Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I am Geli, your chorus call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Turkcell's conference call and live webcast to present and discuss the Turkcell first quarter 2023 financial results conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by question and answer session. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on your telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Aliser Daryat, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance Director. Mr. Daryat, you may now proceed.

Thank you, Gili. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Turkcell's first quarter 2023 results call. Today, our CEO, Mr. Murat Erkan, and Acting CFO, Mr. Kamil Kalyan, will be delivering a brief presentation on operational and financial results, and afterwards, we will be doing Q&As. Before we start, I'd like to kindly remind you to review our Safe Harbor Statement, which is placed at the end of the presentation. Now, I'm handing over to Mr. Ertan.

Thank you, Serdar. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We have been healing the wound of the recent earthquake, which happened to be one of the worst disasters of our history. We have taken certain actions to make sure people do seamlessly communicate in the region. Turkcell also remains committed to support the local community through projects that aim to increase employment, and we will also make our digital channel available for local producers and suppliers. Moving on to Q1 highlights. Our revenue growth continued to accelerate from 37% of Q1 2022 and reached to a remarkable 61.5%. thanks to the expanding subscriber base and increasing ARPU despite the negative impact of the earthquake during the half of the quarter. Excluding the earthquake impact, the growth would have been around 65%. The strategic focus area, mainly digital business services and tech segments, also supports the top line growth with a strong performance. We are happy to see our mobile ARPA growth, which achieved 68%, exceeding the headline inflation as we reap the benefits of sequential price increase we begun at the end of 2021. On the profitability side, our EBITDA reached 6.8 billion Turkish lira with a 57% increase. And despite the ongoing inflationary pressure, we achieved a margin of just over 39%. In line with our expectation, which accounts for the impact of the disaster on our OPEX. Excluding the earthquake impact, the margin would have been 41%. Last but not least, we recorded a solid and net profit of 2.8 billion TL mainly on the back of the strong operational performance as well as lower FX losses. Next slide. Let's take a closer look at our mobile operational performance. As a part of our strategy, we have been focused on attracting premium subscribers. which led to a net addition of 342,000 postpaid subscribers in Q1, bringing postpaid share to 69%. Prepaid net additions were impacted by lower new subscriber demand in the earthquake region and from the competitive offers, as well as high involuntary churn due to significant tourist arrival in Q3 last year. While we observed the continuing impact of year-end campaigns in the beginning of the year, the market rationalized after the earthquake, and overall the MNP market contracted in Q1. To support the victims of the earthquake, all operators frozen price actions. We also paused telesays to respect our national grid. We resumed both mobile price adjustments and telesays by April. Despite the impact of the earthquake, blended mobile ARPA growth accelerated to 68% year-on-year, outpacing the 54% average annual inflation within the quarter. Without the earthquake impact, we shall note that the ARPA growth would have been around 75%. Our mobile churn rate of 1.7% is reasonably below 2% despite a slight increase year-on-year due to the higher prepaid journey. The monthly data usage of 4.5G users have reached 17.4 GB driven by 88% smartphone penetration up 1.5 points year-on-year. Next slide, please. As expected, the earthquake also had a negative impact on our fixed broadband business. However, we saw a significant demand for our services in March due to relocation in the impacted area. Our focus on fiber subscribers continued, resulting in a net addition of 38,000 fiber subscribers in Q1. Our IPTV platform also saw a net additional 28,000 subscribers in the same period. After the long-awaited notable price adjustment in Q4 last year, and due to the earthquake, there were almost no significant price adjustments in the fixed broadband market. However, we introduced uncommitted offerings in January, which were appreciated by customers. We also saw continued traction in high-speed packages with 44% of new subscribers opting for 100 Mbps or higher packages. Our annual residential fiber ARPA growth in Q1 slightly decreased to 31% compared to previous quarter, mainly due to the action we have taken for earthquake victims. Excluding this impact, the ARPA growth would have been 36%. The slight increase in fixed churn is also triggered by the destruction in the earthquake regions. As we announced previously, our target is to reach 300,000 home paths this year, and we have already exceeded half of that in Q1. With an aim to increase return on investment, We will focus on increasing our take-up rate by addressing potential subscribers in the relevant HomePass areas. Next slide. And now in the next two slides, I will be providing an update on our strategic focus areas. Let's start with the digital services and solutions. In Q1, standalone revenue of digital services and solutions grew by 65% year-on-year. This was enabled by digital OTT service revenue rising 72% year-on-year. Our flagship digital OTT services, namely cloud storage, TV, and music streaming platforms, were the main pillars of the growth. On the back of price adjustment and paid user expansion, collectively standalone, Paid user number grew 24% year-on-year, reaching 5.2 million despite a decline outreach due to suspension of marketing campaigns after the earthquakes. Our second focus area, digital business services, addressing digital transformation of enterprises, posted strong growth of 104% year-on-year. The main drivers of growth were system integration projects. data center, and cloud business. Exceeding 11% of total DBS revenue, data center and cloud services more than doubled their top line, with strong demand from both local and international clients. In this quarter, we gained more than 1,100 new contracts. The backlog from system integration projects reached 2.5 billion TL. which will contribute to the top line over the upcoming quarters. Next slide, please. Our third focus area is Techfin. In Q1, PayCell, Turkey's leading payment platform, increased its revenue by 79% year-on-year. Almost tripling transaction volume was enabled thanks to an ongoing shift into digital payments. PayLater, which is the leading product of the PayCell, maintained its strong revenue trend and doubled its transaction volume, mainly supported by the transaction repayment in Apple and Android stores. PR solution transaction size rose more than four times. Given the increased penetration in the physical force devices in the market and our exclusive role in the Joint Electric Vehicle Project Stocks Pre-Sales Project. On the consumer financing side, financials revenue grow by 65% on rising interest rate and expanding loan portfolio. Financials loan portfolio expanded 7% year-on-year mainly reflecting the increased device prices in the market as well as corporate segment initiatives due to the diversification in the portfolio as well as action taken after the earthquake cost of risk increased to 2.7 percent next slide please now let's look at the performance of our international subsidies Turkish international revenue grew by 31% year-on-year in Q1. Excluding the currency impact, the organic growth was 20%. Lifestyle revenue rose 16% year-on-year in its local currency. EBITDA margin expanded by 4 percentage points compared to the last year, reaching 60%, thanks to higher revenue growth and lower international interconnection expenses. Best revenue rose 15% year-on-year in its local currency. ABTM margin expanded by a remarkable 15 percentage point compared to last year, thanks to the recently revised MTI raise, which led to lower interconnection expenses. Next slide. I would like to say a few words about TOG, our e-mobility initiative. Our investment in Turkey's electrical vehicle initiative is a solid step towards realizing opportunity in the e-mobility ecosystem. In a promise to deliver Turkey's first smart mobility devices, as you may recall, YAMNIK Technology Campus had become ready for mass production in October last year. In March, TOK began pre-sales of its first smart mobility devices and received a strong demand of nine times. Electrical vehicle deliveries started in April. As Turkey's leading payment platform, Paysal provided the payment infrastructure for the pre-sale process through TOK's own app. Paysal managed the process around 11 billion Turkish lira transaction SmoothLib and its very first company in the world to achieve such a large transaction volume through a wallet app in a short time. In the meantime, Tok has laid the foundation of battery development and production factory adjacent to its technology campus, together with battery giant Pharisys Energy. The facility is planned to be completed by 2024. Now, I would like to leave the floor to our acting CFO, Mr. Kamil Kalyan.

Thank you, Murat. Now, let's take a closer look into the financials. Group revenues grew by 62% year-on-year, corresponding to an incremental rise of 6.6 billion TLs. This quarter was another period where we saw the results of our dedicated price adjustments resulting in robust ARPU growth. Tüksatürk revenues rose 70% in this quarter thanks to an expanding subscriber base and an ARPU growth that exceeds inflation. Our digital business services was another revenue driver with its doubling performance. The revenue contribution of international segment was limited to 442 million TL in this quarter, reflecting the easing inflation in our international markets as well as the slowdown in currency depreciation. TechWin segment added 253 million TL to the top line on the back of PaySell's tripling transaction volume and FinanceSell's higher loan portfolio and average interest rates. Improvement of the other segment's contribution on a yearly basis is mainly thanks to a rise in sales from digital channels and higher equipment revenues. Next slide, please. Now, some highlights on EBITDA development. Strong revenue growth has been the key driver of the 57% rise in EBITDA. In this quarter, EBITDA margin contracted by 1.1% year-on-year. Declining the interconnection expenses as a percentage of revenues partially compensated the rise in personal expenses. Please recall that we had made a secondary rise to wage in July last year on top of the January rise following the minimum wage increase. Energy expenses had a limited impact on the EBITDA margin as last year's energy price hikes were exceptionally high. Lastly, I would like to mention about TÜVCEL International's profitability. In this quarter, EBITDA margin of the segment improved by 3.8% year-on-year. Lifestyle's improving margin performance in Ukraine was joined by best in Belarus, thanks to the recently announced MTR change in favor of us. Next slide, please. Let's take a closer look at our CAPEX management. As we begin the year, we are implementing a disciplined CAPEX plan, which brings our last 12-month CAPEX intensity ratio to 20.6% in line with our guidance. Looking at the CAPEX breakdown, mobile and fixed investments each account for one-third of the total CAPEX. On the mobile CAPEX side, our non-discretionary approach is still intact as evidenced by a single-digit mobile CAPEX intensity. Of note, we had to make around 350 million TL one of CAPEX due to the earthquake. On the fixed side, having realized 1.5 million fiber compasses in past two years, we have decided to slow down the given compelling cost environment. Therefore, this year, we will focus on monetizing these recent homepaces. This quarter, we added 160,000 new homepaces to our portfolio. We are proceeding with expanding our wide space capacity in our data centers. Thanks to modular structure of our existing data centers, we are just adding new modules to meet increasing demands. Next slide, please. At the end of Q1, our gross debt position increased by 4.6 to 59 billion TL due mainly to new borrowings and currency depreciation impact of 1.4 billion TL. Our cash position increased by 1.4 billion TL to just over 27 billion TL in Q1. Effective movements had 0.5 billion TL positive impact in the cash position. To note, 1.4 billion TL virus usage tax payment in Q1 negatively affected our cash position. As of first quarter of the year, Group Net Bet was around 23 billion TL with a 0.9 times net leverage. Excluding the Tetsium business, this was at 0.8 times in line with the previous quarter. We are far below from our long-term threshold of 1.5 times net debt to EBITDA. Of note, 10% depreciation in our currency leads to a 0.1 times increase in our net leverage. The majority of our cash continues to remain in hard currencies. Excluding effect swaps, 57% of our cash is in US dollars and 15% in euros. This cash is sufficient to cover our debt service until 2025. The FX debt service is around 280 million US dollars this year, which we believe is reasonably manageable given our strong cash position and committed long-term credit lines. Next slide, please. I will go into the management of foreign currency risk in Q1. We have continued to keep majority of our cash in FX and also utilize hedging instruments as part of our prudent financial risk management approach. Looking at the FX position composition, we had 1.9 billion US dollar equivalent of FX debt on our balance sheet. On asset side, we had 1.4 billion USD equivalent FX cash and a 600 million USD derivative portfolio mainly comprised of proxy heads, namely futures and forwards. Overall, we ended up with a short FX position of just 21 million USD, which is within our neutral FX position definition of ±200 million USD. We may, however, see a higher short-effects position from time to time during the rest of the year due to the absence of liquidity at higher costs for hedging as well as as a result of 2G license fee of around 140 million euro. This concludes our presentation and we can now open the line for questions. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, then you may press star and two. Please use your handset when asking your question for better quality. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question is from the line of Kennedy Good-Jonathan with JP Morgan. Please go ahead.

Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to ask questions. Just a quick one on the potential price increases for the rest of the year. When should we expect further price increases on the mobile side? And given now that your mobile app is growing well ahead of inflation, How should we expect price increases to evolve? And then secondly, there was a significant cash outflow in terms of working capital, I think driven by an increase in your trade receivable balance. Can you give us a sense of what drove that and whether that will reverse in the quarters to come? Thank you.

First of all, thank you very much, Jonathan. Let me take the first question regarding price increase. As you know, we are the leader operating mobile, and our priority in a high inflation environment is to adjust our price in a timely manner. So due to the earthquake in the first quarter, we have temporarily stopped price increase in February and March, but continue with the price adjustment in April. We aim to maintain our price focus strategy throughout the year. So far, we increase our price almost every quarter, and our aim is to keep this behavior. And we have successfully implemented this strategy last two years. And the accelerating ARPU growth and revenue growth clearly showed this attitude. So despite the negative impact of Earthquake on ARPU, mobile ARPU increased 68% annually. So we beat the inflation, which was 54.3%. So if we... get rid of the earthquake impact, the ARPA growth would be around 75%. So the strategy clearly works well. So let me give the word to Kamil regarding the cash outflow.

Thank you Murat Bey. in the first quarter and we will collect it from subscribers throughout the years. We paid 1.4 billion TL for this in Q1 at the end of February. The first reason was that. The second one, there were some important factors that adversely affected our cash generation through our working capital. One of them is bonus payments we made to our employees for the previous years. Expansion of financials, loan portfolio is the second reason. And the third one, receivables from our growing EBS business, which are relatively longer term, is the third reason. And I may add to this, due to earthquake, we stopped collecting some payments from our subscribers for one and a half month period. Therefore, it also increased our trade receivable for a limited time.

Thank you. That's very helpful.

The next question is from the line of Morris Till with Schroeders. Please go ahead.

Hello. Can you hear me? In that way. Okay. Thanks for taking my question. You mentioned the position of your guidelines. Can you remind them where they ended the quarter and where they are right now. And also, can you elaborate a little bit on your newly contracted liquidity?

We have some committed, we have a significant amount of committed life in EKN and CDB side, we do not have any problem about the position of our credit lines. Also, we are trying to add new credit lines to our portfolio this year. Around 220 million euro CDB will end in March 2024. And EKN credit line was around 30 million dollars.

Okay, great. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press char and 1 on your telephone. Once again, to register for a question, please press star and 1 on your telephone. The next question is from the line of with Unlu Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you very much for the presentation. I just wanted to ask about your capex over sales guidance. I think you keep it around 22%, but the first few performance was much lower. Is it due to the currency effects? I think that most of the capex was realized as of the first quarter, one of capex. So Going forward, could there be a possibility of a lower capex over sales for 2023? It would be very helpful if you talk more in detail about your prospects there. Thank you.

Thank you, Ece. First of all, historically and seasonality-wise, Q1 is the lowest CAPEX sales ratio quarter. Usually, Q4 is the highest one. So, if you look at the existing guidance, we would like to keep our guidance as 22% CAPEX sales ratio because Some of the Earth-K CAPEX happen in Q1, but there are more to go coming quarter, so we would like to keep our CAPEX ratio as it is.

Ismail Datsi, are you finished with your questions? Yes, thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press char and 1 on your telephone. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Turkcell Management for any closing comments. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us, but I think we have one more question. Is that right?

Yes, sir. The next question is from the line of Demitar Stemal. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the presentation and congratulations for a very good result. My question is regarding the donation related to earthquakes. You had announced 3.5 billion Turkish lira. How should we elaborate that? When... When are we going to see the impact on your financials? And the other question is about the dividend side and general assembly side. Could you give us some indication in those two issues? Thank you.

Thank you, Cemal. First of all, regarding the donation, our board of directors has decided to contribute up to 3.5 billion TL to relevant earthquake relief organizations. First of all, we need to present the donation decision to our shareholders vote at the annual general meetings. Therefore, it will need to be voted by the shareholder first. Once it is approved at the General Assembly, we will determine the timing and payment structure of donation among other mechanics as well. So regarding the AGM and regarding the dividend distribution, I would like to remind you that our dividend policy continues unchanged. As you know, dividend proposal is first made by the Board of Directors and then voted by the shareholders at the General Assembly. No proposal has been made by the Board of Directors for this year yet. As you may recall, from last year, our Board of Directors dividend proposal was announced together with the General Assembly announcement. Therefore, I don't want to speculate on the potential proposal of the Board of Directors regarding the dividends. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for a very clear answer. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further audio questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Turkcell Management for any closing comments. Thank you.

Thank you very much for being with us in this Q1 result. We hope to see you in the next one. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a pleasant evening.