Cyfrowy Polsat S.A. Ord

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the results call of Polsat Plus Group for the third quarter of 2022. The results will be presented by Mr. Mirosław Błaszczyk, CEO, Mr. Maciej Stec, Vice President, Responsibility for Strategy and New Business, Mrs. Katarzyna Ostap-Stoman, CFO, and Mr. Stanisław Janowski, President of TV Polsat. After the presentation, we will hold a Q&A session. As always, you can post your questions in advance in the chat section. Mr. Błaszczyk, the floor is yours.

Good afternoon and welcome. This is the agenda of today's meeting. First, I will present the most important events that took place in the third quarter. After that, Staszek will discuss the operating performance in the media segment, and Maciek in the B2C and B2B segment, and then clean energy segment. Kasia will present our financial results for the quarter, and I will close the presentation with a brief summary. We will end the meeting with a Q&A session. Key events of the third quarter. We continue to successfully implement our Multiply strategy targeted at building customer loyalty and customer value. As you will see later on in the presentation, churn remains at the very low level of 6.68% per annum, while contract B2C ARPU and prepaid ARPU grew by plus 4% and plus 9% respectively. In my opinion, these are very positive results given the difficult economic situation and uncertainty that people are facing today. We dynamically execute our strategy 2023 plus in the clean energy segment. In particular, we support onshore wind farm projects developed at present by PAC-PCA. Currently, five projects with total capacity of 190 megawatts are under construction. Additionally, we are consistently building the full value chain of green hydrogen economy. As I'm sure Maciek will tell you about in detail. We also concluded a joint venture agreement with the leading CE developer HB Revis regarding the construction of office facilities in Port Plaski, a very promising project in the mid-term. And finally, an event that takes me very proud to be a part of this group. Polsat Plus Group won the main award, Company of the Year at the Economic Forum in Carpaths, which is frequently called the Polish Davos. The distinction was awarded for the business success of our group as well as for the numerous social and charity initiatives of the group and its founder, Mr. Zygmunt Solosz. And now, Staszek and Maciek will present the operating results of Polsat Group in third quarter. Staszek, please go ahead.

Thank you and good afternoon, everyone. I will discuss our performance in the media segment, TV and online in the fourth quarter and nine months of 2022. As always, I will start with our performance in the online segment. We are consistently building our position on the Polish online market. After the acquisition of Interia in mid-2020, we are a strong number three player on this market. In third quarter, we have increased the average monthly number of real users of our website to 20.5 million and page views to almost 2 billion. I'm very pleased with these results because they reflect the positive effects of synergies, especially in the area of content distribution and online advertising. What is perhaps more important, these operating results translate into a solid growing stream of revenue, thanks to which we were able to deliver promised two-fold increase in EBITDA only two years after acquisition. I would also like to highlight that in the third quarter, Interia acquired a majority share in a very popular local online portal that focuses on new technologies, antiweb.pl. The portal specializes in consumer electronics, gaming, new media, IT sector, startups, science and telecommunications. I am convinced that this new addition to the group will help strengthen our position on the market of internet portals going forward. Turning to the TV business, as you can see, our performance in terms of audience shares still remains under pressure from the compulsory switch to the new FTA broadcasting standard. A quick reminder, in the first half of this year, commercial broadcasters were first to start broadcasting their FTA channels in the new DVB-T2 standard, while a large number of households were not ready and still are not ready today. to receive these channels because they do not have the necessary reception equipment. The public broadcaster, however, was allowed to continue using the old DVB-T standard until the end of next year. This is a clear regulatory-driven disrupting factor that puts our viewership under pressure for the next few quarters. Despite this negative factor, our audience shares remain broadly in line with our strategic target and in the third quarter the total viewership of Polsat Plus group was 22.5%. Our main channel Polsat had the audience share of 7.5% and our thematic channels had 15% of audience share. The good news is that slightly weaker viewership figures are not reflected in our performance on the advertising market. I'm very happy to say that in Q3, our revenue from TV advertising and sponsorship went up almost 3%, while the broad market fell by 1.2% year-on-year. As a result, our share in the TV ad market grew to 29.4%. As for our performance in the nine months of 2022, the negative impact of the switch to DVB-T2 is also visible in the longer time horizon. Our total audience share amounted to 22.8 in the three quarters of 2022, so broadly within the strategic target corridor of 23-25%. Polsat remained a leader among main channels with nearly 8% of audience shares and our thematic channels recorded a viewership of 15%. Our position on the advertising market in three quarters is very strong, in my opinion. Similarly, as in the third quarter alone, in nine months, our ad revenues grew by 1% on a declining market. As a result, our share in the TV advertising and sponsorship market grew to the level of 28.8%. This brings me to the end of my part, so maybe a quick word of sum up. I think that our results for Q3 and 9 months of 2022 are good, solid results despite the negative regulatory effect of the refarming to the digital terrestrial broadcasting signal. Despite hurdles, we continue to invest in the future of our media business, thus building a strong growing position of the TV advertising market. Moreover, we are consistently developing our online business through Interia. As an effect, the revenue stream of our media segment grows 11% year-on-year, a highly satisfactory result, which Kasia will talk about later. Thank you. Maciek, over to you for the B2C and B2B services segment.

Thanks. As Staszek said, first I will give you an overview of our performance in the B2C and B2B services segment over the past few months. Okay, I will start, as always, with the core of our business, our Multiplay strategy. One of the effects of this strategy is the consistent, stable growth of our customer base using bundled services. In Q3, almost 2.5 million customers were subscribed to two or more of our services. These 2.5 million customers use a total of 7.4 million services. Our Multiplay customer base is still growing and given over half of our customer base remain single players, I really believe there is still room for promoting the Multiplay product going forward. Another very important effect of the Multiplay strategy is its favorable impact on the level of churn. Churn is one of our crucial KPIs because it reflects customer loyalty and satisfaction. If you look at churn in a longer perspective, you will notice that thanks to the successful implementation of our strategy over the years, we were able to bring down churn to historically low levels and keep it stable there. In Q3, churn was once again only 6.8% per annum. As you can see on this slide, in Q3 we provided over 13.3 million services to contract B2C customers. We maintain a high and stable number of mobile telephony and internet services, but our total RGU base is under slight pressure, minus 1% year on year, on the back of a lower number of provided pay TV services. This is something I have already flagged a few months ago. Last year, we changed the brand of our online video offer from ipla to Polsat Box Go and absolutely repositioned it in terms of pricing. Today, it's no longer an add-on to mobile tariffs, but a full value standalone pay TV offer. The consequence, however, is that about 400,000 low-end ipla RGU's are systematically disappearing from our base. I will show you soon that the decline in pay TV RGUs does not trigger a negative impact on ARPU. On the contrary. Moreover, we compensate the loss of IPLA RGUs by a growing number of TV services provided in OTT and IPTV technologies. As you know, our Multiplay strategy is centered around building customer value, which is the main driver of our retail revenue growth. In the past quarter, RPO per contract B2C customer, the direct measure of customer value, increased by 3.9% year on year to 71.3 zlotys, which I think is an excellent result. Of course, this is the effect of consistently upselling and cross-selling products and services from our portfolio to our customers. As you can see, the trend of RGU saturation per customer is steadily growing and in Q3 each of our customers used on average 2.24 services from our portfolio. Solid ARPU growth is also the result of a very good rate of migration of our existing customers to our 5G tariffs. we are still the only operator in poland to offer 5g services based on a dedicated frequency band and as a result we offer the best customer experience of our 5g network like i said rpu drives our retail revenue but i would like uh also to mention Here are the excellent results of handset sales that we have been observing over the past two quarters and the noticeably improved margin on these sales. This is worth remembering because equipment sales were a strong positive driver behind total revenue growth and strong positive bottom line contributor this quarter, as I'm sure Kasia will tell you. Moving on to the prepaid segment, let me just say that this lack of our business has been performing exceptionally well recently. As you can see on the slide, both the scale of our prepaid base and RPU generated on the services are in a growing trend. In Q3, our prepaid RGU base increased to over 2.8 million services. This is still the effect of our activities to support the Ukrainian people. consisting in, among other things, distributing free starter packs to refugees at the beginning of the war. Pre-per-RP recorded yet another quarter of very strong growth, up by 9.1% year-on-year to 17.9 zlotys in Q3. Remember, when we discussed declining IPLA RGU two slides back, well, the same reason, Upward price repositioning of our online TV services is one of the key positive drivers of ARPU growth in the prepaid. This positive effect is also supported by changes in our mobile offering and the fact that customers of mobile prepaid services choose packaged solutions over the pay-as-you-go model more and more frequently. In the B2B segment, we successfully maintain a high customer base, 69.1 thousand business customers. This base grew quarter on quarter following the acquisition by Netia of OctaWave, a company specialized in cloud solutions. Our view for B2B customers increased to over 1400 zlotys and this is because we successfully expand our communication and ICT services offer for the B2B segment. For us, building value is central in all segments, also in B2B, although I must admit that this market is highly competitive and building value here is still more challenging than in B2C. This was my last slide concerning the B2C and B2B services segment, so I would like to make a brief summary here. We are operating today in a pretty difficult environment. Our customers are facing huge inflation, higher interest costs on their debts, sky-high energy prices, a possible recession. Overall, sentiment is gloomy. I would say, despite all that, I think we delivered a solid performance. We continue to implement with success our multiplayer strategy, and as a result, we continue to build customer value reflected in ARPU, growing to over 71 Zlotys in contract and over 17 Zlotys in prepaid. And we care about customer loyalty, which is visible in record low churn levels, only 6.8%. On top of that, we successfully transferred the growing cost of money over time into retail prices of end-user devices for those who are interested in buying smartphones in installments from us. And gradual tariff adjustments are also underway given the economy around us is changing dynamically and we work to mitigate its impact on our financials. And now let's take a look at what is new in the clean energy segment. This slide and the next are just a quick refresh to our strategy goals related to clean energy. Our first goal is that together with ZEPAK we want to become the leading producer of clean green energy. We have already achieved our target power in biomass. Two biomass turbines of 50 megawatts each are already fully operational in Konin. We want to install 600 MW of solar power. We already have 70 MW operational in the Brudzef solar power plant, 250 MW on onshore wind power. As I said last quarter, we are moving forward very dynamically in this area and already over 190 MW are under development. We want to construct two installations for thermal waste treatment. A letter of intent has already been signed for such a waste treatment plant with the town of Rebnik. Last but not least, we support ZEPAK in their offshore wind farm and nuclear projects. Our second strategy goal is to become the leading producer of green hydrogen in Poland along with ZEPAK. As you all know, we want to build a full and complete value chain based on green hydrogen. We are developing green energy projects to ensure the energy necessary to produce green hydrogen. We want to construct an electrolysis plant with 100 megawatts of power for the purpose of producing green hydrogen. What is important, the first 2.5 megawatts electrolyzers has already been shipped and is currently being installed. We are working on hydrogen storage and transportation. Also, we are already using three hydrogen trailers, one carrying 370 kilograms of hydrogen and two trailers with more than 1,000 kilograms capacity each. Ultimately, we want to establish a network of 30 hydrogen refueling stations. At the moment, we are building the first generally accessible station in Warsaw. We also want to support creating demand for green hydrogen in Poland. To this end, together with ZEPAK, we have designed and built the Polish hydrogen bus, the Neso bus, which is being promoted on the streets of Polish cities. and we have started the construction of a hydrogen bus factory in Świdnik. Also, we continue to expand our own fleet of hydrogen cars. We have recently placed an order for 50 more cars, which will bring the number of hydrogen vehicles in our car fleet up to 150. We are working intensively on the rapid implementation of projects in the clean energy segment because we believe this is critical not only to help mitigate certain negative effects of the current economic situations, such as energy prices for a start, but also to help combat climate change. Let's look at execution. The Brudzew Solar Power Plant, the largest photovoltaic farm in Poland, is performing very well. It produced almost 70 gigawatt hours of clean green energy since the beginning of this year. Thanks to the energy produced at Brudzew, which we contracted via PPA, we are able to hedge part of our exposure to energy price volatility, which is particularly unstable in Q3. And we have started expanding the Brudzef Solar Power Plant by another 12.4 MW of capacity. We are very active in the area of onshore wind power generation. In Q3, PAK PCE acquired a fifth wind farm in Drzezhevo. It consists of 23 wind turbines with 50.6 MW of capacity. Including this latest addition, the portfolio of onshore wind farms that are currently being developed by PACPCE increased to over 190 MW of capacity. I'm also very happy to say that the construction of the first two wind farms in the pipeline, Kazimierz Biskupi and Miłosław, is proceeding according to the planned timeline and we expect to start generating energy from wind already in the third quarter of 2023. On this slide, I wanted to give you a better sense of our green energy projects, where they are located, what phase of development they are in, and when we expect their operational launch. So, very quickly. Two biomass turbines of 50 MW each are already operational in Konin. Three solar power plants in the pipeline. The Bruzev plant is already operational and, like I said, doing very well. PAK-PCE has contracted an expansion of this plant by an additional 12.4 MW. We call this project Cambria and we expect it to be ready for launch in Q3 of 2023. The last solar power plant in the pipeline is the Psykona farm and it's by far the largest, almost 200 megawatts of installed capacity. We are in the process of obtaining necessary permits for this project and once we complete the paperwork, the farm should be completed and launched within 15 months. As I have already mentioned, there are five onshore wind projects in progress in total capacity of more than 190 megawatts. The first two are expected to launch in the third quarter of next year and the other three a year later. You can see their location on the map on the left. ZEPAK and the municipality of Rybnik have signed a letter of intent for the construction of a thermal waste treatment plant by 2026. Let me just draw your attention to the fact that implementing all these projects means that two years from now we will be past the midpoint of our strategic target of 1000 MW of installed capacity. Now let's look what is happening in our green hydrogen project. We have been intensively promoting our hydrogen powered bus. The Neso bus has already done test drives in five Polish cities and has met with very favorable reception. I'm really proud to say that the Nesobus was awarded a medal at the 2022 TransExpo Mass Transport Trade Fair in Kielce. We also presented the Nesobus at the IAA Transportation Trade Fair in Hanover, as the addressable market for this product is not limited to Poland only. In order to launch mass production of hydrogen buses in Poland, we have started construction works on the hydrogen bus factory in Świdnik. The planned completion date is Q3 2023. The factory will be able to produce over 100 buses per year. We are also progressing in the area of producing green hydrogen on our own. The first 2.5 MW electrolyzer from Hydrogenics is finally in Konin and is currently being installed. What's more, we are in the process of finalizing the purchase of another electrolyzer. And finally, we have concluded an agreement with Nel Hydrogen Denmark for the supply of equipment for seven hydrogen refueling stations. We have obtained the necessary permits and construction work is underway on the first public available hydrogen refueling station in Warsaw. so the inhabitants of Warsaw will have a chance to test the state-of-the-art technology on their own. So, as you can see, step by step we are bringing together all the elements of the value chain based on green hydrogen, and I hope that during our next meeting I will be able to proudly say that we have successfully completed this value chain. One last word of summary from me and we can move on to our financial performance. We consistently and rapidly execute our strategy 2023 plus in the area of clean energy. We simultaneously develop our solar power, onshore wind and green hydrogen projects, not only because they will bring us benefits and help address external issues resulting from the economic situation. We strongly believe that by executing our strategy, we are contributing to achieving the zero emissions target on the global scale by 2050. So, despite the challenging economic situation, we continue to dynamically invest in the future of our business and our country. As promised, let's move to the financial results. Kasia, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Maciek. Good afternoon, everyone. Looking at our key financial metrics in Q3 2022, we posted an impressive growth of revenue up by 7.9% year-on-year to almost 3.3 billion zlotys. As Maciek said at the beginning of his presentation, The main drivers behind revenue growth this quarter were on one hand solid RPU growth and on the other significantly higher revenue from sales of equipment. Media segment solid top line performance also contributes positively to consolidated revenue growth. Unfortunately, this positive growth dynamics did not carry over to the bottom line. In Q3 2022, adjusted EBITDA reached the level of 840 million zlotys, decreasing by 7.1% on the back of still very high energy costs, inflationary pressure on various cost items, but also our decision to take over the cost of producing Volleyball World Championships moved from Russia to Poland, because we perceive supporting sport, volleyball in particular, as an element of our long-term ESG strategy. Please note that adjusted EBITDA excludes gains on the disposal of subsidiaries and associates NetCo in Q3 of last year and Modivo this quarter. Last 12 months, free cash flow decreased by almost 27% over the past nine months and amounted to over 1 billion zlotys at the end of the third quarter. Pressure on free cash flow mainly comes from two sides. High local interest rates inflating our debt service costs and the success of our sales of smartphones translated into incremental working capital employed. I have said this before and I will say it again. It was never my goal to achieve the highest possible level of free cash flow indicator. Free cash flow is a tool for me to help implement projects and offers that are designed to increase the value of this group in the long run. Net leverage increased to 264 times in the third quarter. The significant increase that you see on this slide comes from the fact that LTM EBITDA used to calculate this ratio no longer incorporates the gain on the disposal of NETCO concluded in Q3 of last year. Moreover, a higher net leverage reflects our scale of support for green energy and green hydrogen projects. On this slide, you can see the decomposition of revenue and EBITDA growth by segments. In terms of revenue, all our business segments contributed positively to growth in Q3. On the B2C and B2B segment, the main growth drivers were RPU growth and strong handset sales with higher margins. In the media segment, we posted growing revenues from advertising and from wholesale of our content to other parties. The new real estate segment brings a solid contribution to the top line growth mainly thanks to the sale and trend of real estate. Despite growing revenue, EBITDA remained under inflationary pressure through OPEX in both the B2C and B2B segment and the media segment. The biggest pressure on the bottom line came from the media segment and it was connected to a significant extent with a one-off sporting event. As mentioned before, this year's Men's Volleyball World Championship was relocated from Russia to Poland for obvious reasons and TV Polsat undertook the full-scale TV production of this event. Growing energy prices, which reached unbelievably high levels in the third quarter, also continue to be a significant source of negative pressure, although we managed to partially mitigate these factors thanks to the production of green energy at Bruzef. In Q3 2022, generated free cash flow was visibly under pressure reaching the level of 89 million zlotys. This quarter we paid the last and the highest installment for the UMTS license in the amount of 31 million euro. The frequency was renewed in Q422 for another 15 years with a bullet payment of PLN 352 million, so you will not see any other installment or a balance sheet liability referring to it in the future. Our free cash flow indicator also turned out to be the victim of our own success because excellent handset sales translated into higher working capital employed. Moreover, we are facing growing interest expenses and inflationary pressure on OPEX as discussed before. Going into more detail on cash flow decomposition on the next slide, please notice the clearly decreasing capex to revenue ratio down to 8.6% in the nine months of 2022. Please remember that this ratio includes capex in our TMT business as well as in our new real estate segment. In Q3, we sold some non-strategic assets, particularly 10% stake in Modivo, which generated a cash inflow of little over 640 million zlotys, while M&A activities consumed almost 740 million zlotys in nine months. Hence, these two items largely net off each other. The majority of the acquisitions that are shown here took place in the first half of the year, so you are already familiar with them. As a quick reminder, the most important ones were the acquisition of the 67% stake in Port Praski and circa 40% in PakPCE. Moving along to the right, we granted loans in the amount of circa 400 million zlotys net of the first three quarters of 2022. Net, because this item includes not only loans granted to PACPCE to support investments in renewable energy sources and accelerate the execution of our strategy, but also repayment of some loans of disposed subsidiaries. During our last meeting, I flagged the settlement of the tax on the gain related to the disposal of our mobile infrastructure, which was a significant one-off factor reducing our cash flow in Q2. We systematically repay our debts, both under our SFA and the debts of newly acquired companies. 838 million zlotys in total in nine months, and finally, our share buyback program consumed 340 million in May 2022. At the end of the third quarter, cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet amounted to almost 1.6 billion zlotys. My last slide concerns the group's debt. As mentioned before, net debt to EBITDA increased to 2.64 times, firstly, because the positive EBITDA contribution from the sale of NETCO is no longer there, and secondly, due to the scale of our support for clean energy projects. As I have signalled many times before, this last factor is going to drive net leverage up further in the coming quarters because executing our strategy in the area of clean energy is our number one priority. The average interest cost has stabilised at the level of 8.4% after a series of sharp hikes over the past months. This is an external factor to us. However, please remember that approximately 30% of our interest rate exposure is favourable hedge with the positive cash contribution reaching nearly 80 million over nine months. Like Mirek and Maciej said, we operate in turbulent and uncertain times and the economic situation is far from comfortable. I would just like to say that I'm extremely happy that our top line is growing at a healthy pace because that means that business is doing just fine. I believe that with time we will adapt and mitigate the negative external pressures. Financing the uninterrupted continuous growth of our business remains my priority. Thank you. Mirek, back to you for the summary.

Nicely said, Kasia. I fully agree. Thank you, Kasia, Staszek and Maciek, for your presentations. Let me quickly summarize the third quarter and we will be ready to answer your questions. We are successful in pursuing our Multiply strategy, which is centered around value creation and increasing customer loyalty. This translates into a record low level of churn of only 6.8% and growing RRPU 71.3 zł. As a result, we enjoy stable recurring retail revenue growth. We are dynamically implementing our strategy 2023 plus in the clean energy segment. We have contracts in place for over 190 MW of power from wind farms. We are also dynamically implementing the 2023 plus green hydrogen strategy. We are installing an electrolyzer, building the first public hydrogen refueling station and the hydrogen bus factory. And at the same time, we are actively promoting the Neso bus. Following the acquisition of Port Praski, we signed a cooperation agreement with HB Revis, the developer of the tallest office building in Europe, located in Warsaw. In the mid-term, we will work together on the construction of office space in the Port Praski complex. Our strategy 2023 Plus blends in with the dynamically evolving economic landscape, the needs of our customers, as well as the stable planned development of our business. And, as our today's presentation clearly shows, we continue investing in the development of a more and more diversified business, despite headwinds coming from an unfavorable macro situation. Thank you very much for your attention.

Thank you. Right now we will begin the question and answer session. To ask a question please post your question in the chat section or simply raise your hand. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you want to ask a question, please raise your hand or put the question in the chat section. Okay, we got two questions via email from Nora Nagy, Erste Bank. The first one is, can we expect a full hedge of energy expenses from Q3 2023 onwards when the wind power generation and the expansion of the photovoltaic farm in Brzezów become operational?

Okay, Maciej Stas, let me answer this.

We are very excited about the new renewable energy projects, especially the wind farms, because they are our first wind projects. Nevertheless, they are still too small to fulfill the needs of our group. Let me remind you that in 2021, internal energy use of Portsat Plus group was about 350 gigawatt hours. So this number includes the energy needs of the mobile infrastructure, which we have sold to sell next. And in fact, after the expansion, the Brudze plant will have the total capacity over 82 megawatts and the two wind farms that they will be completed by the end of 2023 will have between 27 and 28 megawatts of capacity. So they are relatively small and they won't cover our internal needs fully. But please remember that we are going to consolidate the biomass business also next year. This is where full energy price hedging will come from. The energy production from the two biomass turbines already exceeds our internal needs even. I can say additionally that biomass is a stable source of energy and we will use it to balance production from solar and wind according to the needs. So the future in this segment energy hedging is bright for us.

Thank you, Maciej. The second question of Nora Nagy refers to OPEX. The question is, what's the outlook for employee expenses next year?

It's very difficult to say what will be exact outlook for the employees expenses next year. First of all, we have the blended effect The first effect is of the, what Maciek said, will be consolidating the green energy assets and especially the biomass plant with Holitz crew. And the second effect obviously might be the market, but at the moment we already see the signs that the employee dictating the prices market is declining at the moment. So I don't know how it will look in next year. So it's really, really hard to estimate that.

Thank you. We also have a question from Mr. Marek Buczak. Mr. Marek would like to know what's the targeted leverage ratio in the mid-term? Should it fall below two times the net debt to EBITDA?

In the mid term, I don't suppose it will fall below two times, but we'll see.

Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you want to put the question, please raise your hand or put the question in the chat section. I don't see any hand being raised, so I'm passing the floor to Mr. President.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your participation in today's presentation of our group's operating and financial results. Since this is our last meeting this year, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and all the best in the new year and see you in 2023. Goodbye. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.