Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Konstantinos, your Chorus Call Operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Turkcell Conference Call and live webcast to present and discuss the Turkcell Second Quarter 2023 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in listening mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a 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. Alistair Dariagi, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance Director. Mr. Dariagi, you may now proceed.

Thank you, Konstantinos. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Turkcell's second quarter 2023 results call. Today, our CEO, Mr. Murat Erkan, and Acting CFO, Mr. Kamil Kalyon, will be delivering a brief presentation covering operational and financial results, which will be followed by a Q&A. Before we kick off, I'd like to kindly remind you to review our safe harbor statement placed at the end of the presentation. Now, I'm handing over to Mr. Erkan.

Thank you, Serdar. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We delivered outstanding results in the second quarter. Our determined inflationary pricing strategy plays an instrumental role in delivering an ever-accelerating performance. Pacing the inflation, our revenue growth ramped up to 74% on a record ARPA growth and expanding subscriber base. Strategic focus area also supported top-line growth as always. On the profitability side, our EBITDA almost doubled, reaching 9.5 billion TL. Driven mostly by strong top-line growth and reduced energy prices in Q2, we achieved a remarkable 44% EBITDA margin. This strong operational performance coupled with dynamic and prudent risk management enabled a solid net profit of 3.2 billion Turkish lira on a 70% year-on-year rise. Considering these results, we further increased our full-year guidance. Next slide. Let's take a closer look at our mobile operational performance. Our focus on post-paid subscriber yielded a sustaining substantial gain of 404,000 subscribers in Q2. topping a 70% post-paid share of the mobile base. Following the gloomy Q1, we resumed price adjustment in April. And as the competitors followed us, overall price level escalated in a market. However, temporary competitive offers were observed in the market, triggering an increase in M&P volumes. Rising acquisition price level and alternative data solution for tourists impacted prepaid subscribers. The inflation figure for July indicates a surge in inflation during the second half of the year. Yet we are committed to price adjustments. Accordingly, we rise our prices in August. As anticipated, the ripple effect of preceding price adjustment and intact upsell effort propelled a remarkable 84% acceleration in mobile ARPA. The ARPA versus CPI spread widened further. Despite a slight increase due to the line closure deferral from Q1, our mobile churn rate stood at 1.9%. Next slide. In the fixed broadband, our focus persists on fiber. Accordingly, we gained 40,000 fiber subscribers in Q2. The IPTV platform, a supportive factor in subscriber retention, grew with 35,000 net additions. We achieved 165,000 additional home paths during Q2. We are delighted to exceed our annual target of 300,000 in the first half, benefiting from more favorable FX rates. In line with our fiber extension, the take-up ratio decreased to just below 40%. However, it is fair to expect the rate to rebound for the remainder of the years as we aim to monetize these investments. This quarter, residential fiber ARPU grew strongly by 49% yearly, surpassing quarterly average annual inflation after a long break, thanks to price adjustments. Longer contract duration and the reluctance of incumbent operator to make price adjustments have been affecting this segment adversely. To mitigate these factors, we have shifted our focus over the past year to offering 12-month contract or contract-free tariffs, resulting in 53% of our Fibers customers opting for this plan by June. Lastly, We are pleased to see continued interest in high-speed plants. The rate of these packages in the total fiber portfolio has increased by 11% year-on-year. Next slide. On strategic focus areas, let's start with digital services and solutions. The standard revenue of digital services and solutions grew by 87% year-on-year due to price adjustment and expansion of paid users. We have reached significant milestones in our flagship services. OTT TV services has surpassed the 1 million mark, while the Cloud Storage services exceeded 2 million users. By surpassing 1 million active users in Pakistan, BIP further expanded its user base through the partnership with JAWS. Our standalone paid user base reached 5.5 million, rising 22% annually. On the other hand, TV Plus is intensifying its collaboration with both local and international business platforms and partnering with leading global studios. Moving on to our next focus area, digital business services, constitute 10% of Turkish Revenue. having registered 82% year-on-year growth. The main growth drivers were system integration projects, data center, and cloud businesses, each doubling their revenues annually. Notably, the backlog from system integration projects has reached 2.9 million Turkish lira. Next slide. Our third focus area is Techfin. In the second quarter, PayCell revenue rose 95% year-on-year. PayLater has more than doubled its volume and remained the key driver of PayCell revenues. This growth was supported by increased payment in mobile app stores and expanded user base, a volume of ready-to-use limits. PayCell Card has also supported this remarkable performance thanks to increased money transfer and higher card fees. In May, the nationwide joint QR project was launched, which enabled our customer to make payment using PayCell app at any location with QR code. Turning to finance cell into its revenue group by 87% with an expanding loan portfolio and rising interest rates. The loan book reached 4.7 billion Turkish lira on an 88% growth. Next slide. Now, international subsidies. The Turkcell international segment, which accounts for 10% of the group top line, grew by 48% year on year in Q2. Excluding the currency impact, the organic growth was 38%. Thanks to increasing data roaming revenue and also price adjustment, lifestyle revenue in Ukraine rose 36% year on year. in its local currency, well above the inflation. The EBITDA margin improvement of 1.2 percentage point was mainly driven by lower interconnection and energy expenses as a percentage of revenue. Best revenue rose 22% year-on-year in its local currency, comfortably exceeding the inflation. The MTR rate revision at 2022 year-end year-end and a disciplined OPEX result in a 20 points margin improvement. Next slide. I would like to end my presentation by sharing our updated guidance for 2023. Taking into consideration our outstanding first-half performance, we have revised our revenue growth target to around 71%. EBITDA guidance to around 37 billion Turkish Lira and maintain capex intensity at around 22%. I will now leave the floor to our CFO, Mr. Kamil Kalyan.

Thank you very much, Murat. Now let's dive into our financial results. Our group revenues had an incremental rise of 9.2 billion TL corresponding to 74% growth year on year. Turkcell Turkey revenues were the main driver of the performance thanks to expanding subscriber base and solid ARP growth. Digital services were also supportive on the remarkable performance. Turkcell international revenue grew by 48% lower than overall group due to lower inflation and limited currency depreciation. Techfin business grew by 93% year-on-year with an incremental rise of 383 million TL, as evident by the traction in financial services companies, PayCell and Financel. Next slide, please. Now let's look at our EBITDA performance. Tuxel Group EBITDA reached 9.5 billion TL, reflecting on the solid revenue growth. In Q2, EVTA margin expanded by 3.7%. Increasing employee expenses was offset by decreasing interconnection expenses, cost of goods sold, and energy costs as a percentage of the revenue. Of note, 15% reduction in the electricity prices, which was introduced for industrial consumers in April, supported the margin. Also, we shall inform you that following the minimum wage increase in July, we have also increased our rates by around 37%, which will be weighing on our financials starting from Q3. Next slide, please. Let's take a closer look at our CAPEX management. In second quarter, we kept implementing our disciplined CAPEX plan, which brings our last month CAPEX intensity ratio to 20%. Mobile and fixed investments in total accounts for more than 70% of the total CAPEX. Mobile CAPEX investments at a higher share in total CAPEX compared to last year, as we had to make around 420 million one of CAPEX due to earthquake. However, we managed to keep single digit intensity. On the fixed side, even though we slightly exceed our annual target, it was lower than previous years. As we have mentioned before, this year we mostly focus on monetizing our fixed investments for the rest of the year. Next slide, please. Our cash position increased by 7.8 billion TL in second quarter. FX movements had an impact of 6%. Our gross debt position grew by 18.7 billion TL in Q2. The increase in gross debt is mainly due to 14.8 billion TL currency depreciation. We ended the quarter with a net debt position of 28.2 billion TL. Thanks to the strong EBITDA generation, our net leverage remains around one times and excluding financial, it is 0.8 times. The remaining FX debt service is around 156 million US dollar this year, which is manageable given the cash position and committed credit lines. The majority of our cash continues to remain in hard currencies. Excluding effect swaps, 58% of our cash is in US dollars and 10% in euros. Next slide, please. Lastly, I will go into the management of foreign currency risk in Q2. We have continued to keep majority of our cash in FX and also utilized 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 financial liabilities on our balance sheet. On the other side, We had 1.4 billion USD equivalent FX financial assets and 645 million USD derivative portfolio mainly comprised of proxy heads namely futures and forwards. Overall, we ended up with a long FX position 84 million USD which is within our neutral FX position definition. 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 Mandaci Etse with Unlu Securities. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you very much for the presentation and congratulations on the strong results. I have a couple of questions on your guidance and potential art for growth going forward. The first is about the subscriber additions in the mobile site. We are seeing a slower increase compared to previous years or previous quarters. So is that stable performance will be sustainable for the second half? How would you think about or write about the subscriber addition? The second question is about the mobile ARPA growth. We have seen a significant recovery and was there any price adjustment on the mobile or was it just fixed size as of August? So should we think about 90% ARPA levels or more? normalized level given the high base of last year for the second half, particularly on mobile R2. And thirdly, I saw that you have upgraded your guidance for full year. On the ABTA margin side, I'm seeing that you are a bit more cautious regarding ABTA margin performance for the second half. Is it due to expectation of higher cost inflation because you're also making price adjustments Could you please provide some more color about these questions to these teams? Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, Ece. First of all, regarding subscriber growth and subscriber growth target, in the mobile segment, we experienced net ad of 165,000 subscribers in the second quarter. This is supported by the seasonality effect, which is lower than the normal trend. Essentially, 404,000 net additional post rates was partially offset by the net loss in the prepaid segment. Rising new acquisition price level and alternative data solution for tourists particularly impacted the price sensitivity prepaid subscriber. However, we believe that these alternative solutions could pose security risks. On the fiber and IPTV side, net subscriber ad continues as usual, supported by NetAd. And also for this year, we expect a net ad of around a million subscribers as well. Regarding second question, mobile ARPA growth and price increase, we did increase for the mobile during August, mobile and fixed. They are not in the same time, but we increased our price during August. And we will closely follow the inflation. So we, as everybody knows, our strategy is based on inflation pricing. So we're gonna closely follow the inflation and during the inflation increase, we're gonna increase our price. For the EBITDA guidance, I think this is mainly But there are two reasons actually. One of them, in the first half, the energy price decreased. So it is decreased 15%, I believe, in April. So for the next half, we put some expectation on the price increase for the energy price. The second thing is, because of the inflation, For the employee salary, we had to increase our employee salary in July 37%. So this is going to impact also second half EBITDA for the employee salary increase as well. So these are the things that makes us a little bit cautious. But obviously, we're going to follow up closely to recover the but it is, you know, it's going to be around 40% level anyway.

Thank you.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone. The next question is from the line of Demirtas Kemal with Atta Invest. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the presentation. My question is about the financial expense side. When we look into details, we see significant increase in financial expenses and as far as we know, you don't have very big, long, short ethics position. You have some net debt position. And even if we come up with, you know, the ethics changes from first quarter to second quarter, and we multiplied by your net debt position, we come up with 10 billion Turkish lira financial expense. Could you give us more detail how should we approach to your financial expense side? Because, you know, your EBITDA is strong, it's good, and your guidance is revised up, and the fixed impact is possibly on that numbers also. So how should we think when we try to reach the bottom line? Because EBITDA is strong but huge financial expense. So if you didn't hedge, what would be the result? I would like to understand the effect of all those hedges on your bottom line. How does it save you and how did it save you if you didn't hedge what would happen in second quarter? If you have any, you know, just callers on that. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Cemal, for the question. As you know, following the sharp currency movement in the fourth quarter of 2021, Strike levels of some of the call options that we had sold as part of our participating cross-currency swaps were exceeded. Consequently, in order to maintain the protectiveness of our hedging portfolio, we opted for short-term derivative instruments as the current market conditions have not been ideal for the long term. We have a net long FX position in the amount of 84 million US dollar at the end of the second quarter, as you say, which is in line with our neutral position definition. The hedging costs of short-term instruments have normalized after the elections, but we saw an increase in the FX rates, unfortunately. According to the majority of our FX gains, has arisen from the increase in the FX rate, which offset the loss arising from the valuations of our short-term derivative contracts due to the normalization of the TL interest rate curve. Despite this negative impact from the interest rate curve, our derivative portfolio printed a positive M2M valuation, which helped us to keep our FX loss limited. Going forward, the movement of swap curve will also have an impact on FX gain loss. However, we aim to stick around our FX neutral definition. as we declared previously, plus or minus 200 million US dollars. I should also note that we continue to evaluate market conditions. If we can find favorable conditions, we might consider restructuring our portfolio.

So, you know, in the third quarter, you're going to use the, you know, similar instruments, and if you assume that, you know, the currency will be more stable, should we also assume your EBITDA will remain high and your financial expense will go down. Is it the model we can take?

Yes, might be, but it depends on the economy management interest policy. If the interest is especially currently, the interest rates for Turkish Lira loans are very high, as you know. It might be going higher in the next term.

if the interest expenses increase like this way maybe we can wait a kind of extra additional finance interest expenses okay and as a follow-up question rather on the operation side we see you know the the price are increasing and when we look at competitors they're also you know they're increasing the prices to just match the increasing cost. How do you see the third quarter outlook? You revised your guidance, but how do you see from your side about the pricing and please also the additions, subscribe additions, what could be the trend for the third quarter question? And one other question about the strategic perspective, you know, both Turk Telecom and Turkcell are, you know, like controlled by the wealth fund. And at some point, you know, there is 5G issue, there is a licensing of Turk Telecom. These are all possibly on the agenda. And as far as we know, in the past, before, you know, finding a solution to 5G issues or others, licensing of, you know, TÜV Telecom would be also, you know, linked to that about the full, you know, regulatory system. At least from TÜV's perspective, what should we expect in the regulatory environment for the next, you know, one year? Could we expect and already be, you know, the elections are completed, so what should be the you know, the issues going forward for telecom sector also, you know, for your side. Thank you.

Thank you. First of all, regarding the price increase and the competition follow up, you know, so far we increase as a market leader, we increase our price based on inflation and it seems our competition also following up us. On the fixed line side, it is really difficult to see or foresee what's going to happen. But we see some movement on the fixed side, which is good for us, so we can increase our prices. For the mobile side, I think as the leading operator in the mobile, our priority in a high inflation environment is to adjust our prices in a timely manner. So we're gonna continue what we did so far and follow the inflation. The other question was regarding strategic perspective of Telekom to sell control by the wealth fund. So I think for the 5G, everybody's expecting for next year the license, not this year. So we'll see what's going to happen. But Valfan has, I believe, 22 companies underneath. So for the licensing side, I mean, we're competing with Telecom. So Valfan is a strategic investor for both parties. I don't see any issue on this side. As I said, for the 5G, We expect 2024 as a licensing or spectrum tender as well.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Demirat Kayahan with AK Investment. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation and opportunity to ask questions. I have a couple of them. The first one is price increases this year in formulating the guidance or other way of asking, should we expect another price increases given the direction of your cost inflation? That would be my first question.

Okay. For this question, I mean, we just increase our prices. We're going to follow the inflation. But my feeling is by the end of the year, one more price increase we can expect. But obviously this price increase for the next year, not this year, you know, not this year numbers or revenues, anything. But I think we can expect in price increase for last quarter in Q4.

Thank you. Would it be possible to give any direction in terms of the expected capacity intensity for the next year? I mean, in your view, should we expect something lower than this year or a bit higher given the expansion plans, the maintenance?

Yeah, to be honest, it is very difficult to, you know, see for next year CapEx guidance, but obviously our aim is decreasing our CapEx ratio, sales CapEx ratio, revenue ratio. So my expectation would be little lower but not too much on this side but it's too early to say because we don't know the effects because our capex 75 percent of our copies depends on foreign exchange so it is really difficult to forecast for next year capex And macro conditions also is going to give us sometimes hard times, sometimes good times. So we'll see. But it is too early to say anything about 2024. Okay, okay.

Thank you. Understood. And the final question I have for international operations. I mean, the numbers in Ukraine are looking quite strong, given the difficult operating environment. There's a I mean, decent growth in the US in terms of margins are going up. Should we expect this to continue going forward? How do you see the situation over there?

Obviously, you're asking difficult questions because Ukraine is under war. So, based on existing, you know, behaviors, I mean, we will see, we will see, you know, successful operation over there. But You know, sometimes it's really difficult to speak while ongoing war is happening over there. So we are happy about Ukraine lifestyle performance. Things getting easier, but it doesn't mean like before the war. As everybody knows that Ukraine had, you know, around 8% maybe 10 million people move out from ukraine so this this this makes uh you know uh are they gonna come back or not we'll see so it is really difficult to uh forecast for for next year or coming years but so far we're good if things stable we're gonna continue as as good as today but you know it is under war So it's difficult to comment on this one.

Okay, understood. Thanks for taking your time. Congratulations on the results. Thank you.

Once again, to register for a question, please press star 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.

Thank you very much for joining us and have a good day, have a good night, whatever it is. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thank you for joining us. We hope to see you in the next one.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

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