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Millicom International Cellular S.A. (TIGO)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Fri, Feb 11, 2022

$81.67

-1.40%

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Transcript

Michel Morin

Operator

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Millicom's Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. I'm Michel Morin, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations at Millicom. And this event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO, Mauricio Ramos; and our CFO, Tim Pennington. And after their prepared remarks, we will have a Q&A session. By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release, which is available on our website and along with the slides that we will be referencing during today's presentation. Now please turn to Slide 2 for our safe harbor disclosure. We will be making forward-looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and could have a material impact on our results. We will also be referring to many non-IFRS metrics throughout the presentation, and we define these metrics on Slide 3, and you can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release and on our website. So with those legal disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to Mauricio Ramos, our CEO. Mauricio?

Mauricio Ramos

Analyst

Thanks, Michel. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We had another excellent quarter in Q4 to what was a strong finish to a solid year in 2021. So let's jump right in with the highlights for the year on Slide 5. First, 2021 was a year of continued strong customer growth across all our business lines and in all our countries, we saw strong demand and robust customer growth throughout the year, and this continued on in Q4. Second, we were able to convert that healthy customer growth into strong revenue and EBITDA growth of 7%, which gives us good momentum as we enter 2022. Third, in a year when we decided to invest to capture that growth, we delivered strong operating cash flow well ahead of our guidance for the year. And fourth and finally, we continue to raise the bar on ESG, which we will discuss later today and at more length at our Investor Day this coming Monday. Let's look at the details beginning with our home customer growth on Slide 6. We now serve more than 4.1 million cable customers. We added a record 415,000 new customer relationship in 2021, and roughly 700,000 in the last 2 years. This customer growth in our home business over the past 2 years is even more significant when you consider also, and we're seeing better pricing, including charging for installation fees in many countries. Our home ARPU was up 2.5% organically in 2021. That's our strongest ARPU growth in the last 4 years. And in fact, we have raised prices throughout the year in the vast majority of our markets. Now turning to Mobile on the next slide. We had our strongest performance in years, adding more than 3 million subscribers, including more…

Timothy Pennington

Analyst

Thank you, Mauricio. Let me take you through the Q4 numbers, the balance sheet situation and how we intend to report in 2022. So starting on Slide 16. This is just our usual bridge from the reported IFRS numbers for the quarter to the underlying numbers for LatAm service revenue and EBITDA, which better reflects the way we manage the group. With the consolidation of Guatemala, which took place midway through Q4, this will be the last time we report like this. In future, we will focus our attention on our IFRS results. But for this quarter, we will continue to discuss our performance for the LatAm segment as we've done in the past several quarters. So let's go to Slide 17. We reported positive year-on-year growth in every quarter of 2021. In Q4, we saw 5.7% organic growth. It was supported by a stable macro, remittances from the U.S. continued to be exceptionally strong and improved vaccination rates, which are now above 50% in several countries. Now as you can see from the slide, performance was driven by the home business up 10% on last year, sustained by record net customer additions, improved penetration, which was up 200 basis points in HFC and stable ARPUs. There was another good performance from our consumer mobile business, maintaining a very healthy 4.2% year-on-year growth, driven by subscriber growth. We're now just under 45 million customers and a more stable ARPU environment. As a reminder, our consumer mobile business has already returned to pre-COVID levels. So the 4.2% growth we reported in Q4 of this year is against the most challenging comparison of last year. This should give you a better sense of the strong momentum we saw during Q4. Thanks in large part to the additional investments we've made in our…

Mauricio Ramos

Analyst

Thank you, Tim. Before we take your questions, let me recap the key highlights of the year. We had one of our best years ever in terms of customer into. We added more than 3 million mobile subscribers, 1 million of them on postpaid and 415,000 net additions to our home cable fiber business. Service revenue and EBITDA grew strongly with both up 7% and in a year in which we chose to invest in the business, operating cash flow came in well ahead of our target. And finally, we completed the acquisition of our minority partner in Guatemala in a transaction that was immediately accretive to our cash flow and to our net income and that will make it easier for us and for you to model and value our business, as you will see beginning with our Q1 reporting in April. With that, we're ready for your questions.

A - Michel Morin

Analyst

Thanks, Mauricio. So we'll now proceed with the Q&A session. If you'd like to ask a question, please e-mail us at investors@millicom.com, and we will add you to the queue. You may also e-mail us your question and we will answer it at live. We'll now go to Diego Aragao from Goldman Sachs. Diego? Just give it 1 second to team up.

Diego Aragao

Analyst

Yes. So look, my first question is on the leverage. This should be at around 3x EBITDA adjusted for the future right offering, as mentioned by team. So just wondering, if you can comment on your expectation for the leverage, for instance, what will be a sustainable level for your business? And how long it will take for you to get there?

Mauricio Ramos

Analyst

Diego, that's a great question. And I have the luxury of having 2 CFOs. And so one thing I'm not going to do is take the leverage question today, Diego. Let them figure out who's going to take it. With that, I just want to make sure everybody meet Sheldon to my left. He is a new guy in town. You will see a lot of him on Monday, because they see the ground running, and he can answer just about any question that you can throw at him. So he's only getting Tim's help today, just because he's on apprentice seat for a little while. So you got to figure out, who's going to taking the leverage question.

Timothy Pennington

Analyst

Okay. I'll start because then Sheldon can sort of disabuse anything that I say in the . And look -- but no, look, I mean, we've been very focused on leverage. And very pleased that on a pro forma basis, where with just a fraction above 3% at the year-end. And we said that we're going to be below 3% by the end of 2022. And in fact, on Monday streaming we're going to target 2.5x by 2025. We should be in that ballpark. But Diego, I don't want you to misunderstand. We're still targeting that 2x that leverage target within that is the right operating level for us.

Diego Aragao

Analyst

Great. I guess maybe the second question and first, nice to meet you. Looking forward to see you in person. So the second question is regarding Colombia, versa performance side that market despite a growing competition, right? So I just want to get your views on the outlook actually for the market, especially because theoretically speaking, I think the competition should continue to be tough in that market considering recent transaction from KKR with Telefonica recent, let's say, comments from America Moto about their expectations for Colombia. So I think it will be good to hear from you about that market in particular.

Mauricio Ramos

Analyst

Yes. So, thank you, Deigo for that. You'll see a lot more on Monday, but we like the decision we're in Colombia for the long term. We got the spectrum. We're the largest holder of 700 gigahertz spectrum, not strategically very relevant. We're putting in to use with a network that today for the second year in a row have been externally evaluated as the best network on just about every category in the country. Now on the back of that, we've increased distribution and service layers through the organization. We've invested heavily in our commercial capacities. And we've also continued to deploy our fiber cable network in Colombia, very successful, which gives us on mobile, the ability to offload, put WiFi to . So when you look at the strategic picture in Colombia, and yes, it's competitive. And yes, Telefonica has made a partnership with KKR, where we sit strategically is 1 million months better than where we were 2 years ago. It's a very strong position. Now the thing that has to change, because I've been saying this now for a few quarters, right? The thing that has change is that before, I was saying, listen, it's common. We're going to win. Today, you now have a few several quarters in which the numbers are really coming our way. It's 1 million postpaid net adds almost that we have in Colombia 800,000. Our market share has picked up 200, 300 basis points just this year. And in the context of the mobile market that is indeed competitive and which has seen prices come down, our revenue. The overall competition on price and quantity is actually up. And as we anticipated and are going to know the orders, there would be an inflection point was in Colombia. And I said it's just coming out of what is going to be Q4, Q1 -- there's not capping last time around. You already see it in Q4, clearly picking up revenue, clearly affecting the EBITDA, and because a lot of the network buildup half of that, 2/3 of that is behind us, then OCF is also picking up in Colombia. For the first time ever, we have market share of mobile that's in the