Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Today’s call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Oscar Nooij, MD Capital Allocation and Business Control.
Liberty Latin America Ltd. (LILA)
Q2 2019 Earnings Call· Wed, Aug 7, 2019
$8.11
-1.88%
Same-Day
+2.97%
1 Week
-5.52%
1 Month
+5.33%
vs S&P
+1.78%
Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Today’s call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Oscar Nooij, MD Capital Allocation and Business Control.
Oskar Nooij
Management
Good morning and welcome to Liberty Latin America's Second Quarter 2019 Investor Call. At this time all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. Following today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Today's remarks may include forward-looking statements, including the Company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical fact. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. Additional information or factors or risks that could cause results to differ is available in Liberty Latin America's most recently filed Form 10-K and Form 10-Q. Liberty Latin America disclaims any obligation to update any of these statements to reflect any change in its expectations or any conditions on which any such statement is based. In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, which can be found in the appendices to this presentation and on our Investor Relations website. I would now like to turn the call over to Liberty Latin America's CEO, Mr. Balan Nair.
Balan Nair
Management
Thank you, Oscar. And welcome everybody to our Q2 results presentation. As always, I'm joined by my senior leadership team from across the region. I'll get them involved as needed during the Q&A. The structure of this call will be familiar to you. I am going to start by taking you through our highlights for the second quarter, providing some greater detail and progress we are making each of our product areas, before wrapping up with a strategic update for the group. Chris Noyes, our Chief Financial Officer, will then follow up with some prepared remarks reviewing our financial performance and touching upon our 2019 financial guidance. After that, we will get straight to your questions. As a point of housekeeping, we will both be working from slides, which you can find on our website at www.lla.com. Beginning on Slide 4 with our key highlights for the second quarter. Building on the good start we made to the year, we continue to drive solid operational momentum in the second quarter, adding over 110,000 fixed and mobile subscribers. In fact, in fixed our 67,000 additions represented our best Q2 performance for over a decade. And in mobile, Cable & Wireless continued its improving trend contributing to our 44,000 net adds. We also delivered robust financial results as we saw year-over-year rebased revenue and OCF growth of 3% and 8% respectively. Thirdly, we continued to drive innovation by providing leading broadband speeds as well as enhancing our video platforms. We have an exciting pipeline of product launches for our customer coming up in the future as well. And we continue to upgrade and expand our fixed networks having added 330,000 homes last year. We passed or upgraded 160,000 homes in the second quarter taking our year-to-date activity to roughly 240,000 homes. As…
Chris Noyes
Chief Financial Officer
Thank you, Balan. I will begin on Slide 10 with a high level snapshot of our second quarter financial results. We reported $983 million on revenue and $387 million in OCF, reflecting rebased growth of 3% and 8% respectively. Our Q2 2019 reported results benefited from the inclusion of Cabletica and UTS. With respect to OCF, our margin improved to 39.4%, up 110 basis points from Q2 2018, as we drive operating leverage across our business. Our P&E additions totaled $166 million in Q2 or 17% of revenue. This result reflects much lower capital intensity as compared to $218 million or 24% of revenue in last year’s Q2, which included $42 million of hurricane restoration spend. Moving to adjusted free cash flow, we delivered $68 million in Q2, significantly above the prior-year period driven primarily by lower cash CapEx. On Slide 11, I will summarize our Q2 performance for each of our three reportable segments. Starting on the left, C&W delivered $607 million of revenue down less than 1% on a rebased basis, which reflects an improvement over Q1 rebased results. As in prior quarters, mobile revenue remain challenging on year-over-year, especially in Panama and the Bahamas, although sequentially from Q1, we saw signs of revenue stabilization reflecting the positive impact of our commercial offers. Largely offsetting the mobile decline, we continued to deliver rebased growth in B2B, helps in part by increases in managed services revenue and rebased growth in our fixed residential business driven by the strength of broadband. Reporting $235 million in OCF, C&W posted 3% rebased growth, which was supported by a net decrease in operating costs as C&W improved its OCF margin to nearly 39%. For the quarter, P&E additions were $82 million or 14% of revenue and included over 95,000 new or upgraded homes.…
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from James Ratcliffe from Evercore. Please go ahead.
James Ratcliffe
Analyst · Evercore. Please go ahead
Good morning. Thanks for taking the question, two if I could, one on operations and one for on strategy. On the operation side, Puerto Rico’s margins are back to almost 50%. And you've indicated in the past that's sort of the leading benchmark there. How much upside opportunity is there at Chile in Cable & Wireless, and how much of the operational benefits you’ve been putting in place that we’ve seen thus far? And secondly, you mentioned the $1.9 billion in liquidity, and your neighbors in the building just got a very large check. Can you talk about what the M&A landscape looks like and also your views on potential collaboration with Liberty Global? Thanks.
Balan Nair
Management
Thank you, James. Good morning. And so the first question on the operations, we are quite focused on operational efficiency, but structurally, the different market, they’re just different. In the Cable & Wireless, you have numerous islands that are somewhat fragmented. So I doubt – if I'll be straight up, but I doubt we'll ever get to those kinds of margins in some of those islands that we operate in. But both Chris and I feel very strongly and my management team as well that there's at least quite a few points that we can gain on the OpEx efficiencies to get us to a number that I think you'll like. Now on the second question, on the liquidity, well we don't comment on M&A. And – but we feel that the pipeline in our region is strong. There are quite a number of assets that, I think, would be very attractive to us. But we are quite patient. And as you can see from 2018, we – there were a lot of deals that were rumored that we were engaged in and didn’t come into play, and it's mostly because we know how to do the math. And we'll be very disciplined in – on the M&A front. As for Liberty Global, it's really up to them. You'll probably hear more from them tomorrow.
Chris Noyes
Chief Financial Officer
And just to add James, on the OCF margins, I mean, a key target that we have is that OpEx efficiency to the low-30s as a group. So as you saw on the slides, we were kind of upper 30s as a company. So we have a number of points we could see to get at, which a decent amount of that fits within the Cable & Wireless sphere.
James Ratcliffe
Analyst · Evercore. Please go ahead
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Operator
Our next question comes from Matthew Harrigan from Benchmark. Please go ahead.
Matthew Harrigan
Analyst · Benchmark. Please go ahead
Thank you. Two questions. One, your operations have been more than satisfactory, and I'm sure you're surprised at where your stock price is and clearly it's a function of the emerging market macro and all that. You don't have an authorization in place for buybacks unlike your predecessor company. Given where your stock price is, is there an imperative to get something going there? And then secondly, on the technology side, I think when you first came out of the block, I mean, there was talk about a lot of commonalities with Liberty Global, your sister company and Verizon and all that. I think in your markets on the middle income side, it feels like you're probably inclined to put a little less silicon into the home now and be a little more facile on some of the strategies there. Can you talk about how your technology strategy and how it’s kind of diverging a little bit from Liberty Global as an indicator of what markets you operate in? Thank you.
Balan Nair
Management
Sure. The first question on the where stock currently sits. Yes, we certainly do think it's tremendously undervalued, but it's kind of self-serving to say that. But we know our LRP, we know our plans, and we see the upside coming at us. As to the buybacks, we do not have a Board-authorized buyback plan at this point. And if we needed to put one in, we can put one in very quickly. But as we look at our capital allocation, its back to – buybacks certainly is one of the three things we would look at. We have tremendous internal projects that deliver great IRRs like our newbuilds and as well as the inorganic opportunities in our region. And like – I think I said that in the last call as well. I mean we'll evaluate all of them against our stand-alone plan. And if the stock gets to a point where the IRR is a lot better than a stand-alone plan, I mean, and – or some of the other alternatives, we can get an authorization in very quickly and move quickly on that. On the technology front, I think we have a slightly different roadmap than Liberty Global in some areas, but for the most part we try to keep together with Liberty Global because of the combined scale. So buying DOCSIS modems, the combined scale makes a lot of sense. We are more heavily on mobile, so there is lot of things that we do on mobile that some of our sister companies do not do. So we’ll continue to innovate in that front. I think you'll hear some really interesting things, really positive things in the next quarter call, we’re keeping it ourselves for now. And on the video front, we are on the same roadmap as Liberty Global. We are going to launch the EOS box in Chile and some other areas where we are quite fragmented. We are looking at other options as well that I think in the next call or the call after that, I think we'll be ready to announce those. But my Chief Technology Officer, Vivek Khemka, is very busy. He also runs our product teams and he's got a lot cooking up in the pipeline.
Matthew Harrigan
Analyst · Benchmark. Please go ahead
Great. Thanks, Balan, I appreciate it.
Operator
Operator
Our final question comes from Kevin Roe from Roe Equity Research. Please go ahead.
Kevin Roe
Analyst · Roe Equity Research. Please go ahead
Thank you, Good morning. Balan, in Panama, could you update us on the consumer broadband, competitive dynamic and your go-to-market strategy there? Thank you.
Balan Nair
Management
Thanks, Kevin. In Panama – Panama is a tale of two stories, the fixed network and mobile network. In our fixed network, we are an attack in the market. In the mobile network, we are the incumbent. In lot of cases, we carry the highest ARPUs, and as you know, and I've talked about this before as well, it's a core player market and it's one place to do many in that market. So consolidation will come and we think rational mobile – rationality will come back into the mobile marketplace, but our management team is focused on the higher end of mobile in Panama. You'll see the net adds fluctuate back and forth, and most of the net adds move in Panama, it's mostly the low end prepaid, and there's lots of low end prepaid these days because of what some of the competitors are doing in the marketplace. So if you're chasing net adds, a very quick way to chase in Panama is just offer one box for seven days unlimited, and you can get a lot of net adds, but it's really to a very low end, it's just turning back before. On the fixed side, I think we are an attacker and it's a positive story. And for the longest time, our competitor there has been cherry-picking our customers, and our management team is fighting back and we're seeing the early results, we’ve cable guys and we have fixed guys in many ways. And this is our bread and butter. And we know that business in and out, we know how to price it, we know have to go for it, and you're starting to see that in that place and as well as the other markets as well, it's not unique to Panama, it's across our operations. But in all of these operations, we have good competitors, we learn from them, we compete with them effectively and we are very rational in these markets.
Operator
Operator
That will conclude today's question-and-answer session. I'd like to hand back to Balan Nair for additional or closing remarks.
Balan Nair
Management
Well, thank you so much operator, and thank you everybody for taking the time to join us this morning. You'll see clearly from our results today that we are making progress. This is a very exciting journey for me and my management team, and I think a lot of other good things will come along as well. We are really looking forward to the second half of this year. Have a great day, and thanks again for your support.
Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Latin America's second quarter 2019 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay for the call will be available on the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. There, you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.