Atento S.A. Ordinary Shares

Good morning, and welcome to the Attento second quarter 2021 results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star, then two. If you are at your computer, please use the submit a question box in your webcast viewer. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Sheikhor, Corporate Treasurer and Investor Relations Director for Attento. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome everyone to our second quarter 2021 earnings conference call. Before proceeding, please note that certain comments made on this call will contain financial information that has been prepared under international financial reporting standards. In addition, this call may contain information that constitutes forelooking statements, which are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties. Certain results may differ materially from those in the forelooking statements as a result of various factors. We encourage you to review our publicly available disclosure documents, follow the relevant securities regulators, and we invite you to read the complete disclosure included here on the second slide of our earnings call presentation. Our public filings and earnings presentation can be found at investors.atento.com. Unless noted otherwise, all growth rates are on a year-over-year and constant currency basis. Here with us for today's calls are Carlos Lopez Abadia, Atento Chief Executive Officer, and José Azevedo, our CFO. Following their prepared remarks, we will move to a Q&A session. As we have been doing in recent calls, we do our best to answer all questions received. We believe the Q&A session is a relevant part of the call, so we encourage you to ask your questions over the phone, through the webcast system, or even by sending us emails. I will now turn the call over to Carlos, which will do today's call from our office in Madrid. Carlos, go ahead.

Thank you, Shai, and good morning. Good afternoon to all of you. Yes, I'm speaking to you from our Madrid office. I've been in Mexico and Madrid over the last few weeks. I like to be with clients and our operations in as much as possible. And as markets return to normalcy and meetings are again possible, I am returning to my usual travel schedule. But we're here today to discuss our results and progress during Q2. We have finished the first half of the year with strong results. In Q2, we have continued our growth trajectory with significant improvements in revenue, EBITDA, and continued cash flow discipline. Despite the continued impact of the COVID pandemic in some of our regions still severe during Q2, we have delivered revenue growth of 17.6% in constant currency, 21.7% in current currency, and 50.7 million of EBITDA at 13.3% margin, more than doubling our EBITDA last year. These results have allowed us to continue the leveraging, putting us already within the full year guidance of 2.5 to 3x net debt to EBITDA ratio. This higher EBITDA in H1 and solid expectations for H2 which as you know, due to the decisionality of our business is when we generate higher profitability and most of our cash flow, have allowed us to be confident to catch up on some capex and tax deferrals that we did last year while investing in growth for this year. We continue to improve our hard currency mix, US dollars and euros. We're delivering around 25% of our revenue and 30% of our EBITDA, 15.8 percentage points more than last year. in hard currency. This is thanks to continued growth of our US business and improving profitability of our EMEA operation. We feel that our sales engine continues to improve. We have more than doubled sales in the first half of 2021, and we expect to finish this year with a strong book of business leading into 2022. Despite the fact that we continue to be vigilant and we continue to invest in COVID-related safety measures. With these results, we feel that we have fully recovered from the impact of the pandemic in 2020, amply exceeding the results of 2019, and being fully on track to deliver our three-year plan. Now while delivering the day-to-day, we continue to focus on our transformation. This quarter, we have added a new chief human resources officer, a new CIO, a new chief of information security, and a new ESG director. For the people-intensive business and the quality of our HR processes and talent management is key to our results. And further, as we change the company, we need to pivot to new skills, new talent profiles, and work culture. And the new HR leadership is paramount to these objectives. We're also placing more and more emphasis on the technology that we use and that we bring to our clients. Among these of particular importance is cybersecurity these days, both for our internal use and as a differentiator in our market offer. We will continue to add talent to our technology, innovation and cyber areas. ESG has always been very important to attend to. We feel that we have done a lot in the past in this area, but we did not have a formal program at the right level. We have a structure, a formal ESG program and a new leader And we have elevated the visibility to the Board of Directors and the New Compensation and Sustainability Committee. We will be presenting our ESG plan and commitments publicly in Q3. As we approach the third year of our three-year plan, we will be focusing progressively more on our third horizon, growth. Our U.S. strategy continues to gain momentum. We have achieved in Q2 33% growth in revenue, 53% growth in EBITDA. We continue to achieve wins in both the commercial and government sectors with important new contracts, important wins, one of them serving the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Although the majority of our employees work and are expected to continue to work from home, we are opening two new centers, one in Florida and the other one in Utah. thus giving us better times on coverage. Our strategy to focus on new sectors and global accounts continues to gain traction. We continue to grow in all of our geographies and in our new focus verticals, such as media, tech, and more data, advancing their share from 8.6% to 10.9% of our total base. We are launching new services and expanding profitable ones. We're expanding our multilingual services with partnerships such as the one we recently announced with Manpower Group. Now, having finished a strong H1 with a strong Q2, we feel increased confidence to meet or exceed the guidance that we provided for the year. We expect to finish the year strongly, on track to meet the objectives of our three-year plan for 2022. As I said to you, from my first presentation, this management team will work hard to earn your trust, and I cannot think of a better way than consistently delivering on our commitments to you. Let me turn this over to José that has more details on our results.