Atento S.A. Ordinary Shares

Good morning, and welcome to the ATENTOS third quarter 2021 results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in 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. Pablo Sanchez, Chief Marketing Officer and ESG Director for Attento. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to a third 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 forward-looking statements, which are not warranties of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties. Certain results may differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements, as a result of various factors. We encourage you to review our publicly available disclosure documents filled with 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 fillings and earnings presentation can be found at investors.atento.com. And less noted otherwise, all growth rates are on a year-over-year and constant currency basis. Here with us today's call are Carlos López Abadía, Atentos Chief Executive Officer, and José Acevedo, Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will move to a Q&A session. As we have been doing in the recent calls, we will 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 systems, or even by sending us email. I will now turn the call over to Carlos, which will do today's call from our Madrid office.

Good morning. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today. We would like to discuss with you today a strong set of Q3 results that reflect the continuing improvement of Atentos performance. We show continued improvement across all key financial metrics, starting with revenue, with 4.1% growth in the quarter, and EBITDA with 14.7% growth, with a margin of almost 14%, 1.2 percentage points higher year-on-year, which puts us on a solid track to meet our guidance for the year. Revenue growth has been driven by Brazil, with a very strong performance of our telephonic account, delivering 19.3% growth in the quarter and continuing growth of our U.S. operation. U.S. has grown 40% in the quarter, while more than doubling EBITDA. Our EBITDA performance continues to improve with highest EBITDA and EBITDA margin since the beginning of our transformation, with 51 million in the quarter, and 141 million in the nine months to September. We also continue to reduce leverage with net debt to EBITDA at 2.8x already within our guidance for the year. Sales performance is critical to an enterprise, but when shifting from legacy sectors to no higher potential sectors, sales are even more important in managing the transformation profitably. We continue to improve our sales engine and the shift to new economy high potential sectors. We have increased our sales results in the nine months to September by 34%. More importantly is the quality of these sales. We increased EBITDA margin of new sales three percentage points from pre-pandemic levels while improving hard currency sales by 77%. Revenue in the target sectors of media, tech and born digital represent now 11.2% of our base, up from 8.3% last year. We have added 14 new logos in Q3 and 40 in the year to date. Now, beyond financial indicators, I would like to talk to you about something very important to attend to and to myself, the impact that we have on the people and communities that we touch. We are proud to have introduced a new and stronger ESG plan to leverage more of Atento's strengths to make a difference. Our plan covers all three areas, environment, social and governance. As a company with around 150,000 employees, we probably have an opportunity to make a greater direct impact in the social arena. Let me highlight our initiatives in diversity, to skilling and in giving first job opportunities to many. We're also very proud to have joined recently the 10th Partnership for Afghan Refugees in the U.S. I am looking forward to keeping you updated on our progress and contributions in ESC. Finally, we want to reiterate our guidance for the year and give you visibility to our targets for 2022. Two years ago, around this time, in our investor conference, we shared with you our three-year objectives. Since then, we have had a pandemic and many changes in our industry and markets, but we still want to reiterate those very same objectives for 2022. We disclosed in our 6K that we suffered a cyber attack in Brazil that detected early, affected a small number of our servers. Now that we are back to normal, I want to take this opportunity to thank our clients publicly for their support. Sadly, I learned that many of them have suffered similar attacks as well. Unfortunately, a common challenge for many of us. Thank you very much. Jose, over to you.