Michael Prior
Analyst · Raymond James. Your line is open
All right. Thank you, Justin. Usually you get a better crowd to warm up than the Safe Harbor. But I have to go with that. As usual for the fourth quarter, I’ll begin with some comments on the year. Overall, I think we’re quite pleased with how we are positioned as the year came to a close. In International Telecom, we closed and completed a good part of the critical integration work of two significant acquisitions, leaving us with three similarly sized businesses with fully integrated telecommunications offerings in manageable competitive environment. We have significant scale within each of our main International Telecom market and we are working hard to ensure that the customer experience and the value proposition continue to improve and that these businesses are well positioned for the long-term value creation. In U.S. Telecom, we make great progress on improving operating efficiencies against the backdrop of significant price reductions. That’s helping to ensure consistent and reliable cash flows. There’s more work to be done positioning this segment for the longer-term but we’ve made a good start. In both our international and domestic telecom segments, we also made progress on rationalizing the portfolio and improving overall strategic focus. This includes the sale of small market acquired in the Virgin Islands acquisition and the pending sale of our Northeastern United States wireline operation. In renewable energy, we opened up a new market and potential for growth with the deal we closed with Armstrong Energy Group out of the UK. That resulted in the launch of Vibrant Energy in India. Well, we are – a bit behind on our initial build schedule, we are optimistic about the potential for strong returns in that market and we see the entire segment is producing significant opportunities for investment for both the near and mid-term. So while there is still much to improve and as always risks and developments to manage. We believe we have entered 2017 with a strong platform for steady operating cash flows and plenty of opportunity to invest for growth. With that, I’ll turn to some more specifics starting with the International Telecom segment. In that segment, for the fourth quarter, we had higher expenses and thinner margins than we initially expected, and we anticipate margins improving form there. Furthermore as I noted, we make good progress strategically and operationally. The fourth quarter saw this happen on a number of fronts. In Bermuda, we launched a new brand to One Communications with a combined company emphasizing our ability to meet all communications needs for everyone from the ordinary consumer to the very large financial services firms located on the island. We also commenced a number of investments in operational initiatives to improve the experience of residential customers of our video and broadband services. Those initiatives most of which will extend well into 2017 include upgrading customer premises equipment and extensive fiber build to improve speed capacity and quality of service, upgrading our submarine fiber network and improvements to customer care and other items. We also launched 4G LTE on our wireless network a first for Bermuda and we’ll expand that network further in advance to the America’s Cup activities this summer. In the Caribbean, we launched a major upgrade of our wireless network in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which we expect to complete towards the end of the third quarter and we invested in terrestrial and subsea fiber expansion in multiple markets including the Cayman Islands. With our acquisition integrations we are walking the line between impatience to improve the operational efficiencies and customer experience and patience to get it right. We’ve made great strides in strengthening the leadership teams, capitalizing on shared resources of operational expertise and making some of the easy fixes. But the process will continue throughout the next few quarters. We also made strides in improving operations in Guyana from both in efficiency and the customer experience standpoint. And the greater cost discipline has put us in a better position in that market as the competitive environment changes. In speaking of the competitive environment our competition in most of these markets is also investing in wireline and wireless network operations. We believe we can manage these developments and hold our own, but there could be pressures in some markets even as we expand in others. And you’ll note that we have expanded our segment data and given subscriber numbers for this segment in the table through our release. We expect to extend a little upon that for the 2017 quarters. And the data will of course become more meaningful with the next quarter enabling comparisons. Overall subscriber levels are growing at a modest level for this segment for the time being. We have one share in prepaid wireless and we’ve expanded the homes passed as well the penetration of the same, by a high speed broadband connections and video services. But we’ve also had some offsetting declines due to competitive moves, the industry wide reduction in voice access lines and the winding down of some of the legacy fixed wireless network elements. Moving on U.S. Telecom, both the quarter and year were in line with revenue expectations we communicated at the beginning of the year and exceeded our expectations on operating income as the expense management efforts under taken by the team paid off. The wholesale wireless business is the largest component of the segment and of course was the driver behind the year-on-year declines, though comparisons were more favorable for the fourth quarter because much of that impact occurred a year ago. Meanwhile, we continue to work with the national carriers to find ways we can help going forward in addition to improve side economics. We see a strong value proposition but it is clearly a long sales cycle conveying that proposition in most cases. We’re not standing still waiting those outcomes however, we continue to work on improving operating efficiencies and looking to additional sources of revenue and cash flow. In addition to our retail activities, particularly on tribal lands, we have also looked at depth in market through some smaller tower and backhaul investments in selected enterprise offerings. And as discussed briefly last quarter, we determined some time ago that our Northeastern fiber and enterprise business needed to get bigger to fit operationally and strategically within our company and within the sector as well as to better maximize value. After looking at a number of expansion opportunities, we ultimately decided to exit by combining the business with the regional private-equity back to rollout. We first invested in that business more than 10 years ago and while it is beginning to show real momentum following the fiber network expansion. We felt it would be much stronger as part of a larger operation. And we expect this transaction to close in the current quarter. So we thought it would be useful to give a reminder of what that will mean for our reported results. While the sale of cost of reduction in segment revenue and this business as a reminder contributed about $5.5 million in the fourth quarter. Given the early stage of the fiber network expansion, the divestment should actually result an increased operating and net income and only a small reduction in EBITDA contributed to the segment. Next in the renewable energy segment, the fourth quarter continued a positive trend in terms of domestic power production. But results were lower than last year because of two factors. First, the quarter mark the expiry of most of the state credits we received in California related to our power production there, and Justin will get into that in a little more detail. Outside of these credits, we do not have any subsidies scheduled to expire in the next five years. Second our construction of – and thus revenue generation from our solar power plants in India is behind by about one quarter. The Indian federal government’s last minute mandated termination of certain denominations of currency came at a bad time for us in the construction cycle as our contractors were unable to pay their workers. Well we eventually put together a work around by helping established bank accounts for those workers. It still caused a significant time and then the effects lingered in many businesses in the supply chain were facing some more problems. These things will happen though and we are once again building quickly to meet what we see is robust demand. There has been great competition for the larger builds in India with bids that seemingly record low rates. But at our level any reductions in power pricing have been more than offset by reduced costs and we remain bullish on this opportunity, despite the delay. We expect our Indian operations to generate more than $2 million in very high incremental margin revenue in the fourth quarter of 2017. And we expect relatively rapid growth from there in 2018 contingent only on our ability to borrow at reasonable terms against the completed facilities. As a side note going forward for this segment, we’re going to try to communicate more in terms of revenue than EBITDA contributions as well as related capital expenditures rather than in megawatts. We think that metric can be a little confusing given different costs to build and different electric power pricing in the markets we operated. So in summary, we exited 2016 very much on our strategic plan with a group of geographically diversified strong in-market telecommunications businesses. With the potential to continue to deliver solid and consistent cash flows for the long-term. As well as an exciting investment and growth platform in the renewable energy sector. At the same time, we’ve maintained a high quality balance sheet with the majority of our debt sitting at the operating subsidiary level leaving room for further expansion. And now I’ll turn it back over to you Justin.