Earnings Labs

Millicom International Cellular S.A. (TIGO)

Q4 2015 Earnings Call· Wed, Feb 10, 2016

$82.22

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Transcript

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Good day to all, and thanks for joining us here today. Before we get started, this presentation is covered by the Safe Harbor statement. That's up on the screen. I am here today with Tim Pennington, our CFO whom we all know, and a few other members of our senior management team, whom I would like to introduce to you. Xavier Rocoplan, our CTIO; Rachel Samrén, our Head of External Affairs; Cynthia Gordon, our Division Head for Africa and of course you all know Nico. Before we get started, I imagine that many of you would like an update on the status of the investigation to potential corporate payments on behalf of our joint venture in Guatemala. In a nutshell, there are really no developments to report. The matter remains under review with the authorities. We remain fully committed to cooperating with them, as requested. And we'll update you whenever possible. But, no news is really all there is [ph] to say on that matter at this point in time. So, let us now focus on our results. Our key messages are, what we would like to start as always with. No doubt, we are facing strong macroeconomic headwinds, markets are down, currencies have weakened and economic growth is slowing down. Nevertheless, we need to focus on what's going on in an underlying business and keep the eye on the ball to properly execute on our long-term strategies. With that in mind, this is in a nutshell, what we would like you to remember from our call today at a high level. One, we delivered strong organic growth, said differently, we hit our numbers in local currency. Two, we generated positive growing and very strong cash flow in 2015, strong enough to cover our dividend. Three, our operational momentum continued…

Tim Pennington

CFO

Thank you, Mauricio. So, let me take you through the Q4 numbers now. I think Q4 was pretty tough quarter in the global economy, but all business is pretty resilient and we continue to post decent organic growth on revenue, on EBITDA and particularly on cash flow. In 2015, we saw some extreme currency volatility. We were particularly affected in Colombia, Paraguay and Tanzania. They dampened the reported numbers. Revenues were close to $1 billion lower in 2015 than they would have been had we used 2014 FX rates. But as Mauricio just outlined, we ended the year inside our currency adjusted guidance range. And furthermore, our Q4 adjusted EBITDA margin improved by 90 basis points, and that delivered one of the key focus areas for us during this year. And so with better underlying EBITDA, strong working capital management, some capital discipline, our cash flow has shown good signs of improvement. In Q4, we did prepare the business for the future. We've taken restructuring charges in several markets. We've tightened up a number of historic issues. It has been paying for us. But it leaves us well-positioned to go into 2016, to reduce our leverage and improve the dividend cover. Okay. Let me start by looking at the revenue picture in Q4. Organic revenue did slow to 4.4% that was the full year to 7.4%. We saw a little bit of slowdown in Central America, but the major impact came from Colombia, where our mobile service revenue was 1% down on last year. But this is a market where we're seeing negative revenue growth from all our major competitors as Mauricio has just said. And once again FX has played a big part in reported earnings, pushing reported revenues for the group 10% lower in the quarter, compared to…

Q - Chris Grundberg

Management

Sure. Thanks, guys. It’s Chris Grundberg from UBS. Just a couple, if I may. Just on the guidance, just wonder if you can flash out on the biggest drivers of the leverage, you’re implying there, maybe DRC will help, but what are the other factors that you’ve got in there? Secondly, on the CapEx, where are you planning to making the savings, especially given the depreciating the FX low dollar number, just curious to get your thoughts there. And then lastly, can you give an update on your percentage ownership of African internet [ph] group and also just on the African Tower portfolio as well as any views there on whether there might be opportunities to crystallize value in other assets any time soon.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Did you get number one?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Yeah. The guidance was striving, our guidance - the improvements you'll see in EBITDA. All right. So, luckily we have some of our team members here who can give you lot more color on some of these, I'll take a crack and I think I'll need some help in [indiscernible] and team and I'll provide you more color. Let's start from the bottom up, which probably easier to address the last conceptual ones. On HTA which is our tower portfolio in Africa, we hold 24% on a fully diluted basis and we've lift up as you may recall sometime this last year into a liquid position, which holds 24% of that tower portfolio, and we view that position as non-core to our African business or to American business. Our percentage of the Africa Internet group is around 8%?

Tim Pennington

CFO

No. It’s about 14%.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

14%. Thank you.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Then the [indiscernible] has been capital raising in the last days, so we are now 14%.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

It was actually confusing that with the 8% stake that was recently taken by AXA, which effectively value the company at around the billion, making it according to the financial times surprise the first African Unicom if you will and we hold 14% of that and of course this is an asset that we don't classify our score. When and how and if we may move to monetize this to assets is really just a consideration of our ability to maneuver through tactical moments appropriately and you've seen us do that with the DRC. On the CapEx question, I welcome the question because I think our presentation may have suggested that we are saving on CapEx and we're not, and we're actually more efficiently allocating CapEx. Truth of the matter is that we have unused capacity in our network that has resulted from the investment in prior years. So, before we go and invest further in new capacity, we need to make sure that we're using the existing capacity to its full potential, and Xavier will give you a bit of a [indiscernible] on that. And also going forward, our CapEx is very strictly allocated to the three buckets that make up our strategy. Monetizing data, so it fits about LTE 4G coverage increasing that in capacity. Two, is about building a fixed network footprint. And three, it is about B2B both in Latin America, to some extent in Africa. So that makes for a very, very laser-focused allocation of capital. The two things put together mean that on absolute terms as team was saying, we can actually reduce CapEx with that actually saving. And why don't you give it a shot with some more details Xavier if you have a...

Xavier Rocoplan

Management

My name is Xavier Rocoplan. I am the CTIO of the Group. I think the first message on CapEx and just really important that there is no change in scope compared to 2015. In other words, we are really driving the strategy that we've being pursuing in 2015, in 2016 as well, which is a rollout on mobile and home or cable that are really, really seen it out. And the efficiencies come essentially from three levels; I mean it has been a big procurement exercise on rationalization over the last two years that is paying off at group level, because we are not preparing a lot of these items centrally. I think the second level is indeed, we have a utilization opportunity on networks in 3G in particular and most of our 4G rollout is not building through a new slide actually, it's on [indiscernible] location on our sites on our competitor’s sites. And then most our CapEx, a big chunk of our CapEx now is about 40% is cable and B2B, and there is a nice upside to this, because lot of installations are actually paid in local currency now, in home and B2B. So that is also helping driving the CapEx in dollar terms a little bit lower.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Thank you. That's why we had you for that additional granularity. And I think Tim will take the first question on guidance.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Yeah. In terms of our guidance and why do we think that our EBITDA will grow at a faster rate than our revenues. I think that has been the focus on efficiency measures that we have been communicating over the last few quarters. And in 2015, we gained about 100 basis points of margin improvement asset that of a corporate center. We've done a lot of work there. This is one that now we can do there. In all of our businesses during our sort of general budget round, we talked about and we have instituted efficiency programs to make our business position it for the future. As you saw, we've taken some restructuring charges at number of African businesses for instance in order to right-size those businesses and get them sort of positioned well for what those in 2016. So, I think all of these matters are sort of weighing up in together to give us the cost on the guidance.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

I think there are pulls around going in various countries as to how many times I will mention the word operating leverage in any given day.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

[Indiscernible] on DNB. Couple of questions, first on Colombia. You mentioned that there is an upside in the margin. How quickly can you move in Colombia do you think? And is it possible to have the same margin in Colombia as the group level so to say? And then on taxes and perhaps dividends to minorities, what should we expect for 2016 on paid taxes and minority dividends?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

I'll take the first one and then I'll let the team address the second one. We've done the hard work in the integration in Colombia and kudos to the group there it's a well-managed integration process with culture of uplift, well managed with the stakeholders and you are beginning to see the EBITDA come through. Going forward, we do intend to continue to drive that up higher as I said and over the long-term, I do expect of the margins in Colombia will rise up to the levels of the group margin. But, we will continue to make that bar higher for Colombia as the group also continues to become more efficient.

Tim Pennington

CFO

I think in terms of where we'll be in fixed [indiscernible] minorities dividend and tax and interest, minorities probably will be a little bit lower in 2016 than in 2015 in the sense that we took some capital dividends out of Guatemala in particular in 2015. So obviously work that repeated because we've now put about a $1 billion of debt on that balance sheet, so it will just get normal dividends and we - on interest, it will be a little bit higher on sort of higher average debt through the period and on tax, tax was positive surprise for, that will be a little bit higher in 2016. Simply as we sort of get back to a normalized charge. In 2015, we have some overpaid taxes in Guatemala and Colombia that we used to offset current taxes. And margin Colombia was that...

Mauricio Ramos

Management

I addressed a little bit of it.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Okay. I'm going to interact.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Other than the message we just gave to our GM's in Colombia. Gonzalo?

Gonzalo Fernandez Dionis

Management

Hi, Gonzalo from RBC. I've got two questions. One on Africa, could you give us a bit more color on the decision process for the disposal? Could we start to seeing that places where you are losing all of the money one times rev, 1.5 times is the number you'll be willing to exit market at? And then secondly, on the data bit monetization, is it mostly prepaid based or is it postpaid base or how are those subscribers evolving, was the churn and then if we could get a bit more color there?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Sure. Thank you for both questions. They are actually very good. On Africa, the overall writing point that we keep making which is very important and most of you have heard us saying this throughout the course of eight or nine months in the job. Our plan A which is as to Africa is the one we are squarely executing and that is continuing to improve on our market position and on our financial performance. That is plan A and we'll continue to be the plan that we drive in Africa. We've stated a goal of making Africa as a division operating cash flow breakeven in 2016, I have no doubt we're going to meet that goal. Cynthia, our new head for the Africa division is squarely focused on that; that’s our game plan with regards to Africa and we’ll continue to be part of the game plan and we are beginning to see improvement in our operations and I say that because we have certainly a commitment to remain very focused on good capital allocation. The second point is specifically on the DRC situation, the DRC situation was if you will a plan B, an in-country market solution that provided us with a better outcome than plan A would specifically for the DRC, why is that? Because we’re able to strike a deal with the world class buyer that has in market synergies and a result of that we were able to strike a price that is pretty good for us, but also pretty good for them. And those are the kind of capital allocation decisions that indeed will pay to make, that’s a rational behind the Africa decision. And then on the data monetization - remind me the question because I don’t --. I mean you talked about…

Tim Pennington

CFO

I think your question is very good because strategically for us the markets we operate in and the type of models that we’ve been suggesting over the last few months to you, do allow us to be well-positioned for data monetization. Whether it’s prepaid or postpaid, the key difference between the voice or voice world and the new data world is that we are beginning to experience in Latin America, is that mobile data is always on. In a top up world prepaid or in a postpaid world, you cannot sit back and take that phone call and not give your service provider any revenue, a failed world. In the new world you have to be top up, you have to have some mobile data available to you in order to access or receive those interactions with your friends that you want. In order to do that being prepaid actually allows you an interesting opportunity to be the provider of choice if you provide more stickiness to your consumer. And the need for Tigo Shop where you can buy data from us and that was the point I was making earlier. Hope that’s clear.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Anymore questions in the room?

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Hi Enrique [ph] from [indiscernible] Asset Management. Congrats on the results, two kinds of following questions from me, one is on the maturity profile, there’s a debt maturity in 2017. If you could give us some detail on what cash you have at the holdco level and how you plan to address that maturity and then the other question is, I see that your CapEx figures exclude, spectrum acquisitions if you could give us some color on what kind of expectations you have for that expense and how do you plan to fund those?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

So, spectrum, we - it's fairly light for us this year, I mean I said in my presentation that it could be high next year depending on whether Colombia comes out with 4G with 700 spectrum or not. We don't know the answer to that at this point in time, and therefore spectrum is always a very difficult sort of calculation for us to forecast. And as to funding it, we feel that our balance sheet is very strong, you can actually see balance sheet in Colombia is very strong, the balance sheet in Guatemala is very strong, the balance sheet in all the markets where we need excessive, a strong so - you have no real concerns of our funding, it is about getting the right spectrum at the right prices at the right time. On spectrum, we think spectrum has a long-term asset that is exactly what it is, and we are laser-focused on our assessment of spectrum. We renovated our licenses in Bolivia and we acquired some spectrum in Paraguay as well as in Bolivia. But in certain other markets, we actually passed on 4G spectrum because the economics did not afford us with a good return and we believe that we were better off driving returns on our 16' 3G network for a long period of time. So we view it with the same level of capital discipline as we view M&A transactions, which is where you would expect us to do. Other maturities are not 17 maturities, Swedish bond, the Swedish kroner bond and we'll refinance that well ahead of maturity national fund.

Georgios Ierodiaconou

Management

It is Georgios Ierodiaconou from Citi. I have two questions please. The first one in Colombia, I believe during the midpoint of the year, one of your competitors reacted towards consistent loss of share. Do you think, as we move into 2016 and beyond I understand you are bound to do a bit better revenues than they have given at this current prices. But are you seeing some of the market share gains you've achieved in the past has been harder to deliver, especially without some metric MTR also eliminated overtime. And if that's the case, can you share with us, I know there are synergies with UNE and other integration benefits, but are there any other actions you are taking to improve the mobile profitability there? And then my second question is more around the balance sheet and maybe following on from the question that was just asked, at what level of payout ratio, do you feel comfortable medium-term in order to cover for their spectrum cost, maybe whether you may have to pay in Guatemala and any currency headwinds you may have to face in a normal year and I understand 50 versus excessive but obviously very normal years, there is some room for that?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Thank you. So, I'll take a little bit of a Colombia and perhaps a little bit of dividend and team will complement that. And it's no surprise to anyone, as you will face it that some of our competitors are driving pricing in Colombia and making that the mobile market growth difficult there. If that were to continue into 2016, we have prepared our budget and we have prepared our outlook with strong focus on the EBITDA growth and cash flow growth to be prepared for that situation. That is effectively what we are doing to address a situation that has been growing on for a little time. We also believe that some of the market anomalies will be corrected in the medium-term. We believe that the ability to give the consumer choice in terms of acquiring a contract with a mobile operator will be put back in the market again and as a result of that some financing will be put back in the hands of the consumer and we also believe that overtime pricing will be made nationwide in order to avoid anomalies in certain regions of the country. That's with regards to Colombia; we're pretty well positioned and pretty well braced for a tough year. And with regards to dividend as we looked into 2015, we basically looked at pretty strong cash flow, we looked at a pretty good position in terms of liquidity and we looked at a pretty strong outlook need into longer return for our business and those are three key conditions for us to recommend the dividend payout that board has now recommended or will recommend to the general assembly. We think those things will sustain in the future and we will address with that framework on decision-making in the future. Anything else Tim, add to that?

Tim Pennington

CFO

The only thing I covered it. Let's now take a question from the lines. Have we got any questions from the line?

Operator

Operator

Yes, thank you. We will take the first question from Bill Miller of JM Hartwell. Please go ahead.

Bill Miller

Analyst · JM Hartwell. Please go ahead

Good afternoon. I'm curious to go back to cable for a second. Are you seeing the hope for benefits in the way as reduced churn and do you ever have a cable subscriber or a lot of churn in cable and does it also help you in your other assets like the mobile service, that's one. And two, is there a chance for roll up you just had cable and wireless to take on be sold to liberty. Is there a chance for a further role up by you either in cable or mobile or in expanding the geographic footprint of your business beyond your existing countries?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

So, I'm going to try to go quickly here. Those are fantastic questions and we're a little tight on time here. Every subscriber that combines our fixed with our mobile subscriber while our mobile services immediately sees a reduction in churn i.e. part on partial of our strategy to provide a seamless connectivity. The benefits go beyond reduced churned for our subscribers that are either postpaid or prepaid on mobile that take up our cable which our definition has a much lower churn and a much larger stickiness. The benefits go beyond that, in markets, where we've launched DTH 70% of those subscribers have taken our DTH service because they can pay for it with our mobile Tigo cash application. So, there is actually a synergy between our mobile financial services, our cable business if you will and our mobile business, that's part and parcel of this strategy. On the role of opportunities, Bill we don't spend a lot of time thinking about those. But we spend a lot of time I mean the liberty question if you will we don't spend a lot of time into that one. But we spend a lot of time thinking about is the fact that we have organic EBITDA growth that we squarely believe is in the high single digits going forward for us were quite a bit of time because broadband penetrations both in fixed and in mobile sit below 40% in market we operate and postpaid to the penetrations sit below 40% in most of our markets and our industry structure allows us to capture that growth because we are the provider of mobile and the owners of the state-of-the-art fixing that work which we are improving and if you layer on top of that the ability with that fixed network to offer a B2B services to small offices and medium size businesses then our tremendous opportunities is on organic growth. And there are opportunities for geographic expansion that we could ourselves conduct into adjacent market. But we are squarely focused first on very disciplined capital allocation because into carried better economies of skill and because our organic growth is something that we can make us focus on. I hope that gives you a complete picture of what our focus lies on.

Bill Miller

Analyst · JM Hartwell. Please go ahead

No, it's a wonderful answer and it sounds like a great opportunity. Thank you.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Thanks Bill. Can we take another question from the line?

Operator

Operator

We will now take Michel Morin with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Michel Morin

Analyst

Hi, everyone. I was wondering and if you could give us a bit more color on Guatemala and the relationship with your partner and specifically, if as part of your guidance and outlook for '16, what you are assuming in terms of dividends being up streamed from Guatemala and I don't know if you can give us any qualitative commentary around how the relationship with your partner is going and whether or not there is any risk to that dividend from Guatemala and whether or not you’re relying on that to fund your own dividend expectations? Thank you.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

First, on the first part of the question and I appreciate and thank you very much because it’s not related to the investigation the question, so I'm happy to answer that. And I’ll let that team to address the second half of your question. Our relationship with Mario Lopez, our partner in Guatemala remains constructive. We have constructive and open dialogue that was there less than a month ago and we met for a long time and we talked helpfully about our business. And ever since we’ve been trading emails with regards to how do we best manage the business going forward. With regards to dividend…

Tim Pennington

CFO

I mean first thing to say is that our guidance is not related to the dividend, the internal dividends we get I mean our guidance is based on the group sort of revenue profile and the group EBITDA profile and incidentally that includes Guatemala and Honduras and that doesn’t change. In terms of dividend upstreaming I mean we’ve had full upstreaming of dividends as normal in 2015 and going into 2016 I think I said this to you and a few people before that Guatemala is becoming less important in terms of our internal cash flow. It will probably be no more than about 15% of our internal cash flow in 2016 as places like Colombia start to come on stream where it starts to provide sort of cash flow for us so it really doesn’t sort of factor into decision making on guidance or indeed our decision making on the group dividend. Those decisions are fashioned by our view of the outlook for the business in terms of office fundamental, a short term opportunity and as long term opportunity.

Michel Morin

Analyst

Great. Thank you very much.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Thanks Michel. Can we just take one more question on the line?

Operator

Operator

And we will take the next question from Jacob Stanford [ph] with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Hi. Thank you very much. I just had one quick follow-up on the question on dividend, what were your total amount of dividend that you received from upstream in 2015 and then my second question is the fall of DRC part of the broader change in the allocation of resources away from Africa towards Latin America. Thank you.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Let me quickly deal with the first question. We had upstream of round about $700 million in 2015.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

What was the second question we couldn’t hear you properly over here.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Sorry, the second question was the fall of DRC part of a broader change in the allocation of resources away from Africa towards Latin America?

Mauricio Ramos

Management

I think across our portfolio, we subject every one of our countries to a very strict view on how they participate in our portfolio allocation and capital allocation. So, we demand from every country to have an outlook so that provides us with the kind of return that we are looking for. In markets, where we are subscale indeed it’s easier to not have a long-term view of a fantastic return and that was precisely what we saw in DRC market, which we were sub scaling, despite a well-managed well run business and a market in which we could sell to a buyer with synergies. That’s what drove that decision and that kind of thinking is likely to inform our decisions going forward whether it’s Africa or Latin America, we do want to operate in industry structures in which we can foresee a healthy return capital going forward and that in telecoms so as you know very well typically requires a healthy market position.

Unidentified Analyst

Management

Great. Thank you very much.

Tim Pennington

CFO

Thanks, Jacob. We’ve run out of time. I'm afraid I'd like to thank Chris from UBS for hosting it today and appreciate everyone turning up in the room and those as well in phone lines.

Mauricio Ramos

Management

Good day.