Earnings Labs

Telecom Argentina S.A. (TEO)

Q3 2016 Earnings Call· Fri, Nov 11, 2016

$11.18

-0.36%

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Same-Day

-2.63%

1 Week

+0.50%

1 Month

+1.57%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Welcome to the Telecom Argentina TEO Third Quarter 2016 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. Participating on today's call, we have Mr. Ignacio Moran, Chief Financial Officer; Mr. Pedro Insussarry, Head of Finance; and Ms. Solange Barthe Dennin, Investor Relations Manager. At this time, I'll turn the call over to Mr. Pedro Insussarry, please go ahead sir.

Solange Barthe Dennin

Operator

Good morning. On behalf of Telecom Argentina, I would like to thank everybody for participating on this conference call. As mentioned by our moderator, the participants of today's conference call are Ignacio Moran, Chief Financial Officer; Pedro Insussarry, Head of Finance; and myself, Solange Barthe Dennin, Manager of Investor Relations. The purpose of this call is to share with you the results of the third quarter of 2016 ended last September 30. We would like to invite all those that have not received our press release or presentation that they can call our investor relations office to request those documents or download them from the Investor Relations section of our website located at www.telecom.com.ar. Additionally, this conference call and slide presentation is being webcasted through the webcast feature available in subsection and can also be replayed through the same channel. Before we continue with the conference call, I would like to go over some Safe Harbor information and other [Technical Difficulty] do in this type of events. We 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 effect of ongoing industry and economic regulation, possible changes in the demand for Telecom's products and services, and the effect of more general factors such as changes in general markets or economic conditions in legislation or in regulations. Our press release dated November 8, 2016, a copy of which is being included in the Form 6-K report furnished to the SEC, describes certain factors that may affect any forward-looking statements that we may produce during this session. Furthermore, we urge…

Ignacio Moran

Analyst

Thank you, Solange, good morning for everyone. Please refer to Slide 6, where we are summarizing some of the key achievements that the Company has reached for the third quarter of the year. Coming to our business highlights, our commercial focus remained toward value segments, while we have continued to stimulate the use of data and internet. During the third quarter, we have increased our postpaid subscribers by 4% when compared to one year ago. Mobile internet consumption is increasing rapidly as megabyte per use per month MBOU are 60% higher for the third quarter of 2016 with an average MBOU of 133,000 for third quarter 2016. Our 4G roll-out continues as more than 4.3 million subs can enjoy 4G services in 600 locations over the country, while data consumption continue to improve. In this sense, average data consumption of 4G users have rose to 1.8 gigabytes per user, 125% higher than the average on non-4G clients. Furthermore, we deem important to highlight that data penetration grew by 10% year-on-year, reaching close to 9 million frequent users. Moving on to the fixed broadband segment, it's worth to notice that we are registering a steady growth in ultra-broadband connections that actually represent 33% of the total client base versus 25% over a year ago. In addition, ARPU grew by 25% versus third quarter 2015. As for the fixed voice, we can remark that ARBU reached ARS105 as of third quarter 2016, increasing 51% versus third quarter 2015, which is mainly explained by the adjustment in monthly fee prices that we have implemented during this year for the business and professional segment. As far as our financials are concerned, revenues increased by 36% in the nine month comparison, while service revenue growth reached 30%, mainly driven by the growth in mobile Internet…

Pedro Insussarry

Analyst

Thank you, Ignacio. Please turn to Slide 14 where we can see the evolution of our consolidated revenues and EBITDA. In the first nine months of 2016, consolidated revenues amounted to ARS38.8 billion with a 36% year-on-year growth. In turn, service revenues in Argentina grew at a pace of 30%, thanks to the strong performance of the Internet services, both mobile and fixed broadband, together with the corporate ICT services. We find interesting to see that when we look at the quarterly performance of service revenue, it's coming from the operations in Argentina. You can note that there has been an acceleration of growth since third quarter 2015, maintaining levels of 30% in the last three quarters. Moreover, EBITDA showed a positive evolution year-on-year, growing by 33% and even accelerating the pace of growth from previous quarters. EBITDA margins stood at 26% for the nine-month period. But when we look at the quarterly performance, we can see that we have started to change the trend of recent quarters as the evolution improves when compared to the similar period of last year. Please refer to Slide 15, where we show the evolution of EBITDA with a breakdown analysis of its components. The Company has been taking some actions to gain operational efficiency and manage its cost structure. This slight increased cost [Technical Difficulty] labor and other expenses that have negatively affected margins relative savings were obtained in marketing and sales costs, fees for services, maintenance and materials, and interconnection costs. Let's move to Slide 16 to review the performance of our operating income that amounted to ARS5.5 billion with a 24% increase year-on-year. EBIT was mainly affected by the 42% growth in depreciation and amortization, not only due to the important network deployment, but also to the acquisition of the 4G…

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Analyst