increase to the consolidate level of charge, while the consumption levels in terms of minutes and texts per user expanded by 6% to 1% year-on-year. ARPU increase was achieved, thanks to a…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) And first we’ll go to Federico Rey with Raymond James. Federico Rey Marino – Raymond James Latin America: Yes, hi, good morning, everybody. I would like if you can give us an idea of salary increases for this year? Thank you.

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

Thank you for the question. For the salary increase, at the moment, the discussion regarding the TLC contract has not started. We start to discuss this in the next month between May and June. Please give us the opportunity to set what is happening in the market. In the market, we had a reduction with every other sectors. And what is happening today? We are moving into a dynamic operating level profit of between 22% to 24% and this would be normally a strong benchmark for our discussion, another opportunity that we made slower reach to discuss with the units of difference in months, let’s move from the 12 months of the time horizon to 18 months or 24 months, that maybe give us some further flexibility. Federico Rey Marino – Raymond James Latin America: Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

We have no further questions. We’ll go to San Dhillon. San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: San Dhillon here from Barclays, just a quick question on your smartphone penetration and what the ARPU uplift is you are seeing from your traditional handset users to those who move on to smartphones? Thank you.

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

We are generally aware that consider for the mobile unique, so let’s tell you we have sustained growth in terms of smartphone compared with the rest of the market. and today, we have reached more than 20% of our customer base is smartphones and when you see the [cellular] or you can see the pace, in the near future, we are running at a 50% penetration in our sell out expense on smartphones. If you go to the call region, we are today in about 96% of our cellular, they are a 3G handset. San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: Are you seeing from that migration to 3G handset smartphones?

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

Can you repeat the question please because we are cutting off? San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: I just want to get a sense of what are ARPU up-list is for traditional low end mobile users versus someone who upsells himself to a smartphone, what kind of, what is the mix change in your ARPU?

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

Well actually, if we take a – we have a program specific for smartphone customers that is our program that we call Personal Black. Today, in that segment, we are at 250 Argentinean pesos in terms of ARPU compares with a regular postpaid based customer that is I believe 135 pesos. And that’s the rate between our regular postpaid and a postpaid customer that uses a kind of smartphone program. San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: Wonderful, thank you very much guys.

Operator

Operator

We’ll go to Sean Glickenhaus. Sean Glickenhaus – HSBC Securities USA, Inc.: Hi, how are you? Thanks for the update on the fixed broadband strategy. Just a quick question, sorry, if you’ve already covered this, but I was wondering the – you had a decline sequentially in the broadband subscribers, I was hoping you could loss some market share, I was just hoping you could explain what’s going on in the market? Thanks.

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

In term of the broadband wireline market, they’re in two sides. What is happening on the market, generally, we feel very rational approach from the main competitors in terms of pricing. On the other hand, we see a market that is going to saturation in Argentina and in the Northern Region when where we operate meaning that we do not see a substantial customer base, a market customer base increase. But what you got (inaudible) in Telecom Argentina, we see in January and February we experienced negative net add, in the month of March, we move back to a positive. And the fact of that we are now, is not only that the marketing levels, what we are working strongly is on the natural. An example, we have more than 50,000 backlog lines at the (inaudible). So, if we will behave well in the next month to work strongly on the network more than in the marketing, I am sure that we will be able to move back to a growth, that again, it’s not driven by marketing, by the market – by a demand that is existing and today and that’s (inaudible). Sean Glickenhaus – HSBC Securities USA, Inc.: Understood, thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

We have no further questions in queue.

Stefano De Angelis

Analyst

Okay, thank you to everybody for participating in our call and if any further questions, just don’t hesitate to call us, especially our Investor Relations team. Good morning to everybody. Bye-bye. Adrián Calaza: Bye, thank you.