Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Zoe Lawrenson, Senior Director of Strategy and Corporate Development, Liberty Latin America.
Liberty Latin America Ltd. (LILA)
Q4 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, Feb 19, 2026
$8.11
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Same-Day
+0.00%
1 Week
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1 Month
+2.00%
vs S&P
+6.25%
Operator
Operator
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Zoe Lawrenson, Senior Director of Strategy and Corporate Development, Liberty Latin America.
Zoe Lawrenson
Management
Good morning, and welcome to Liberty Latin America's Full Year 2025 Investor Call. [Operator Instructions] Today's formal presentation materials can be found on the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website, www.lla.com. Following today's formal presentation, instruction 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 facts. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Liberty Latin America's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K, along with the associated press release. Liberty Latin America disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement or information is based. In addition, on this call, we may 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, which is accessible under the Investors section of our website. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Balan Nair.
Balan Nair
Management
Thank you , Zoe, and welcome, everybody, to Liberty Latin America's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Results Presentation. I will be running through our group highlights and an overview of our operating results by Credit Silo before Chris Noyes, our CFO, reviews the company financial performance. We'll then get straight to your questions. As always, I'm joined by my executive team from across our operations, and I will invite them to contribute as needed during the Q&A following our prepared remarks. As a point of housekeeping, we will both be working from slides, which you can find on our website at www.lla.com. All right. Starting on Slide 4 and our highlights. Our business performed very well in 2025. We added over 225,000 mobile postpaid subscribers across the group, notably driven by Costa Rica and supported by fixed mobile convergence efforts and continuing prepaid to postpaid migrations. The postpaid adds this quarter included a positive net add contribution from Puerto Rico for the first time since the migration. We also recorded $1.7 billion of adjusted OIBDA in full year 2025, which represented 9% growth on a rebased basis. This performance was driven by good execution of cost initiatives as well as effective customer management and came despite headwinds in the fourth quarter from Hurricane Melissa. We worked hard to drive a steep recovery in profitability in Puerto Rico as well as double-digit adjusted OIBDA growth in Cable & Wireless Panama. B2B came in very strong in the fourth quarter, which is seasonally our best B2B quarter. LLA registered P&E additions for the group at 14% as a percentage of revenue for full year 2025, in line with previously communicated intentions and representing a 2 percentage point decline versus the prior year. With adjusted OIBDA expanding, the P&E additions falling, the…
Christopher Noyes
Management
Thanks, Paul. Over the next slides, I will provide key highlights of our Q4 and full year results for 2025 with a focus on the fourth quarter. For Q4, we delivered revenue of $1.2 billion, reflecting 1% year-over-year rebased growth. This was fueled by double-digit top line growth at Liberty Networks and CWP, offset in large part by declines in LC, principally due to the hurricane and LPR as a result of the year-over-year decline in customers. On a full year basis, LLA revenue was slightly down on a rebased basis to $4.4 billion. Moving to the right. We reported adjusted OIBDA of $451 million in Q4, bringing our 2025 full year adjusted OIBDA to $1.7 billion. These results reflect year-over-year rebased growth of 8% for Q4 and 9% for 2025, with both periods adversely impacted by $27 million stemming from Hurricane Melissa. For LLA, our operating focus on cost control and efficiency contributed to our roughly 300 basis point improvement in adjusted OIBDA margins in 2025. We expect our 2025 actions will continue to benefit our 2026 results. Slide 17 recaps our Q4 results for the C&W credit silo. Starting on the left, in Q4, LC reported $356 million in revenue and $153 million in adjusted OIBDA. Both metrics declined year-over-year on a rebased basis, which was entirely due to Hurricane Melissa as the Jamaican business experienced declines of $20 million in revenue and $27 million in adjusted OIBDA in the last 2 months of Q4. Overall, it is important to not let the hurricane detract from what was a very strong year from the LC team, especially in light of their margin improvement and 7% adjusted OIBDA rebased growth for full year 2025. With that being said, we do expect that the next quarters will be financially challenging…
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question today will be from the line of [ Matthew Harrigan ] with [ StoneX ].
Unknown Analyst
Analyst
I wonder if AI will ever enable the Q&A to not be conducted electronically. Actually, 2 questions. Firstly, you have some really abusive expectations on private equity infrastructure investment at one point. That didn't materialize, but certainly, the results are really inflecting upward. Even apart from MANTA and El Salvador, just by virtue of economic growth and increased volume even at lower per bit pricing. Do you think you've got a really nice tailwind just organically from economic activity? Or is it really just going to be largely a step function of MANTA and El Salvador and whatever other discrete projects materialize? And then I have a follow-up.
Balan Nair
Management
On the MANTA and El Salvador project, they're actually quite different projects. The MANTA project is both building more resiliency as well as adding a huge amount of capacity on routes we think are going to be highly profitable. So -- and it's being built right now, and we'll start selling into it very soon, starting later this year, early next year. And we've got quite a bit of interest in that. The El Salvador project on the flip side, it's really a build operate transfer kind of a model with the government of El Salvador. But it has some really good upsides for us as well, including the fact that we will be running, maintaining that network. And in the future, perhaps we could put a branching unit and add some capacity to some of the other drops. So both projects are hugely accretive and have very good margins on it. But they are very complex projects. Ray Collins, who leads our business unit there. He and his team have been really on top of it. The build and the engineering is ongoing right now. And we have a lot to deliver on here, but the team is really up for it.
Unknown Analyst
Analyst
And then as a follow-up, Mike Fries yesterday, this wasn't his expectation, but I think he said one of the hyperscaler executives said that it was possible that they could reduce Liberty Telecoms OpEx from $15 billion to $7 billion or $8 billion. Mike certainly didn't endorse that, but he implied that there was going to be a long run of AI and cost improvements given, obviously, telecom, you've got a lot of repetitive processes and big data lakes and network management, customer management. Do you think you're going to have that type of improvement? Obviously, not of that scale, but do you think we're going to be seeing very, very significant prolonged margin benefits? And then I was also curious, this month, you just the other day with AWS and then Liberty Global with Google and Gemini somewhat before that, both entered into relationships. And I'm curious how the expectations are vary between Google and Amazon. And was there any clear explanation as to why they went with Google and you went with AWS?
Balan Nair
Management
Sure. Let me answer your last question first, and I'll get back. I really can't comment on Liberty Global's decision with Google, like Google Cloud and the work the Google team is doing. It's extremely impressive. Chris, myself or a whole bunch of my executives visited with the Google Cloud folks just 2 weeks ago in California, 3 weeks now. Our relationship with AWS is slightly different, and it's really focused on our business. Most of our models and most of our services and compute and storage is done over AWS. Most of our customers prefer AWS. The relationship with AWS is strong for our internal usage. And certainly, it's a great product for us to partner with our customers. We have quite a number of customers today, cloud customers on our premises that are migrating, and we think the migration to AWS makes a lot of sense for them and for us. And the folks that AWS has been really great to work with as well in this partnership. So that's really kind of why we went down that path. We think it's great for ourselves internally, and it's great for our customers as well. In addition, by the way, AWS is making investments in our region with us building out what they call outposts and their wavelength product in our data centers in Panama, in Colombia. So this is not just a reseller agreement. This is a really deep partnership between us and them. To your second question -- or your first question on AI benefits, I think we are really in the first innings here on this. This requires -- the opportunity is large. Let's be clear. I don't want to put a number on this. But clearly, as you pointed out, we have a lot of…
Operator
Operator
The next question today will be from the line of Michael Rollins with Citi.
Michael Rollins
Analyst · Citi
Curious if you could help us -- help all of us understand the fixed to mobile convergence opportunity. In your major markets or regions, can you frame what the current level of converged take rates are, where you see that potentially going on a volume basis? And to get there, do you have to do substantial discounting? Or can it be nearly as accretive as if you were getting these customers on the stand-alone services and just coincidentally package together?
Balan Nair
Management
The fixed mobile convergence have been a real benefit for us. Yes, there's a few ways to look at it. One, if you know, most of our markets, with the exception of Puerto Rico, it's primarily prepaid, primarily prepaid markets. So when you go to fixed mobile convergence, there's 2 things -- 2 steps here. One, you go from pre to post and then you link the post to our fixed product. And it's primarily postpaid mobile with our fixed broadband. That's really the golden product, the bullseye product we call. And this has worked quite well across our markets. And in Puerto Rico specifically, we've been looking at -- we have more than 50-some percent market share in our fixed broadband in Puerto Rico. And we have right about slightly under 20% in our mobile postpaid. And clearly, the opportunity to link both of them is pretty high. So for every fixed broadband customer that do not have our postpaid, it's really an opportunity for us. And for any of our postpaid customers that don't have fixed broadband, also an opportunity for us. And the trick is really our systems, and we've been going through, as you know, in Puerto Rico, quite a significant upgrade in our systems and stabilizing them. We are now at a point where we can start doing a lot of this postpaid and fixed mobile -- sorry, and fixed broadband convergence. And it's really kind of -- it provides 2 things. One, a higher ARPU in the home or that specific customer, so the customer ARPU goes up. And secondly, churn goes down. And these are proven facts across all telcos over many years. And I think we've been quite successful. We have quite a number of my general managers who are really steeped into this, focused on it, and this is really one of our growth opportunities in '26 and beyond.
Michael Rollins
Analyst · Citi
Maybe just a follow-up on the revenue side. Can you give us an update when you take into account the -- what you just described in terms of the FMC opportunities, the opportunity to continue to grow in your markets, what's a fair range of annual rebased revenue growth that Liberty Latin America should operate within on a multiyear basis?
Balan Nair
Management
That's a great question. I've got to be careful I don't give guidance here. But here's how you look at it. Our mobile product is growing because as we move from pre to post, ARPU gets better, we attach it to our fixed and we start growing. So the mobile product, you'll see growth. It won't be in the double digits, but it will be very respectable single-digit growth annually. And that -- we have a long runway in that. On the fixed side, broadband continues to grow, however, offset by headwinds on video and voice. So as you look at the fixed product, you'll see flattish to slight growth, but it's mostly because we have some legacy products that you got to adjust for. Eventually, will wash out and we'll get to a steady cadence. B2B has good growth as well. And the B2B growth, we are really excited now getting into more and more cloud services that we're selling. We still continue to sell connectivity. But in addition to connectivity, we're selling a lot more cloud services. But even in B2B, there is a headwind. And the headwind is mostly a lot of customers are canceling their voice products. So there's voice services that will continue to decline a bit, but it's offset by these new cloud services. And the second thing that kind of offsets our revenue going forward is roaming. -- clearly, as people travel, this is a great market for us because a lot of the cruise ships, a lot of people roam. But clearly, with new technologies and most people getting on WiFi via WhatsApp, the roaming revenue is going to be continuously, it's going to slightly decline, and that kind of adds to a headwind to our product. So our product portfolio has a lot of really nice good products and a few headwinds that it's just the nature of where the technology is at. I think the way we look at it is we are going to invest further and deeper into all the products that are growing. And then we're just going to manage the rest of the products that we are challenged with, voice, video, roaming, those kinds of products, we're going to just try to manage that. And I think the team has done a pretty good job. You can see it in our numbers. And that's why you can see while revenue is kind of flattish at the top, there's a significant EBITDA expansion. The EBITDA expansion comes from cost cutting, this base management and really us moving to higher-margin products. So that's kind of one way to look at it.
Operator
Operator
[Operator Instructions] The next question today will be from the line of Chris Hoare with New Street Research.
Chris Hoare
Analyst · New Street Research
I had a question on the top line trajectory in Puerto Rico. Obviously, great news on the inflection in postpaid net adds. I wonder if you can give sort of any color on the shape of how that sort of played out in the quarter. And obviously, what I'm trying to think of is what we should expect going forward, whether you'd expect to see further improvements in terms of postpaid net adds? And then also on the top line in Puerto Rico, obviously, that was sort of slightly offset by a bit of weakness on B2B. And I think you said that, that's a function of sort of hangover from the transition, but I'd just be interested in sort of if you can give any more color on what happened there as well and therefore, also trajectory on B2B revenues in Puerto Rico.
Balan Nair
Management
In '25, we had a whole bunch of headwinds there. We started the year with an outlook that's very, very different than what we ended the year with, meaning extremely positive in the way we ended the year compared to how we saw it at the beginning of the year because there were some headwinds and challenges that we did not anticipate as we came into 2025, the first quarter of '25. Here's a few things that can show the improvements. One, of course, you see financially, we're turning this business around. And -- but it's really based on a whole bunch of things that we fixed in the business, whether it's the leadership talent, whether it's the processes in it, the stabilization of the systems and really coming out with value propositions and products that make sense to our customers. There's a huge amount of improvements in business when somebody walks into our store today than they did last year. So a number of things that I think will give us some nice tailwind into '26. The net adds you saw in the fourth quarter of '25 were driven by all these improvements, including a real big turnaround in our NPS scores. And -- but it was also assisted by the fact that we were migrating a ton of these subscribers -- we bought from DISH. They were prepaid subscribers that came to us. But because of our really strong postpaid value proposition, a number of those prepaid subscribers actually ended up buying our postpaid product instead of moving as to prepaid. And so that drove as well some of the growth of net adds in fourth quarter '25. Now if I look into '26, January, we had a very good month in January. So without any of the Boost subscribers moving up to postpaid. So we continue to see the progress in that. But I think this is a journey that's going to take a lot more than 1 or 2 quarters. And my sense is by the end of '26, we'll be an even better state to set up for a really nice opening balance into 2027. And then back to the revenue miss, you correctly pointed out, B2B was a challenge for us in 2025. We opened the year with a very weak opening balance coming into 2025 and struggled throughout the year. We made a number of changes in the team in the B2B team. We brought in a new leader for the group. She is extremely focused. And if I look at my budget for 2026, has a very good and a very, I think, a budget that when we hit it, I think people are going to be quite happy. So the turnaround is happening, but we have to be patient. This is going to take many quarters.
Chris Hoare
Analyst · New Street Research
Okay. And maybe one follow-up would just be on the slide on equity value unlock where you talk about shareholder returns focus. Is there any more color you can give there in terms of either what you're thinking of or timing around when anything might be announced there?
Balan Nair
Management
I think things are looking on the up and up here. We feel really confident about the business. We really feel really confident about the future. As Chris pointed out, the cash flow generation in the fourth quarter looks really good. And you can see that our intention, as Chris pointed out, is we're going to expand that into '26. Now as you know, most of our free cash flow comes in, in the second half of the year. So there's a number of things that we've been thinking about. I suspect that sometime during the course of this year, we are going to come out with something that together with our Board, make some decisions that I think will reward a lot of the shareholders that's been with this.
Operator
Operator
That will conclude today's question-and-answer session. I'd like to hand back to Balan Nair for any additional or closing remarks.
Balan Nair
Management
Well, firstly, I'd like to say thank you for everybody that's been patient with this. Certainly, the story has got lots of moving parts, and we've had a fair share of challenges. And some of it is self-inflicted, some of it, clearly, mother nature is -- we weren't expecting that hit in Jamaica and the hurricane. But we're going to power through all of it. And one thing that's really good about this team is it's we are quite resilient. And when we see things going off, we try to fix it and we do, I think, a pretty dang good job bringing things back to where it should be. And we'll do the same thing within Jamaica as well, as Chris pointed out, I think by the end of this year, you're going to see that Jamaica is back to where it should be, which sets us up for a great 2027 as well. But we've had our setbacks, and we say in our company, all these setbacks, great for a great comeback. And I think we are on our path to a great comeback. So thank you very much for all your support, and we look forward to talking to you again next quarter.
Operator
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Latin America's Full Year 2025 Investor Call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. And you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.