Walter Ulloa
Analyst · Noble Financial
Thank you, Kate. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to Entravision’s fourth quarter 2015 earnings conference call. And joining me today on the call is Chris Young, our Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I must inform you that this conference call will contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to our SEC filings for a list of risks and uncertainties that could impact actual results. This call is a property of Entravision Communications Corporation. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any form without the expressed written consent of Entravision Communications Corporation is strictly prohibited. Also, this call will include non-GAAP financial measures. The company has provided a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures in today’s press release. The press release is available on the company’s website and it was filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. Now, moving on to a review of the fourth quarter and the full year, during the fourth quarter, our performance was driven by strong revenue growth at our audio and digital businesses, along with core advertising growth from our television group. Overall, the fourth quarter concluded another successful year as we made further progress transforming Entravision into a leading multi-platform media company, targeting US Latinos across acculturation levels and devices. Our digital platforms and revenues continued to expand and our unique collection of assets and capabilities allowed us to deliver a highly targeted and engaged US Latino audiences. We remain well positioned with many of the nation’s most populated Latino markets and are focused on continuing to expand our audience shares. We also continued to return capital to our shareholders through a recently increased quarterly dividend, while at the same time taking steps to strengthen our capital structure through a $20 million fourth quarter prepayment of term loans under our senior secured term loan credit facility. Looking now at specific results, fourth quarter consolidated revenues were $65.4 million or flat compared to the prior year period. Our reported revenues were impacted by $5.8 million in political revenues in the 2014 fourth quarter. Excluding the impact of political revenue, total revenues on a consolidated basis increased 10% in the fourth quarter. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $18.8 million in the quarter, down 12% compared to last year, mainly due to the absence of political and World Cup revenues in 2015 versus the prior year and higher variable expenses in our audio and digital divisions. For the full year, consolidated revenue was $254.1 million, an increase of 5% over the prior year. Excluding the impact of $9.3 million in political and $9.1 million in incremental non-returning World Cup revenue in 2014, along with the exclusion of $10.5 million in non-core 2015 telecom-related revenue, total core revenue in 2015 was up 9% over 2014. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA for the full year was $76.3 million, down 4% versus 2014. Now, turning to our TV segment operating highlights, television revenue decreased 8% during the fourth quarter, due to the impact of $4.7 million in political revenues in the fourth quarter of 2014. National revenue was down 15%, while local revenues were down 9% during the quarter. Retransmission revenues increased by 16% during the quarter. Excluding the impact of political revenue and retransmission revenue, core television advertising revenues were up 1%, with core national advertising revenue up 8%, while core local revenues were down 5% during the fourth quarter. For the year, television revenue decreased 4% versus 2014, with local down 9% and national down 19% and retransmission revenue up 6%. Including retransmission, the impact of approximately $7.8 million in political and $7.3 million in incremental World Cup revenue in 2014 as well as approximately $10.5 million in non-core telecom related revenue in 2015, total core TV advertising revenue was down 3% versus the prior year, with TV core local down 4% and TV core national down 3%. A key driver of our core advertising growth in the fourth quarter was automotive, which remains our largest advertising category for television. Automotive was up 20% during the quarter, driven by double digit increases from Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Ford, Chrysler Dodge, Jeep and Volkswagen. Looking beyond automotive, television ad sales increased across several other key categories, including services, retail, media, groceries, product brand and auto repair services. We continued to expand our roster of advertising partners in television. During the fourth quarter, we added 33 new television advertisers who have spent $10,000 or more, which totaled approximately $830,000 in incremental advertising revenue for our television business. Notable top new advertisers included Fiat Chrysler, AutoNation of Las Vegas, Allegiant, Health Plans, Silver State Health Insurance Exchange and Coventry Health Care. Turning to our ratings performance, our Univision television affiliates built up their market leadership in the November 2015 sweeps. For adults 18 to 49 early local news, our Univision television stations finished ahead of their Telemundo competitor in all but one market. In late local news, we finished ahead of Telemundo competitors among adults 18 to 49 in 12 markets. Additionally, our early local newscasts are ranked number one or two against English or Spanish competitors in 12 markets. During a full week, our Univision and UniMás television stations together have a cumulative audience of 3.3 million Hispanics in our markets combined compared to Telemundo’s 1.9 million Latinos. We have 61% more viewers than our Telemundo competitors in our television footprint. Also, in weekday primetime when comparing all stations in total, adults 18 to 49, we outperformed at least one of our big four English language competitors in 11 of our markets. Looking now at our audio division, we continue to deliver strong performance due to the solid positioning of our radio station group, our Entravision Solutions Network and the strength of our industry-leading content offerings. Revenue increased 6% in the fourth quarter [2014], with local up 3% and national up 13%. On a core basis, once you exclude a little over $1 million in political advertising in the 2014 fourth quarter, our audio division increased revenue by 12%, with core local up 6% and our core national up 26%. For the overall year, the audio division revenues increased 9% compared to last year, with local up 6% and national up 14%. On a core basis, excluding political and incremental World Cup advertising, our audio division increased revenue by 14% for the year, with core local up 10% and core national up 20%. This is the fifth consecutive quarter where Entravision has outperformed the broader audio industry, based on Miller Kaplan estimates for the 12 markets which we subscribe. The industry saw a decrease of 1% during the fourth quarter and flat for the full year versus our 9% increase in the full year and 6% increase in the fourth quarter. Our Entravision Solutions Audio Network revenues increased an incredible 44% during the fourth quarter compared to the same period last year. This strong growth was driven by increased ad spend by All States Sprint and Walgreens as well as addition of several new advertisers, including Pfizer, Pepsi, Cicis Pizza and Anheuser-Busch. For the year, our Entravision Solutions Audio Network revenues increased 41% over 2014. At this point, I want to recognize and acknowledge Jose Villafane, our President of Entravision National Sales, for the outstanding work he and his Entravision Solutions team performed in 2015. We’re attracting more advertisers because we have the leading platform with connect brands with highly engaged US Latino audience nationwide. This platform is supported by an unmatched industry content offering that includes Oswaldo Diaz also known Erazno y La Chokolata, Alex El Genio Lucas and Eduardo Piolin Sotelo, the top three Spanish language talents in the entire country, and all of them are day-in day-out strengthening their audiences on Entravision media properties, mobile streaming across our station websites and on social media. Importantly, they will continue to drive audiences for Entravision for the next several years as all three of these talented personalities have multi-year contracts. The strength of our content offering continues to attract advertisers. We had a total of 30 Entravision Solution Network advertisers during the fourth quarter, an increase of 30% from the same period in prior year. Our audio division recorded revenue growth in eight of our top 10 categories in the fourth quarter, including automotive which is up a solid 36%, driven by increased ad spend by Kia, Toyota, Nissan, Honda and Ford. Other key categories registering strong increases in the quarter for our audio business included telecom, travel and leisure, restaurants, auto repair, product brands, media and groceries. We continue to expand our base of advertising partners. During the fourth quarter, we had 30 new audio advertisers who spent more than $10,000, generating approximately $761,000 in incremental advertising revenue. These new advertisers include Pfizer, Delta Airlines and [Hoover]. Looking at the Los Angeles station cluster, Entravision’s largest audio market, total revenues for our Los Angeles audio platform were up 9% for the quarter over the prior year, with local up 23%, while national was up 9%. This 19% growth compares favorably to the most recent Miller Kaplan survey, where the LA market finished at a plus 3% for the fourth quarter. For the year, our Los Angeles audio platform grew revenue a healthy 24% over the prior year, with local revenue up 19%, while national revenue was up 39%. Again, our Los Angeles performance candidly beat the Los Angeles market, which according to Miller Kaplan finished the year flat. Los Angeles is the leading Latino market in the United States according to Nielsen’s Audio Fall 2015 release. Both our morning drive show El Genio and our afternoon show Erazno y La Chokolata are among the top 10 in their time periods in Los Angeles regardless of language among adults 18 to 49 and adults 25 to 54, with the Erazno show being the highest rated Spanish language audio program in the time period among both demos. Looking at our audio division ratings performance among all stations regardless of language in the adult 18 to 49 demographic, Erazno y La Chokolata show is in the top 10 in 11 of our markets, El Genio Lucas is the top 10 in six of our markets and Piolin is in the top 10 in eight of our markets regardless of language. 13 of our audio stations in 10 markets are among the top 10 stations regardless of language among adults 18 to 49. Now let’s look at our digital business. Digital revenues were $6.3 million in the fourth quarter, an impressive growth of 67% over the fourth quarter of 2014. Our digital revenue now accounts for approximately 10% of our total revenue as of the fourth quarter. Our digital business continues to grow at a very strong rate. The key drivers are our unique digital platforms, Pulpo and Luminar, our industry-leading content and our unmatched reach. Today, our digital platform delivers the largest digital US Latino reach to our advertising partners. Using Pulpo, we target and reach Latinos nationwide across all devices and platforms. This is strengthened by Luminar, which adds a unique big data management platform complete with programmatic targeting and yield optimization tools. Our digital reach has expanded by our strategic focus on mobile, our robust entertainment and digital news operation and expanding social media engagement metrics. Today, we can efficiently and effectively connect advertisers with US Latino consumers online, on mobile devices and via social media with digital video, display, audio and native ad units. Whether advertisers try to reach Spanish dominant bilingual or English dominant Latinos, Entravision today delivers a total US Latino market across acculturation levels. Pulpo continues to be the number one ranked digital platform to reach US Latinos in the United States according to comScore. Pulpo’s reach is supported by our owned and operated websites, which deliver an average of 2.7 million monthly unique visitors. This strong digital audience delivery is being driven by our content-focused strategy. During the fourth quarter, we published over 12,600 local news stories and videos across our digital properties and streamlined over 4.8 million hours of audio entertainment to over 1.5 million unique listeners. It is worth mentioning that about 80% of our audience is consuming their content through mobile devices. We continue to make progress developing apps and mobile-first websites associated with our leading content personalities, including Erazno, Alex El Genio Lucas, [LNS show] and El show de Piolin. In January of this year, we launched a mobile app for Erazno y La Chokolata. Within the first week, the app achieved 50,000 downloads and Erazno was the number two trending topic on the Apple Store. One full month after going live, the Erazno app continues to do exceedingly well and surpassing all major KPIs and benchmarks, reaching 87,000 monthly active users. As part of the launch strategy, Erazno promoted a contest where listeners could download the app and register for a chance to win a trip for two to this year’s la noche de locura in Las Vegas. In under 30 days, the campaign generated 540,000 impressions, achieved an open rate of 4.6% and generated 7,500 contestant entries. At this rate, the app is on target to break the 100,000 monthly active users within the next 10 days. We will launch El Genio Lucas’ new mobile-first website in the second quarter of 2016. Our social media presence continues to expand as well. We finished 2015 with over 6.3 million social media followers across key networks, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This was up 150% compared to the fourth quarter of 2014. We expanded our mobile reach and offerings given that Latinos continue to over-index in mobile ownership and mobile media consumption. According to comScore, we currently reached over 15 million unique Spanish dominant Latinos for mobile devices and 25.6 million unique bicultural Latinos through mobile devices through our Pulpo digital network. Mobile remains our fastest-growing revenue stream and today contributes 25% of our total digital revenues. Our mobile offerings also include our text and MMS operations. In the fourth quarter, we sent over 1.7 million text messages and our usage level continue to rise. This has led to a steady increase in the number of MMS text sent, which represented roughly 48% of our total text messages in the fourth quarter. Overall, we continued to make steady progress advancing our digital platform, while expanding our capabilities and revenue streams. Today, we have a truly unique collection of digital assets that delivers highly engaged and highly targeted US Latino audiences to our advertising partners. We remain focused on transform Entravision by further growing our digital platform. Turning now to our pacings for the first quarter, as a reminder, during the first quarter of last year, our television business recorded $5 million of non-advertising revenue related to a channel modification made by us to accommodate a telecom operator. Excluding the impact of last year’s non-advertising revenue, our television revenue is currently pacing in the positive low to mid single digits versus prior year. Audio is also pacing in the positive low to mid single digits for the first quarter. And digital is currently pacing in the positive double digits compared to bookings at this point in the prior year. In summary, despite the challenges in 2015 with the absence of over $21 million of political and World Cup revenue from 2014, we’re pleased with our performance for the year as we continued to execute on multi-platform growth strategy. Our audio and audio network business are consistently outperforming the broader industry, including our Spanish language peers and our digital platform connects robust targeted and engaged US Latino audiences with brands online, on mobile and via social media. We remain well focused in the nation’s most densely populated US Latino markets and are focused on continuing to grow our audience shares and deliver increased returns to shareholders, while at the same time reducing leverage. Finally, we’re looking forward to a robust political year in 2016. We operate large clusters of media assets targeting Latino voters in key states in this year’s Presidential election, including Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Virginia. In each political cycle, winning the Latino vote becomes more critical for both parties in their quest to win the Presidency. This Presidential year will be even more important than 2012 for the Latino voter electric. In 2012, we doubled our political revenue versus 2008. Although we do not expect to double our political revenue in 2016, we are forecasting impressive political revenue increases versus 2012. Now, I’ll turn the call over to Chris Young, our Chief Financial Officer, for a review of our financial information.