Earnings Labs

Telecom Argentina S.A. (TEO)

Q3 2013 Earnings Call· Thu, Oct 31, 2013

$11.18

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day everyone, and welcome to the Telecom Argentina Third Quarter 2013 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. Participating on today’s call, we have Stefano de Angelis, Chief Executive Officer of Telecom Argentina; Adrian Calaza, Chief Financial Officer; Guillermo Rivaben, Director of Mobile Business Unit; Solange Barthe Dennin, Manager of Investor Relations Division. And now I would like to turn the call over Pedro Insussarry, Head of Finance. Please go ahead.

Pedro Insussarry

Management

Okay, thank you Ann. As Ann just mentioned, the purpose of this call is to share with you the consolidated results of Telecom Argentina Group that correspond to the nine-months period of 2013 ended on September 30. We would like to remind you that for all those that have not received our press release or presentation, they can call our Investor Relations office to request such documents or download them from the Investor Relations section of our website at www.telecom.com.ar/investors. Additionally, this conference call is being broadcasted through the webcast feature available in subsection and can also be replayed through this same channel. Before we continue with the conference call, I would like to go over some Safe Harbor information and other details of the call, as we usually do in our quarterly conference calls. I would 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 regulations, the effects of ongoing industry and economic regulation, possible changes in demand for Telecom products and services, and the effect of marginal factors such as changes in general markets or economic conditions in legislation or in regulations. Our press release dated October 30, 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 the disclaimer clause contained in Slide 1 of the presentation. The agenda for today’s conference…

Stefano de Angelis

Management

Thank you Pedro. Good morning to everyone. Please refer to Slide five, where we show the business highlights for the nine months period of the year. On the Mobile business, we continue to lead in the market in terms of revenue share, while we have optimized our commercial cost structure. In terms of resources, we have focused our efforts in service quality improvement, strengthening 3G and the other access capacity. It is also worth mentioning that 3G penetration reached 41% of our customer base, while we had a remarkable performance in smartphone sellouts that reached 65% of total devices sold. Regarding the fixed business, again note that we continued with the FTTx deployment to enrich our value proposition. It is remarkable that 19% broadband ARPU increased in the third quarter and the positive trend in quarterly net add both in fixed lines and broadband access through a significant improvement in provisioning of services. When it comes to our financials, we continue with our fixed cost control behavior to mitigate the impact of the higher labor related costs and higher taxes. The share buyback program launched in May 2013 continues steady for thus adding value to shareholders. Please turn to Slide 6 to commence on the mobile business performance. Our value proposition fostered growth in postpaid and prepaid segments with 550,000 net adds in the third quarter versus 193 in the second quarter of 2013. As of September, our customer base totaled $19.9 million with a 5% year-on-year expansion supported by postpaid growth while maintaining our market position in terms of subscribers. Meanwhile, monthly ARPU rate is 70.4 pesos, an increase of 21% when compared to the third quarter of 2012. We highlight the increase in non-voice ARPU of 34%, that is third quarter 2012 that was boosted by the expansion…

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) We’ll take our first question from San Dhillon from Barclays. San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: Hello, two questions, if I may. Could you explain how much higher the average ARPU of postpaid subscribers relative to the prepaid subscriber in Argentina? And secondly, what is the make up of the average broadband customer or what speed is most popular and are people taking unlimited capacities for instance? Thank you.

Stefano de Angelis

Management

No, [indiscernible]. It sounds your question about the ARPU. Our postpaid ARPU is around 135 pesos, and our prepaid customer based ARPU is 40 pesos. That’s the relationship between both the ARPUs. San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: But great and the question…

Stefano de Angelis

Management

Regarded the most popular we did fixed broadband, you were asking, right? San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: Yes, that’s correct.

Stefano de Angelis

Management

Yes, today the more popular is 6 megabyte ultra, highest penetration in the sale of the new plan. San Dhillon – Barclays Capital Securities Ltd.: Okay, great. Thank you, guys.

Stefano de Angelis

Management

You are welcome.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions) We’ll go next to Michel Morin from Morgan Stanley. Michel Morin – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Hi, every one. I was just wondering if you can comment on your ability to raise prices in mobile. We know that your fixed line tariffs in the regulated area has been frozen for many years now. But in mobile what kind of government pressure are you seeing to not reach prices and what price increases have you been able to put through this year. Thank you.

Stefano de Angelis

Management

Correct there wasn’t been a wire line business just to inline that with price that is free these day and monthly seeing up the broadband obviously and that in the mobile this year as I would in the speech, we received political pressure regarding the nominal price increase of the existing postpaid plans. Right, as you know that the prepaid nominal tariffs are very different from the real tariff that they would estimate. So we were able to manage all the promotion regarding the prepaid and some of the postpaid plans. We were able to act as we can in the plans for postpaid for the new gross adds. Why we were honestly facing these limitations in order to increase the price of the existing plans. What does its mean, it’s mean that we are in this moment discussing a lot of change in the regulation. So we were asked to with the new regulation especially the quality regulation that we are expecting for November will finalize and publish in order to add an arena where we can discuss with the government looking at figures and facts not only at quality as base in the perception of the single user. And you note that the perception of the single user in the mobile arena may change strongly. So starting from November, we expect for the mobile to have a more rational approach regarding tariff where we can discuss pricing and quality on the same stage. We finalized that we were working and this is remarkable in the ARPU expansion of the mobile strongly and the up selling of the postpaid plans of the existing customer base. And this helps us to increase the ARPU in a significant way. Michel Morin – Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC: Great, thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

We’ll take our next question from Rodrigo Villanueva from Merrill Lynch. Rodrigo Villanueva Bravo – Merrill Lynch: Hi good morning. A couple of questions, the first one is related to interconnection costs. We saw significant decline on a quarter-on-quarter basis of 27% this quarter. I was wondering if you could share with us what is behind this improvement and also if it is reasonable to assume a similar level going forward? That would be my first question.

Stefano de Angelis

Management

Regarding the interconnection cost in this quarter we have finalized a new – I don’t think the agreement with Moviles [ph] there. You know that we have roaming agreement in Argentina. I had mentioned on roaming agreements regarding the north and southern region for us. Obviously the cost is basically driven by the needed coverage that we have in the southern regions. As we’ll – meaning parts of the second quarter we were accounting the whole contract that that’s a very – this was time in 2004. So the pricing of voice and SMS was basically in the market because of the impact of the inflection, while the data was, just to give you an example, it was in 5 pesos per megabyte. We were able to re-discuss this agreement. So passing from the third quarter we are normalized interconnection cost just to answer to your question, this is something that we have to expect these trends in the next quarter, the answer is yes, because now we have finalized these agreement, but these agreement we will loose the interconnection roaming costs for the next quarters. Rodrigo Villanueva Bravo – Merrill Lynch: Okay, thank you very much. And my next question is regarding dividend distribution. I was wondering if there is any update regarding the possibility to distribute cash to shareholders through dividends in 2015?

Stefano de Angelis

Management

I confirm in the second quarter conference call I told that we were acting in order to bring to the we have a reserve of 1 billion pesos and we have the ability to approve the dividend distribution in the Board of Directors and our impression is confirmed to bring the decision to pay the dividend by the year end, meaning the year end of 2013. Rodrigo Villanueva Bravo – Merrill Lynch: Okay, okay. Thank you very much.

Stefano de Angelis

Management

You are welcome.

Operator

Operator

And with no further questions in the queue, I’d like to turn the call back over to management for any additional or closing remarks.

Pedro Insussarry

Management

Okay, thank you everybody for participating in our call. And excuse us for the delay in starting the call, we have a problem with the supplier taking the international connectivity. Thank you very much and thank you, [indiscernible].

Stefano de Angelis

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

This does conclude today’s conference. We thank you for your participation.