Earnings Labs

Corporación América Airports S.A. (CAAP)

Q3 2019 Earnings Call· Fri, Nov 22, 2019

$24.88

+0.28%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good morning. And welcome to the Corporación América Airports Third Quarter 2019 Earnings Call. A slide presentation accompanies today's webcast and is available in the Investors section of Corporación América Airports Investor Relations website at http://investors.corporacionamericaairports.com. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this call is being recorded.At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Gimena Albanesi of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Gimena Albanesi

Analyst

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. And thank you for joining us today. Speaking during today's call will be Martín Eurnekian, our Chief Executive Officer; and Raúl Francos, our Chief Financial Officer. Also with us today is Jorge Arruda, Finance and M&A Manager. All will be available for the Q&A session.Before we proceed, I would like to make the following safe harbor statement. Today's call will contain forward-looking statements, and I refer you to the forward-looking statements section of our earnings release and recent filings with the SEC. We assume no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect new or changed events or circumstances. Note that for comparison purposes and a better understanding of the underlying performance, in our presentation today, we will be discussing results excluding hyperinflation accounting in Argentina, which became effective July 2018. Additional information in connection with the application of rule IAS 29 can found in our earnings report.Now let me turn the call over to our CEO, Martín Eurnekian. Martín Antranik Eurnekian: Thank you, Gimena. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. It's a pleasure to welcome you to Corporación América Airports third quarter 2019 earnings conference call. I will start my presentation today with an overview of the highlights of the quarter. And then Raúl will take you through our financial results. Afterwards, I will provide an update on our key business segments and our view for the remainder of the year. We will then open the call to your questions.Beginning with Slide 3, ongoing unfavorable market conditions in Argentina, our largest market, and to a lesser extent in Brazil, continued to impact our performance this quarter.Passenger traffic was up slightly over 1% with over 22 million passengers traveling through our 52 airports in the quarter. Domestic and international traffic…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Today's first question comes from Ian Zaffino of Oppenheimer. Please proceed. Q –Unidentified Analyst: This is Mark on for Ian. So just to start off, going into the bad debt expense this quarter, can you guys provide some more information on exactly how the mechanics of the expense came forward and how it works? And are there any additional bad debt or past due fees that we should be aware of going forward?

Operator

Operator

Just as a note to the speaker line, your line is unmuted. You may be locally muted at your telephone. Q –Unidentified Analyst: Can you hear me now? Martín Antranik Eurnekian: This is Martin again here. I will ask Raúl to intervene if needed. The bad debt provision that we have, it's an aging issue of unpaid fees - aeronautical fees and commercial fees from the main carrier of Argentina. And the fact that we provisionally said it's a matter of aging and accounting rules.Basically, they started missing a part of their payments since August last year. And since it's been a year, we had to provision that, although this airline is controlled by the state, and we believe one way or another, this is not going to turn into a real loss. Q –Unidentified Analyst: Okay, great. Thank you. And then just a follow on, just in terms of, are there any updates to negotiations for the AA2000 concessions, just given where the election results have come out? And then sort of color or incremental detail there would be much appreciated. Thank you. Martín Antranik Eurnekian: Thank you. This is Martin again. As you mentioned, we are in the transition to a new government. This doesn't change our view regarding the state of the concession and everything that the concession has gone through over the last 20 years, basically.And although we now have to establish a new relationship with a new team that will come in since a couple of weeks from now - starting a couple of weeks from now. We still strongly believe that the extension clause will be executed at some point and we are eager to start negotiations with the entering government. Q –Unidentified Analyst: Okay. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Stephen Trent with Citi. Please proceed.

Stephen Trent

Analyst · Citi. Please proceed.

Thank you, everybody and good morning and thanks for taking my questions. I just had a quick one also relating to AA2000, like the gentleman from Oppenheimer. I'm curious, you gave some very helpful color on what's going to happen with AA2000 tariffs starting in January.But then you also said that there's a legal dispute that is going on between you and the regulator in Argentina. And if you could just help me out, what exactly you're disputing the tariffs that are going up in January? Or this is a separate adjustment on the guaranteed IRR? Thank you. Martín Antranik Eurnekian: Stephen, this is Martin again. As you know, the regulator has to review every year the concession equilibrium. In - during this administration, they haven't done it yet. So they released the 2016 revision and the 2017 revision very close to each other.The 2016 revision did not come with a tariff adjustment, so we contested that quite strongly, actually, because instead of going into the administrative process, we went into the judiciary to make a claim for this. And then they released the 2017 revision, which included $2 addition in international fees and the domestic from MXN 74 to MXN 195.

Stephen Trent

Analyst · Citi. Please proceed.

Okay, got it. So as we - and as a quick follow-up to that, is it fair to say that you are going into the current discussions with some negotiating power, considering that you're still owed on the guarantee for some years and the government's flag carrier is - maybe, still owes you some back payments. How should investors think about that? Martín Antranik Eurnekian: Well, yes. Although we do not like to provision for a bad debt, the situation we are in as -- with this bad debt that we have being controlled by the state, we believe that it's going to give us room for negotiation in terms of how that is repaid or how is it handled.And yes, what you mentioned before regarding what could entail the economic equilibrium revisions and the fact that we went over the requirements of investments so far, we think that this puts us in a very good position to negotiate the terms of the concession with the government.

Stephen Trent

Analyst · Citi. Please proceed.

Okay, very helpful, Martin. Thanks very much.

Operator

Operator

This concludes our question-and-answer session. At this time, I would like to turn the conference back over to Martín Eurnekian for any closing remarks. Martín Antranik Eurnekian: Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We really appreciate your interest in our company. We look forward to meeting more of you over the coming months and providing financial and business updates in the next quarter. In the meantime, our team remains available to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you again and enjoy the rest of your day. Bye-bye.

Operator

Operator

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.