Walter Ulloa
Analyst · Wedbush Securities. Please go ahead
Thank you, Carey, and good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Entravision’s first quarter 2016 earnings conference call. 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. Moving on to our review of the first quarter. Overall, we had a good start of the year, as we continue to make progress executing a multi-platform strategy. While overall performance was impacted by non-advertising revenues we generated during the prior period – prior year period, on a core basis, we delivered revenue growth across our audio and television station groups. We also continue to generate strong digital revenue growth, as we capitalize on our unique collection of digital assets and capabilities. Our audience reach across all major platforms continues to increase, as we remain focused on transforming Entravision into a leading multi-platform media company across all acculturation levels. Our audio and television assets are well-positioned across the nation’s most densely populated Latino markets. Today, we deliver advertisers with a largest Latino audience spend in all major platforms, including online and via mobile devices We also continue to return capital to shareholders via our quarterly dividend. Looking now at specific results. First quarter consolidated revenue was $58.1 million, a decrease of 2% compared to last year. Our reported revenues were impacted by $5 million in non-advertising revenue, related to a channel modification we made to accommodate a telecom operator in the year ago period. Excluding this non-advertising revenue, total revenues on a consolidate basis increased 7% during the first quarter. Consolidated adjusted EBITDA was $12.6 million in the quarter compared to $16.8 million last year. The decrease is primarily related to non-advertising revenues previously mentioned. Turning to our TV segment operating highlights, television revenue decreased 7% during the first quarter, again, due to the impact of non-advertising revenue in the prior year period. Excluding non-advertising revenue, television revenues increased 6% in the first quarter. National revenue was up 14%, while local revenue was down 2%. Retransmission revenues increased 16% during the quarter. Excluding the impact of non-advertising revenue, political and retransmission revenues, core television advertising revenues were up 2% with core national advertising revenue up 9%, while core local revenue was down 4% during the first quarter. The automotive category continues to be a strong contributor to our television advertising revenue growth. Automotive was up 13% in the first quarter, driven by double-digit increases by Nissan, Ford, and Honda. Auto tier growth was double-digits in Tier 1 and Tier 2. Beyond auto, we generated advertising revenue growth across several other categories, including legal services up 8%, restaurants up 3%, media 4%, finance up a 11%, and political, which represented approximately $726,000 in television revenue for the quarter. During the first quarter, we continue to expand our roster of television advertising partners. We had a 52 new television advertisers who spent more than $10,000, which totaled approximately 1.3 million in advertising revenue. These new advertisers included companies and brands, such as Brightwood College, Hillary for America and American Electric Power. Turning to our ratings performance, our television – Univision television affiliates built up their market leadership in the February 2016 sweeps. For adults 18 to 49 in early local news, our Univision television stations finished ahead of their Telemundo competitor in all of our markets except one where we tied. Additionally, our early local newscasts are ranked number one or two against English and Spanish competitors in 10 markets. During a full week, our Univision and UniMás television stations combined have a cumulative audience of 3.1 million Hispanics in our markets combined compared to Telemundo’s 1.9 million Hispanics. We have 60% more viewers than Telemundo in our Univision television affiliate footprint and our reach is up 2% over the same period last year. During weekday prime time when comparing all stations in total adults 18 to 49, we had high ratings of one of the big four networks in 11 of our markets. Turning to our audio division. Revenue increased 3% in the first quarter, with local up 2%, and national up 6%. Excluding political revenues, our audio division increased by – increased revenue by 2% with core local revenue up 2% and our core national up 4%. This marks the 6th 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 an increase of 2% during the first quarter of 2016. Entravision Solutions Audio Network revenues increased 16% during the first quarter compared to the first quarter of last year. Growth was driven by Home Depot, O’Reilly Auto Parts, AT&T Mobility, and Wells Fargo, as well as new advertisers, including NBC, Universal, T-Mobile, Volkswagen, and GM Chevy. While our overall audio network grew 16%, our syndication sales for the Erazno show grew a whopping 83% in the quarter. Our Entravision Solutions Audio Network continues to benefit from our strong content offerings, which include Oswaldo Díaz, also known as Erazno y la Chokolata, Alex El Genio Lucas, and Eduardo Piolin Sotelo. The top Spanish talents – Spanish language talents working in the industry today continued to be heard, streamed, followed and connected across Entravision’s media properties. The power of our Entravision Solutions Network continues to attract advertising dollars. In the first quarter, we had 36 Entravision Solutions Network advertisers. This was an increase of 6% compared to the prior year. On the Erazno show, we had 21 active national advertisers, representing a 31.8% [ph] increase over the prior year. Our audio division recorded revenue growth in five of our top 10 categories in the first quarter, including automotive, which was up 27% in the quarter. The strong performance in automotive was driven by Toyota, Nissan and General Motors. Other advertising categories that showed strong growth in the first quarter were legal services up 24%, auto up 19%, and political, which represented $248,000 in revenue for the quarter. Similar to our television business, we continued to expand our base of advertising partners. During the first quarter, we had 33 new audio advertisers who spend more than $10,000, which generated approximately $682,000 in incremental advertising revenues. Notable new advertisers included Buy Now Insurance, The Dominguez Firm, Hillary for America, [indiscernible] Lopez & Associates and Rent-A-Center. Turning to Los Angeles, which remains our largest audio market, our LA revenue was up 2% in the quarter, and was in line with our overall market, which also finished [indiscernible] plus 2 based on Miller Kaplan. KYY continues to be a top ranked LA radio station delivering a number of key demos for the most recent three book Nielsen survey against the coveted 18 to 49 demo, KYY delivered the number one afternoon drive show with Erazno y la Chokolata and the number four drive show with Alex El Genio Lucas. And this is regardless of language against all LA or against all Los Angeles radio competitors. Now, let’s move on to our digital business. Digital revenues increased an impressive 26% to $4.7 million in the first quarter. Digital revenue now accounted for approximately 8% of our total revenue during the first quarter. We continued to generate strong digital revenue growth due to our unique combination of assets and capabilities, which included Pulpo and Luminar, as well as our strong content offering and reach. During the first quarter, we had a several new brands to our digital clients such as Wendy’s, H&R Block, LOL, Southwest Airlines, Aquaphor and Florida Lottery and others in comparison to first quarter last year. We grew in almost every quarter; automotive grew 16%, entertainment 12%, consumer goods 26%, retail 64%, and travel 100%. Our digitals platform continues to deliver the largest digital U.S. Latino reach to advertisers. Our unmatched reach is driven by Pulpo, which targets Latino – Latinos nationwide across all devices and platforms, and then leverages Luminar’s big data programmatic targeting and yield optimization tools. This is strengthened by a focus on mobile centric offerings from growing social media, following as well as our commitment to delivering compelling content across all media platforms, including our owned and operated websites. According to comScore, Pulpo’s desktop reach among Spanish Dominant, Latinos is over 7 million unique users, which represents 23% of online Latinos. This accounts for over 205 million monthly viewed pages. Our Pulpo Bicultural reach is even greater with over 16 million unique users, which represents 52% of online Latinos. This accounts for over 560 million monthly viewed pages. Our audience delivery expands all key demographics as well as Spanish Dominant – Bicultural or English Dominant Latinos. Entravision today delivers U.S. Latino market across all acculturation levels. For perspective comScore continues to rank Pulpo the number one ranked digital platform reaching Latinos in the United States, while our websites deliver over 2.2 million monthly unique visitors. We published over 11,000 local news stories and videos across our digital properties in the first quarter, while streaming over 5 million hours of audio entertainment to over 2 million unique listeners on our ONO digital network. The majority of our audience continues to engage with our content via mobile devices. The high mobile usage rate among our audience continues to drive strategic investments in our mobile app offerings and mobile first websites. Our digital teams remain hard at work, developing apps and mobile first websites associated with our leading content personalities including Alex El Genio Lucas, the LM Show and El Show De Piolin. As you might recall, in January, we launched Erazno y la Chokolata app. The response to the app continues to be very strong and today the app has been downloaded 145,000 times, with nearly 100,000 active monthly users and achieving conversion rates as high as 25%. In addition, we remain on track to launch El Genio Lucas, new mobile first website during the current quarter. Turning now to social media, we continue to grow our engagement metrics. We currently have over 6.5 million social media followers across key networks including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Lastly, mobile remains our fastest growing revenue stream today and contributes 28% of our total digital revenues. We expanded our mobile reach and offerings to given the Latinos continued over index and mobile ownership and media consumption. According to comScore, we have surpassed 13 million unique Spanish Dominant Latinos for mobile devices and 27 million unique Bicultural Latinos through mobile devices to our Pulpo digital network. A multiple mobile offerings also include our text and MMS operations. In the first quarter, we sent over 1.9 million text messages and are overall users level continues to increase. This has led to a steady increase in the number of MMS texts sent, which represented roughly 54% of our total text messages in the first quarter. Now let’s take a look at our patient for the first quarter, our television advertising revenues currently pacing in the positive high single-digits versus the second quarter of last year. Our audio advertising revenues currently pacing in the negative low single-digits compared to the last – to the last year’s second quarter, but we are seen momentum building as we move through the quarter. Digital revenues are currently pacing as approximately 50% above bookings at this point in the second quarter of last year. We should also note that all of this pacing detail is core advertising as we have yet to book any material political revenue thus far in the second quarter. In summary, the first quarter was a good start to the year and we are on track to achieve our full-year goals. We generated core advertising growth across our television and audio station groups, which continue to outperform the broader industry in our Spanish language peers. Our digital revenues continue to rapidly grow and we are making further progress extending online and mobile capabilities and offerings. We remain well-positioned across all media platforms and our overall audience reach continues to grow. Finally, we remain enthusiastic about the 2016 politically year. Our media assets are well-positioned across key swing states including Florida, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Virginia, at a time, when Latino population continues to grow a number and most importantly in influence. We continue to anticipate impressive political revenue increases versus 2012 and presently we expect more than 85% of our political revenue for the year to be placed in the second half of the current presidential election cycle. While the political investment cycles have yet to show consistent patterns of growth in each presidential cycle, our total Q1 political revenue generation of approximately $1 million with 10 times more than 2012 generated from a cross-section of local state, national issue and pack oriented campaigns, including Trump for President on our English language Fox Stations. At this time, I’ll turn the call over to Chris Young, our Chief Financial Officer for review of our financial information.