Atento S.A. Ordinary Shares

Good morning and welcome to Attento's 2021 fourth quarter and full year results conference call. Today's call is being recorded. All participants will be in a listening 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. Hernan Van Waveren, Investor Relations Director for Attento. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome everyone to our fiscal fourth quarter 2021 earnings call to discuss Atento's financial and operating results. Here with us for today's call are Carlos Lopez Abadía, Atento's chief executive officer, and Jose Acevedo, chief financial officer. Following their review of Attento's financial and operating results, we will open the call for your questions. Before proceeding, please note that certain comments made in this call will contain financial information that has been presented and prepared under international financial reporting standards. In addition, this call may contain information that constitutes forward-looking statements which are not guarantees 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 filed with the relevant securities regulators, and we invite you to read the complete disclosure included here in the second slide of our earnings call presentation. Our public filings and earnings presentation can be found at investors.attento.com Please be advised that unless noted otherwise, all growth rates are on year-over-year and constant currency basis. I will now turn the call over to Carlos.

Thank you, Hernán, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I want to discuss with you the results of 2021 and our perspectives for 2022. Our 2021 results show continued improvement of our recurring operations when excluding the one-off cyber event that impacted our results significantly and beyond our initial estimates. As a result, we have made significant investments in our cyber preparedness, both from a technology and operational perspective, and we expect to resume in 2022 the improvements to our business and results. The continued improvements showed in the first three quarters and in the fourth quarter on a recurring basis give us the confidence that we are on the right track to continue to improve Atento. On a recurring basis, we have grown our revenue 7.9% and EBITDA by 23.7% while expanding operations in key markets and sectors with a strong sales growth and record customer satisfaction. We increased sales by 20%, with the vast majority of those sales coming from strategic and high-growth sectors such as technology, fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, while expanding relationships with traditional clients. A very important example of the latter is Telefonica. We completed the extension of the MSA to cover the totality of our geographic footprint with them. It is my belief that as important as MSAs are, we need to earn the business of our clients every single day. In that spirit, we have expanded our relationship with Telefónica in Spain with 800 workstations with a contract that extends beyond the MSA. We continue to grow our U.S. and EMEA business, taking the hard currency share of our EBITDA to 26%. as a result of growth and margin expansion in both markets. The U.S. has grown 34%, reaching a 16.6% EBITDA margin, while EMEA has reached a 14.2% EBITDA margin. We have opened two nose centers in the U.S., one of them co-branded with our customer GameStop. These are important results for us, not only because of the inherent attractiveness of the market, but also because it allows us to slowly but surely reduce our foreign exchange exposure. On the topic of FX, I need to point out that we are working with our bankers to address the financial costs of our foreign exchange exposure. Expect some news from us on this front. We continue to drive efficiencies across our organization. While we believe in the importance of our regional organization, which enables us to stay close to our clients, we continue to drive the implementation of shared service centers and global operating models. We expect to start delivering this year significant efficiencies, lowering our cost structure, while providing better, more consistent service quality to our customers. We continue to innovate and expand our portfolio of next-generation solutions. We're emphasizing partnerships not only as technology sources, but also as go-to-market partners. We have started a new partner channel organization in the U.S. that we expect to materially contribute to our growth in 2022, rolling it out to the rest of the world in the second half of the year. I will be remiss if I do not comment on our cyber plans, given our recent experience. Making virtual out of necessity, we have modified our cyber strategy, adding the lessons learned. It includes three components, prevention, detection, and recovery. Particularly in the area of recovery, we are establishing joint protocols with our customers to accelerate service restoration in the event of future cyber attacks. This is something we have learned to be of paramount importance to address the cyber risk. Last but not least, we keep on delivering on our ESG commitments. We have reduced scope one emissions by 16%, continue to be a leader in the diversity and inclusions, and have achieved a new record in customer MPS while also improving employee satisfaction. Finally, our outlook for 2022. We see some of the impact from the cyber attack affecting us in Q1 results, but we also see an acceleration of results and a resumption of our transformation trajectory thereafter. thus improving on our 2021 recurring EBITDA and revenue numbers. Jose will now review our results with you in more detail, and then we'll take your questions. Thank you.