Alfonso de Angoitia
Analyst · Itau
Thank you, Elsa. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky; and Carlos Phillips, CFO of Grupo Televisa. Last year was marked by several milestones, both at Grupo Televisa and TelevisaUnivision, which Bernardo and I are confident will allow us to create greater value for our shareholders. In 2024, we focused primarily on four key goals. The first goal was to streamline the OpEx structure and to rationalize CapEx deployment of our Cable Company to improve our free cash flow generation. Our second goal was buying the AT&T minority stake in Sky to integrate it with Easy and attain material synergies through cost cutting initiatives. Our third goal was to spin-off our non-core sports and gaming businesses, creating a newly publicly listed company in Mexico to unlock value for our shareholders. And our fourth goal was scaling and turning profitable our DTC business at TelevisaUnivision, while identifying opportunities to materially reduce the company's OpEx in 2025 to improve profitability and enhance its free cash flow generation. We believe we accomplished all these goals. Let me touch on each of them. First, we implemented a corporate restructuring process at our Cable segment to improve profitability, optimize CapEx, increase free cash flow generation and position us well to achieve sustainable revenue growth over the coming years. Valim is doing an amazing job at our Cable Company and at Sky. The measures carried out so far allowed us to improve profitability by over 300 basis points to 39% in 2024 relative to the third quarter of 2023, and we are confident that our Cable EBITDA margin will continue to expand gradually over the coming years due to ongoing efficiencies. Regarding CapEx, our Cable investments were optimized by 37% to almost $400 million in 2024, while our Cable CapEx to sales ratio of 15.6% was 740 basis points lower than that of 2023. This streamlining in Cable investments has been driven by a more disciplined subscription acquisition approach focused on value customers and a more efficient and rational expansion of our fiber network. In 2024, operating cash flow for our Cable segment, which is equivalent to EBITDA minus CapEx was over MXN11 billion growing by almost 38% year-on-year and accounting for more than 23% of sales. This implies that operating cash flow margin of our Cable segment increased by around 700 basis points. Second, we integrated Sky with our Cable segment to strengthen our competitive and financial position. On this front, we reorganized the structure of the combined company, allowing us to retain top talent and optimize duplicated roles. We also implemented synergies and efficiencies across several areas, including commercial, sales commissions, programming, IT, technology, finance and marketing, among others. This integration has allowed us to standardize regions, sales channels and commissions, have better customer base management, increase productivity, achieve cross-selling and upselling, improve penetration of triple play services and gradually reduce churn. The Sky restructuring and integration process allowed us to cut OpEx by around 10% year-on-year in 2024, while allowing our CapEx deployment of $83 million declined by 44%. Therefore, Sky's operating cash flow of around MXN3.2 billion increased by 3% year-on-year and accounted for almost 21% of sales. This means that the operating cash flow margin for Sky expanded by 300 basis points year-on-year. All-in-all, Grupo Televisa's consolidated operating cash flow was MXN14.3 billion in 2024, growing by over 28% year-on-year and accounting for almost 23% of sales. This implies that our consolidated operating cash flow margin increased by 600 basis points year-on-year. In 2024, the OpEx and CapEx of efficiencies obtained in our two consolidated businesses and a leaner corporate structure allowed Grupo Televisa to generate over MXN10.1 billion in free cash flow. We view this as a great achievement as it represents a free cash flow yield for our consolidated operations of around 43%. Third, on February 20th, 2024, we concluded the spin-off of Ollamani and its listing on the Mexican Stock Exchange. This spin-off not only streamlined Grupo Televisa's operations and simplified our asset structure, but also unlocked value for our shareholders through this new company that currently has a market cap of around $270 million. And our fourth major milestone was to turn ViX, our streaming platform, into a $1 billion direct-to-consumer business from a revenue standpoint and turn it profitable during the third quarter of 2024. Our DTC business is growing and scaling with our most important metrics trending in the right direction, with most of them ahead of plan. We added users and subscribers by more than 20% during the year, grew engagement, reduced churn, and generated significant marketing savings, driven by our efficient customer acquisition funnel through our free tier. Therefore, during the second half of the year, we already delivered the major milestones of a profitable direct-to-consumer business only two years after lounging the service, compared to four to five years for our peers. This was only possible because of two main reasons. The first one being we own the rights to the largest long-form video library in the world, in any language, with over 300,000 hours of durable scripted entertainment. And the second reason, we have material advantages with regards to original content cost production as we have a fully vertically integrated system in a very efficient location. We have a great and very efficient factory of content in Spanish. Each year, we produce around 100,000 hours of long-form video content across news, sports, and scripted entertainment. Achieving this milestone was an essential step in a transformational phase of TelevisaUnivision. Now, the next big opportunity for value creation is to build on this foundation through further integration and operational optimization of the business. On this front, I'm glad to share with you that we have already laid the foundation for further integration and efficiencies within TelevisaUnivision. In late December, we executed an optimization program reducing our headcount by around 1,000 employees or about 8% of global workforce. Combined with other efficiency measures, this will reduce our 2025 operating expenses at TelevisaUnivision by over $400 million. Having said that, let me turn the call over to Valim as he will discuss the operating and financial performance of our consolidated assets.