Michael Prior
Analyst · Stephens Inc. Your line is now open
Thank you, Justin. Good morning and welcome everyone. This quarter was a great first step towards seeing our recent investments start take shape and reaping the benefits of putting our balance sheet to work. Those benefits are most clear in the international telecom segment where we invested cash, assumed debt, and contribute subsidiary level equity into two businesses that are centered on markets we know very well, mainly Bermuda and the U.S. Virgin Islands. During the quarter, we completed most of the work involved in integrating the teams and businesses and synchronizing key processes and functions. We are also moving quickly on areas we have identified both pre-close and post-close as needing attention or requiring investment to improve the customer experience. There is certainly 20 more to be done in all areas including network, care, and systems, but there's nothing we've seen that we believe will stand in the way of taking these businesses to the next level of performance. Meanwhile, we saw the result of some good and smart work improving operating efficiencies in some of our other businesses, including the balance of international telecom and in U.S. telecom. In the former that's added to the year-on-year growth and EBITDA and in the latter, it offset part of the impact of the anticipated year-on-year revenue decline. In renewable energy, we enjoyed the benefits of an unusually dry summer in the United States as well as some contract escalators and continue to pace with our investment in building in India. Lastly, we managed to pay lawyers and bankers that left this quarter, which helped the bottom-line. As investors may recall, we incurred very high transaction and related expenses over the past three quarters and we view those levels as unusually high even with our history of transactional activity. All right. With that I will turn over to more specifics by segments starting with U.S. telecom. In U.S. telecom, we continue to work with our major carrier customers to help alleviate the margin pressure thereunder, while at the same time, ensuring there's future path for our wholesale business to make sense for us. This past quarter was quite consistent with our expectations of where we expected to be in that process and the impact on revenues. Revenue and profits were lower compared to last year. Although as I noted, our team did a good job of finding additional operating efficiencies to help with us adapt to the current climate and offset a portion of that impact. The trends behind this business remain the same; data volumes continue to climb, but rate adjustments and other concessions more than offset the revenue benefit of those volume increases. Those impacts on year-on-year comparisons will continue to be felt consistent with prior guidance for another quarter or two and after that, while there may be some lingering effects, we expected overall comparisons will become easier. We continue to work on additional revenue streams and further cost reductions, but there are not a lot of easy wins and therefore, it is far too soon to judge whether we will be successful in that regard. On the wireline part of the segment, in August, we announced an agreement to sell our fiber and other wireline operations in the Middle East [ph] to a larger player in the regions owned by Oak Hill Capital Partners. This business simply did not have enough scale and we believe a negative [ph] for ATN made good strategic sense. We made our first investment in this business more than a decade ago and we are very appreciative of the efforts of the leadership and employees over the years to expand and upgrade the business including extensive fiber builds and underserved towns and communities. And we're confident those benefits will be enjoyed by customers for years to come and indeed enlarged and expanded as part of the new company. We expect the transaction to close by early 2017 and just give you a sense of the size or impact, this business generates about $21 million in revenue annually. The current EBITDA margins are much lower than our consolidated margins. And thus we expect the deal to have an immaterial effect on EBITDA and because of the level of capital spending involved in it today to be the accretive to free cash flow and net income. Moving to international telecom, as I covered in the overview, the main news here is seeing the impact of the two transactions. While there will be puts and takes, we believe there's plenty of opportunity to improve these businesses and their financial performance. Right now we're working on a number of areas; customer care upgrades and improvements, retail operations and branding, network quality assessments and improvements, network expansions, and operating efficiencies and synergies in all areas. Our approach is to move fast on the clear needs and biggest improvements from the customer standpoint and move more deliberately and carefully on the efficiencies and synergies that don't provide a significant near-term benefit to customers. And we recognize that our plans and expectations will inevitably has to be modified as market realities such as the competitive environment evolve. So, what does all mean from a financial standpoint? Well, it means getting these businesses into an area of healthy and sustainable operating margins will take a little time, but if we are successful, there will be signs of progress in 2017. It also means that capital expenditures may be higher in the near-term, but will level out as the critical elements of the network plan are addressed. I noted as well that network investments will vary by market, but there is a common element at the moment of mobile network 4G expansions happening in multiple markets in the same timeframe tearing into the middle 2017 and Justin will cover this in a little more detail when he talks about capital expenditures. In terms of growth, the main opportunity will be in growing data revenues, whether wireless or wireline. This primarily will come through higher data penetration rates in places like the Cayman Islands, Guyana, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. And some simple subscriber information across our international telecom segment to understand where things were at the end of September. We had approximately 94,100 high-speed data subscribers. We had 61,200 video subscribers. We had 187,600 voice lines that's fixed and 313,500 wireless subscribers. And the first number I gave you the high-speed data is fixed. We will -- we're also looking at providing additional operational metrics. But at this point, I think it's a little too soon to get more granular having just absorbed all these systems and databases. One other thing to mention before we move on to the next segment. As some of you may have noticed, hurricane Nicole went right over Bermuda in October. In fact the eye of the hurricane, which I think was category three at that time, passed over and surrounded the territory. Bermuda is a remarkable place and despite this engulfing, there was no loss of life and I would like to thank KeyTech Group's employees for their dedication and hard work in swiftly restoring service to our mobile, video, and high-speed data customers despite damage and massive power outages. So, we don't expect this storm to have a material impact on the segment results for the fourth quarter and again, are grateful for both our employees and customers for safe and for the excellent work in quickly restoring the service. In renewable energy, revenue from existing domestic production facilities was up nicely over last year to primarily to the severely dry and thus sunny summer weather in our areas of operation, but as I mentioned before there are other benefits as well including contract escalators. Meanwhile development of new solar facilities in our vibrant energy business in India continue to pace. We remain optimistic that we will have the first 11 megawatt facility ready for service and generating revenue in the current quarter and that we will have at least 50 megawatts in total facilities ready for service in the first quarter of 2017. We will provide a better sense of the incremental revenue and other impacts on our P&L with our fourth quarter results. While the operating team continues to acquire critical land and grid connections where we have clear indications of customer demand, the next phase to achieving our broader goals building and operating hundreds of megawatts facilities in India will be securing the project debt financing on the initial sites. And this is a process we would like to complete in the first quarter of 2017 or soon thereafter. In summary, this was a great step forward in understanding the composition of our business and revenues following our recent investment activity. We have much work to do and much opportunity in the months and quarters ahead. As investors will know despite all of this activity, we still have significant balance sheet capacity. In telecom, we're always looking at potential investments, but we're spending a little less time on that today given our focus on integration and internal investment. In renewable energy while we're similarly focusing most of our attention on the new business in India and our existing facilities in the U.S., we are still active in the market. This is a business where development and strategic investments are ordinary course. Also as I noted, there was some good work done in select areas the U.S. and international telecom segments on identifying and realizing cost savings help maintain the sound competitive footing and sustainable model. We are appreciative of those efforts and they will continue. Lastly we're very pleased with the current configuration of ATN's business. In telecom, we have a balanced mix of domestic and international services and of wireless and wireline. In renewables, we have the experience of solid base of producing assets domestically that we are leveraging and what is probably the world's fastest growing market for solar power. And in both telecom and renewables, we're bringing services primarily to underserved markets and that is something of which we're all very proud. And now that I've avoided ending my talk of the proposition, I'll turn the call back over to Justin.