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Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (CHT)

Q3 2024 Earnings Call· Sat, Nov 9, 2024

$43.51

-0.21%

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Chunghwa Telecom Conference Call for the Company's Third Quarter 2024 Operating Results. During the presentation, all lines will be on listen-only mode. And when the briefing is finished, directions for submitting your questions will be given in the question-and-answer session. For your information, this conference call is now being broadcasted live over the Internet. Webcast replay will be available within an hour after the conference is finished. Please visit CHT IR website, www.cht.com.tw/ir under the IR Calendar section. And now I would like to turn it over to Ms. Angela Tsai, Assistant Vice President of Investor Relations. Thank you. Ms. Tsai, please go ahead.

Angela Tsai

Management

Thank you. I'm Angela Tsai, Assistant Vice President of the Finance Department for Chunghwa Telecom. Welcome to our third quarter 2024 results conference call. Joining me on the call today are Rong-Shy Lin, our recently appointed President; and Audrey Hsu, our new Chief Financial Officer. As usual, I would like to remind everyone to read our disclaimers and note the related forward-looking statements on Page 2. Before I turn the call over to President Lin, I would like to briefly introduce our newly appointed President and CFO. President Rong-Shy Lin hold a PhD degree in Computer Science from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and has previously served as our Chief Business Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Security Officer, possessing comprehensive experience in business development and technology advancements in the telecom industry. Our new CFO, Audrey Hsu, holds her PhD degree in Accounting and Finance from Lancaster University, and was serving as Professor of Accounting at the National Taiwan University. She was also the Associate Dean of International Affairs and Director of GMBA of National Taiwan University. We warmly welcome our new executives, President Lin and Dr. Hsu, to the earnings conference. And now I will turn the call over to President Lin for the business update, who will be followed by Dr. Hsu for the financial highlights. Afterwards, we will move on to the Q&A session. President Lin, please go ahead.

Rong-Shy Lin

Management

Thank you, Angela, and hello, everyone. Welcome to our third quarter 2024 results conference call. To begin, I would like to extend a warm welcome from all of Chunghwa Telecom to our new CFO, Audrey Hsu. We are happy to have her join our executive team and to participate in today's call. And now please flip to Page 3 for our recent strategic achievements. In the third quarter, we are pleased to announce our continued success in expanding our lead in Taiwan's mobile market. According to the regulator of communications in Taiwan, Chunghwa Telecom's blended 5G penetration in the third quarter remained the highest among peers which has positively contributed to our continued growth in our postpaid subscriber numbers from this year. We are glad that Chunghwa Telecom continued to outpace the industry in terms of subscriber growth. In addition, we achieved a new single quarter revenue record for the third quarter, the highest in the last seven years. Meanwhile, we are especially pleased to see our total ICT revenue, reach its third-quarter high since 2022 when we transformed our organization to a customer-centric structure. Our proven success and effective strategy has driven our continued ICT industry leadership, furthermore pulling us farther ahead of our competitors. Going forward, we are confident in expanding our industry lead. Another area we continuously develop is advanced networks and technologies. In the third quarter, we were proud to announce our successful collaboration with NTT Corporation in launching the world’s first IOWN all-photonic communication link between Taiwan and Japan. This delivers high speed connectivity with ultra-low latency and power consumption, perfectly suited for the AI-driven future. In addition, as the exclusive OneWeb low-earth-orbit satellite service provider, we’re happy to report that the coverage in Taiwan has reached 90% in the third quarter and is expected…

Audrey Hsu

Management

Thank you, President. Good afternoon, everyone. I am pleased to share a summary of our financial results for the third quarter of 2024. Starting with our income statement highlights on Page 14. For the third quarter of 2024, our revenue exceeds 55 billion, marking a seven-year high for this period. This is a 3.6% increase from the same quarter last year. This was primarily driven by the significant growth in our ICT business. Our income from operations and net income saw slight declines of 0.8% and 1.0%, respectively. It’s important to note that these shifts were largely due to two main factors. First, higher manpower costs have impacted our income. These expenses reflect our strategic investment this year in maintaining a skilled and motivated workforce, which is essential for sustaining our operational momentum and driving future growth. Second, we experienced increased broadcast rights fees for the Olympic Games. Securing valuable content is a critical step in enhancing our service offerings and supporting our long-term growth objectives. Despite these higher costs, our earnings per share for the quarter stood at $1.16, showcasing the underlying strength of our core operations. Now if we move to column 5-7 of the Table, looking at the first nine months of 2024, revenue grew by 2.1% year-over-year, driven by continued strong performance in ICT, mobile, and broadband services. Income from operations and net income decreased by 1.9% and 1.5% year-over-year, mainly due to the high base from last year’s one-time government compensation related to ST-2 satellite. Additionally, higher manpower, which were also noted earlier, underscore our investment in maintaining a talented and motivated workforce. Utility costs have also risen notably, impacted by the Taiwan government’s decision in April to raise electricity prices. This increase has contributed to our higher operational expenses. When we exclude the one-time…

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions]. Our first question will be coming from Sara Wang, UBS. Go ahead, please.

Sara Wang

Analyst

Thank you for the opportunity to ask a question. So actually I have two questions. First is that I understand that the high base last year from government subsidy and also higher electricity actually put pressure on our net profit growth. But I just want to be more specific that why profit before tax declined for consumer and enterprise segments, any other like sector-specific reasons? This is my first question. And then second is on the enterprise segment. The emerging enterprise application revenue is growing quite fast. May I then ask what's the contribution to the total enterprise revenue? Thank you.

Audrey Hsu

Management

Okay. Thank you, Sara. So for your first question, I think if my answer is correct, you asked whether why the profit reduced and revenue increased. As I mentioned that there are a couple of reasons. The first reason, I mean that I think the compensation of the satellite is the main -- one of the main reasons. And other than that, I think, as you know that our policy this year that we -- the corporate have a new decision to improve the talent pool. So the employee cost increased dramatically. So it's across all segments. So this is the second main factor. And the third factor, as you already know, that electricity costs is a major portion in our company, in particularly in like data center or a lot of the -- across the enterprise segment. I think that the utility cost also takes -- compared to last year, I think it also represents a significant portion. And the fourth one is that I think for consumer segment, Olympics video content also represent another reason as I mentioned that the investment in the video content is also our company's strategic purpose. And so as you know, that most of the long-term investments will end up in expense, in income statements. So that is the reason that when you read the income statement, you may see the profit reduced a bit but to us, we do not take it as a loss -- expense. We take it as a strategic investment for the future. Thank you.

Sara Wang

Analyst

Got it. Thank you. Very clear. And then just a quick question, like the emerging enterprise application revenue, like what's the percentage contribution to total enterprise revenue? Thank you.

Angela Tsai

Management

Hi, Sara. About the enterprise emerging application revenue and the total ICT revenue, we've done this separately, announced the percentage of our enterprise emerging application revenues versus the ICT total revenue.

Sara Wang

Analyst

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions].

Angela Tsai

Management

Okay. I think I can present a question we received from our platform. The question is about that how the company can -- what's the company's strategy to increase the revenue or the revenue increase strategy going forward? And another question is about the net profit decreased for the three sectors. About the sectors, the net profit decreased. The reason for the decrease for the CBG and EBG, I think our CFO just answered the question. So now we will discuss our revenue strategy -- revenue increase strategy.

Audrey Hsu

Management

I think there are a couple of -- I think, again, that one of the purposes of the corporation is to maximize shareholder return. And I believe that the profit is always the fundamental main purpose. So our executive team have already -- have worked hard to focus on a couple of the areas to improve our profits in the future. So the number one is that we try to focus more on high-margin products or service. So in the future, we will try to discontinue or scaling back low-margin offerings, which reduced revenue but improved profits. And so this is one area we will try to focus, and we will exit from non-profit markets or customer segments. And secondly, as you know that our -- the size of the company is quite huge. So streamline operation is also an important strategy for our new CEO and President. So our company will undertake efforts to improve operational efficiency such as automating process, incorporate AI and/or renegotiated supplier contract, et cetera. So try to streamline operation is quite important to help us to improve our profitability. And third, for the revenue part, as you can see for our mobile segment, we keep going -- continue to grow year-on-year. And one main reason is because we launched a couple of the programs, something like points and rewards redemption. And as you see, loyalty points is quite important to allow customers to earn rewards over time. And this can often be redeemed for discounts on their bills, and this can help improve the customers -- users. And second, we will have a lot of the bundling package. Many loyalty program will bundle additional services such as streaming subscription music, cloud storage or even IoT device into a single plan to create more value for the customer. And third, as you know that we have a lot of -- we launched the iPhone 16, so the discounts and subsidies on 5G device. So we believe that there is still a big potential for CHT to increase the 5G penetration rate. So if we continue to implement the strategy in this loyalty program or the bundle service, we believe that we can keep increased revenue and also profit.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions].

Audrey Hsu

Management

There is another question about what kind of the low profits of the service that will be launched? As you know that most of the iPhone sales revenue is low -- is negative profit. Why? Because it is under the bundle program because one of the main purpose is not just -- it is under the bundle program. So it is not really low profit. I mean that under the IFRS 15, we look at on the contract basis. We do not look at on per separate basis, if we don't really launch any low profit. So what I want to emphasize is that for most of our enterprise segment and consumer segments, we will try to streamline operations and to see if there is any product that we can improve the operations and to reduce the cost, and we believe there is a lot of potential.

Operator

Operator

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. If there are no further questions, I will turn it back over to President Lin. Thank you.

Rong-Shy Lin

Management

Okay. Thank you very much for your participation. Thank you very much. See you.

Operator

Operator

Thank you, President Lin. And ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your participation in Chunghwa Telecom's conference. There will be a webcast replay within an hour. Please visit www.cht.com.tw/ir under the IR Calendar section. You may now disconnect. Thank you, and goodbye.