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Hello and welcome to the year-to-date 2023 results SES SA announces financial results for the 9 and 3 months and the 30th September 2023. My name is Laura and I will be a coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded and for the duration of the call your lines will be on listen only. However, you will have the opportunity to ask questions at the end of the call This can be done by pressing star 1 on your telephone keypad to register your question. If you require assistance at any point, please press star 0 and you will be connected to an operator. I will now hand you over to your host, Richard Whiting, Head of Investors Relations, to begin today's conference. Thank you.

Thanks, Laura. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining this analyst and investor call for our year-to-date 2023 results. We appreciate you accommodating the change of date given the material agreement just signed. This morning's presentation was uploaded along with the press release to the investor section at SES.com if you don't already have it. And as always, please note the disclaimer at the back of the documents. In a moment, Rui Pinto, CEO, will present the main business highlights, followed by Sandeep Jalan, CFO, to cover the financials in more detail. After some closing remarks from Rui, we will take your questions. And on that note, let me hand over to Rui.

Thanks, Richard. Good morning, everyone. Again, our apologies for changing the date, but we wanted to give you an Empower update that is material for our company, and that justifies just advancing it by a couple of days. So please, starting on page three, let me go through the highlights of our announcement. I'm really pleased that our year-to-date financial performance has been good, solid and good. Our networks business has delivered growth on the back of positive outturns across each of the three sectors, government, global in the U.S., mobility, and fixed data enterprise and cloud. Also, on our media video segment, our revenue performance was consistent with our expectations, and we have signed and are signing important long-term news across our valuable TV neighborhoods. A couple of examples, Telefónica in Spain, Canal Plus in Africa, and I'll elaborate a little bit more during the call, but it's a really good performance from our video team. Therefore, we are on track to deliver our full year 2023 financial outlook. And I have to say that it's really pleasing to see that result. I'm also delighted to announce that following the FCC certification of our phase two USC band clearing, we have now collected the incentive payment of $3 billion gross pre-tax. This is a true milestone. We have been working on it for quite some time, as you all know. We enabled the accelerated deployment of 5G service in the US while preserving our key customer services and realizing substantial value to the company. And having that milestone ticked off is really a feather in the cap of the team that achieved it. We're already putting a portion of these proceeds to work in a very disciplined way. We announced the share-by-back program of up to €150 million, and we intend to start executing on that program with practically immediate effect in November 2023. At the same time, we have decided to call the hybrid bond of €550 million in line with our objectives of reducing leverage and lowering our overall cost of debt. If we could please move to page four, and I'll jump straight to the Empower update. And let me start there. On one hand, it's disappointing that we are not being serviced as early as we would have hoped. But clearly, we as a company have to get this right. And we work hard and extensively with our partner supplier, Boeing, to make sure that, one, we understand the causes of the phenomena that we have observed in space. And two, and more important, that we have a solid plan moving forward to deploy the Empower constellation. We have made a lot of progress towards identifying the causes of the Empower module issues that I have mentioned back in August. With four satellites in orbit, we collected, quite frankly, a really good amount of data. And we're now in a position to not only understand what is happening, but also to have a technical fix for the problems. I also have to say that after this assessment and investigation over the last few months, we determined that the initial satellites in orbit, we will have a significant reduction in anticipated operational lives and available capacity. However, one of the beauties of these extremely flexible software satellites is that we can trade that. In other words, if our model indicates that we are being, for example, pessimistic on the longevity of these satellites, we can trade that by adding capacity to the constellation and vice versa. This flexibility allows us to be confident that we can start our service in early Q2 2024. Importantly, and I should mention that very clearly, we expect that with the mitigations in place, our existing O3B meal constellation customers will be supported, as well as the O3B Empower customers. We still room for further customers and market growth from early Q2 next year. We always like to keep, personally, a bit of margin, but this may be as early as April if our tests continue to proceed as we planned. However, it's a little bit later by a quarter than what we planned before. Therefore, you know, we have to adjust the expectations that you all have on the start of service of the constellations. Furthermore, we continue to work and we are going to deliver on the full life cycle capabilities of the O3BM power constellation. And we are going to be upgrading the remaining five satellites and deliver an additional two satellites with Boeing beginning not only the remedy or the fixing of the design weakness that we identified, but also the construction of two new and power satellites that will be delivered in record time. Including our agreement with Boeing, which we finalized yesterday, confident that we are going to accommodate this additional investment within our existing CAPEX envelope from 2023-2027. And this is a mix of our material agreement with Boeing, where Boeing and SES are sharing the risk, and possibly insurance proceeds, but that is still being investigated depending on the performance of the satellites in orbit. Therefore, it's expected that the impact of the O3BM power delay of one quarter will be in the order of mid-single-digit percentage lower in terms of 2024 revenue and adjusted EBITDA. However, we are not giving up on that, and there are potential mitigations. We are looking at how can we best optimize our extensive MEO and GEO fleet so that we serve our customers and preserve as much of our revenue. We are preserving our backlog of of sizable and important customers. And there are a number of strategic programs that we are working on, some of them you know, that may help us mitigate the impact of this delay. This is a solid plan. We are confident on that plan. And it will enable our customers to already benefit from those 3BM power systems from early next year, from Q2 next year. and it will focus on delivering a capable system to the market which should be the bedrock of the long-term success of our networks business as one example and to allay say maybe some of the possible concerns we have done a successful demonstration of empower f1 and f2 in india at the india mobile congress with our partner alliance geo they branded this the geospace fiber and we have demonstrated gigabit per second capabilities for a number of remote sites alongside CHEO, including a demonstration to Prime Minister Modi, and that was just last week. So this was actual data, actual satellites, actual demo, demonstrating the capabilities of the Empower constellation in orbit as we had planned. So on that note, let me move quickly to the key elements of our year-to-date performance. On the next slide, please. Our revenue of 1.5 billion euros year-to-date is fully in line with expectations. In the last nine months as well, we have signed a total of 1.3 billion euros of contract renewals and new business wins across the group. I couldn't be more pleased with that outcome given the fact that competition is intense in all our sectors, certainly on the network side. This result includes 835 million euros of revenue on the three network verticals. A couple of notable wins are the Mexico CSE program using SCS17, and it's a pleasure to be able to help with digital inclusion in Mexico. We have had several U.S. current awards. One that is notable is the Air Force Ducey program that we have won. And there are other deals as well in the aviation cruise customers section as well. We also did sign a partnership with Starlink, which benefits our customers and increases our market penetration in the cruise sector, and we are very proud of that. This is all complemented by 445 million euros backlog that we have secured in video. Notably, some multi-year transponder renewals with Telefonica in Spain, the successful expansion of UKTV until the end of the decade, the renewals of Canal Plus in Africa, renewals of QVC, RTL HD Plus, and a number of others. Our media video team has been very diligent and disciplined in trying to withstand market pressure in terms of price, and even sometimes being able to index some of our contracts, and that's a good outcome. We're also maintaining a strong grip on costs, and discretionary spend with an adjusted EBITDA of 792 million euros. If we could move down to page six, please. Third quarter revenue grew 8.6% year-on-year for networks, and it's really good to see the rebound on government, 15% year-on-year. It's a priority sector for us, where we feel that we have differentiated capabilities. This resulted in year-to-date results being 5% higher than in 2022, including growth in all three verticals. You can also spot from the bullets that the sector where we have more intense competition is fixed data, but even there, we achieved a 2.3% year-on-year growth. If we move on to page seven, please. On the video side, as I trailed just before, We are tracking really well against forecast. We saw a reduction of 2.5% year-on-year in the third quarter. That contributed to the last nine months underlying a revenue closing of 3.2% lower versus 2022. These are secular trends that we are all familiar with, and we believe that we are better than the competition, certainly this year. These trends continue to be largely lower volumes in mature markets with pricing stable to increasing and contract duration remaining very healthy and strong and long. The small sector of sports and events is one that we are very proud of because we are seeing a lot of growth in there, including a contract with FIFA that is notable that we managed to get. With that, I'll hand over to our CFO, Sandeep, to give more details on the financials, please.

Thanks, Jorge. Good morning, everyone. Starting with the financial highlights on page nine, and as Rui already explained, the brief highlights, reported revenue for the first nine months was 7% up year on year to Euro 1.494 billion euros, including the full contribution from acquisition of DRS GES that we completed in August of last year. On a like for like basis, our revenue was slightly higher compared to year to date September 2022. Adjusted EBITDA of €792 million was about 5% lower, both on a reported basis as well as on a like-for-like basis. This represented a margin of 53%. Adjusted net profit was €180 million, and I will cover this in a moment in more detail. The financial outlook for 2023 is fully reaffirmed, with revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and CAPEX each being on track versus the outlooks we gave in February this year. Moving now to the net income walk on page 10. Adjusted EBITDA was 37 million euros lower compared to year-to-date September last year, and it was driven by four main components as shown in this table. First, 6 million euro positive from the scope effects of the DRS-GES acquisition and Forex. Second, 5% growth in networks of 37 million euros, including the periodic revenue of 7 million euros that we have recognized in quarter one of this year. The third component is video declined by 33 million euros, including the periodic effects. On an underlying basis, video was 3% lower year on year, which represents an improvement versus the 7% decline that we reported last year for 2022, and we are pleased with this flattening trajectory. Finally, recurring OPEX was higher by 47 million euros as we had anticipated with our guidance. Below adjusted EBITDA, lower interest expense contributed positively to adjusted net profit by 27 million euros versus the prior period. The main movements leading to adjusted net profit of euro 180 million were almost entirely non-cash, particularly high depreciation linked to a CS17 being in service, additional amortization and lower net forex gain than the prior years. The difference between adjusted net profit and reported net profit of 682 million euros is primarily explained by the CBAN income related effects. We are very pleased by a fantastic execution of the CBAN project with full success and 100% proceeds have now been realized in cash, mostly in October. First effect is that we have recognized a significant CBAN net income of €2.7 billion, which is close to $3 billion. This income recognition also implies that we have converted an intangible asset on our balance sheet into real cash. And hence, we have also recorded a non-cash impairment charge of €1.55 billion on the intangible assets triggered from this recognition of CBAN income. We have also recognized that tax payable on these proceeds of about half a million euros, which after including other positive effects from impairment effects, et cetera, amounted to a net charge of 0.44 billion euros in the P&L. Moving now to page 11. We continue to focus and maintain a strong and sector-leading balance sheet with investment-grade metrics, now further bolstered by U.S. C-band proceeds, fully realized in cash by now. Adjusted net debt at 30th September was 3.7 billion euros. We have not only a low cost of funding around 3%, but also healthy maturity profile of seven years, with only 400 million euros of senior debt falling due for maturity during the next couple of years. leverage stood at 3.5x essentially unchanged from the end of last year Now, since the end of September, as we reported, we have fully received the Phase II CBAN incentive payment of $3 billion. We expect to pay the tax of €1 billion, and we will now start the share buyback of €150 million that we had announced in August. This buyback represents the maximum amount authorized by our AGM resolution that demonstrates our belief in the business fundamentals. We also intend to exercise the call on the 550 million euros hybrid bond at the upcoming maturity in January 2024, thanks to the C-band proceeds that we have realized. Hybrid bonds continue to remain an integral part of our capital structure, including the 2026 hybrids that we have on our sheet. Additionally, we expect a further $445 million of USC bank cost reimbursement. The process of reimbursement remains much slower than our expectations. Nonetheless, we have so far received over $0.9 billion of reimbursements and continue to engage with the clearinghouse to process our standing claims. When adjusting for these items, this leaves a pro forma adjusted net debt of around 1.5 billion euros a net leverage of around 1.5x. We remain committed to using the CBAN proceeds in the best interest of shareholders and expect to provide further clarity with the full year results in February. In the meantime, the cash is earning interest income of more than 5%. With that, I will hand back to Rui for the conclusions.

Thanks, Sandeep. I appreciate that. So to sum up on page 13, please, I'm clearly pleased with our continued strong financial performance, which means we are fully on track to achieve our financial targets for 2023. We now have the substantial C-band proceeds, which further support what I'm sure is a sector-leading financial position and strength. We are deploying as Announced before, 150 million euros share by back program, and we are exercising our option to call the hybrid in keeping with our commitment to be financially disciplined and lowering our cost of debt. As you heard from Sandeep, we expect to provide further clarifications regarding the financial policy at the end of February next year, but that's a good problem to have, if you ask me. While I appreciate that today's news on O3BM Power will require a little bit more patience from the market as we work to deliver the Constellation's full lifecycle capabilities and growth potential, we can look forward to starting services in Q2, early Q2 next year, with the ability to still support our existing O3BM Power customers, as well as additional service and market growth. We have a solid plan to manage the near term operational shortcomings, deploy five satellites that will have a design improvement addressing the issues that we have been basically investigated, embedding two brand-new satellites to the constellation alongside our partner point. These will ensure that SES will deliver the highly differentiated capabilities of O2DM power and will deliver long-term growth and success to our network's business. So we did the right thing here. I'm really pleased that we have a solid plan going forward, despite the fact that we are not exactly where we wanted to be in terms of schedule. With that, thank you very much, and we are happy to take questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Thank you. We'll now take our first question from Alexander at Societe Generale. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yes, good morning, and thank you for taking my question. I just have two. The first one would be, should investors expect any further capital allocation decisions beyond the reimbursement of the high bridge that you just announced and the 150 million buyback that was previously announced? Is there more to come still in this front, or are you happy with your capital structure right now? And then the follow-up is just on the impact of the Empower delay. Which of the three verticals in networks is going to be more affected and which one less? So we can model this correctly. Thank you.

Hi, Alexander. So on your first question, clearly the hybrid continued to remain an integral part of our capital structure. We have two hybrids in our balance sheet. as we stand today with the CBAN proceeds in our pocket and the current capital market conditions. We have the upcoming call on these hybrids in January 2025 that we intend to call. Of course, these are decisions that we will continue to take, taking into account the latest capital market conditions These instruments may be quite costly in the market. Regarding further clarity on the financial policy, as I already spoke earlier, we are currently assessing our plans, and with our annual results in February, we'll be giving more clarity. The current share buyback program is already at the maximum level of 150 million euros, which is authorized by our annual general meeting. Clearly, the direction of the financial policy remains a solid financial policy with a heavy focus on investment grade, stable to progressive dividend and disciplined investments, and clearly with the C-Bank proceeds now in pocket and with our upcoming focus on the next year plans that we are currently assessing, this is something we will engage with our board and provide more clarity as we go forward at the end of February.

Thanks, Alexandre. Commenting on your second question, we believe that the differentiated high throughput and flexibility of Empower is stronger on government and mobility. We are quite confident that our growth plans and ambitions on those two sectors are going to be minimally impacted by this delay. But I would also say that on fixed data enterprise and cloud, the competition and the price erosion is intense. So every month that we delay, of course, there is a little bit of an impact. So if you wanted to put an order, I would say government and mobility are still a strong sector for us, and enterprise and cloud or fixed data is a sector where we have to pay more attention. Perfect. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll now move on to our next question from Roshan at Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for the questions. I've got a few on the Empower, please. Firstly, the backlog this quarter, understandably, I guess it didn't move up materially versus previous quarter. And you do highlight a big chunk is protected backlogs. But is there a risk that, given that we've had this additional delay, customers go to some of the alternatives? Rui mentioned mobility and government being key verticals. We have seen a few competitors make a bit of progress here on that front, having signed capacity contracts. Is there anything you could say that would be useful, please? On the CAPEX envelope and the two incremental satellites, You mentioned scope for insurance payouts. Have you got clarity that you will receive that, or is this something which you are looking to investigate, please? Sticking with the CAPEX, you highlight that the lifetime of the existing satellites in orbit has been shortened. I guess in this Current evolution, we are talking about shorter capex cycles, but is there now a risk that you have to start getting the next iteration of Empower up and running, given the shorter life frames, please? And lastly, just on the operational front, government had a very strong performance this quarter. Anything on that, or are we now fully washed through the withdrawal of troops from previous quarters that you mentioned, or could we expect this to be a new trend going forward in government? Thank you.

Well, thanks. Let me take the questions in turn. So, on the backlog, the fact that we are going to start our service in early Q2 gives us a high level of confidence that the backlog will not be impacted. We still have margin, a bit of margin in our customer commitments and on our backlog that will give us, that gives us confidence that the backlog will not be impacted given the new in-service date and the launch of Empower F5 and F6. Actually, we are on the manifest with SpaceX for our launch on the 12th of November. So there is margin there. It's not something that is worrying us. Of course, it's not infinite margin, but there is margin, and we are confident that with the start of service in early Q2, possibly even April, that we are not going to have an issue with our protected backlog. On the CAPEX envelope, We have kept, of course, our insurers fully in the loop on the investigation, as we should. But the agreement that we have with Boeing and the sharing of risks that we have with Boeing gives us confidence that we can deploy two additional satellites without impacting our CAPEX envelope and without depending on insurance proceeds. And that's an important point. That does not mean that we are not going to explore the insurance avenue, but it's not a dependency on our CAPEX envelope. Boeing and SES are working together on making sure that this groundbreaking service goes up. It's important for both companies, and we worked extensively with them on how to proceed with their power conservation. In terms of lifetime, I'm not sure I captured the question completely, but as I mentioned in my opening remarks, we have flexibility with these satellites in terms of deploying capacity versus lifetime on the initial satellite. So we can adapt to the ramp-up of our customers. As you can imagine, I mean, we are going to have 12 months give or take period where we will be carefully managing the constellation and we have flexibility and margin to make sure that our ramp-up is fulfilled and protected for our customers. Finally, on government, if I remember the question, you know that government, they have their own cycle in terms of budget and execution and sometimes it's not uncommon for you to have signed contracts that have delays due to milestone delivery or project execution more in government than in other sectors so it's not something that worries us that sometimes it moves to the south because it's guaranteed revenue and guaranteed customers so again not really concerned on that front and just complement you are seeing an effect of this this sort of approach at the end of the year as you start delivering and speeding up. Sorry for the addition there.

That's perfect, very helpful. I'm sorry, just to check, you said 12th of November for satellites 5 and 6 to be launched. So they're on site now, I see.

Oh, yes. They are quite comfortable in Cape Canaveral. Of course, it's no earlier than 12th of November. We are working closely with SpaceX. We are their manifesto. We have our second stage. It's all good to go. So we have an already agreed date. And as you know, in launches, we have a date, a backup date. Sometimes you're subject to weather and other Florida things, but we are there. Perfect. Sounds good. Thank you.

Thank you. And our last question comes from Aitak at Barclays. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hello. Hi. It's Aitak from Barclays. Thanks for the presentation today. So I have two questions. The first one, when we refer to a mid-single-digit impact to revenue and EBITDA next year, are you effectively providing us 2024 guidance for current consensus numbers, like less around 5%, or when we get to February, could there be a series of other things that could change the numbers? And this mid-single digit number is just one part of that. The second one is also related to that, that like when we say a mid-single digit impact before a mitigation, Can we quantify the impact of any potential mitigations that you are looking at, even if we understand that you cannot be confident on this right now? And the final question, overall, are we basically thinking about losing a year in your growth plan, or could the delays and capacity issues also impact your growth in 2025 compared to what you might have hoped before? Thanks a lot.

I think Sandeep and I will take turns. I didn't quite get the first question, but I think it's between guidance and expectations.

Yeah, so clearly a good question. So as we explained to you about the Empower situation, this makes single-digit percent lower revenue and EBITDAs to give you a kind of magnitude that we are looking at, looking at all the components that we explained earlier. these components basically include first a delayed start of service from early quarter two compared to 2023 and 2023 that we're expecting second the necessary operational procedures mitigation procedures that we are putting in place to upgrade these satellites then lower ramp up So these are the current impacts that we are expecting from the Empower-related effects. This is not including any potential mitigation effects. We are, as you can imagine, we are at early stages. We are assessing all the potential mitigations, including usage of our own extensive fleet of satellites, neoclassic, as well as geofleet, and other mitigating actions This is not a guidance for 2024 or beyond, and this is a process that we have in early phases again. We are currently going through our business plans and budgets, and that's a process that we'll undertake in February. In February, you can expect a full year guidance, which will include a comprehensive assessment of empowered situation, the necessary mitigations, and our full-fledged plan, including our geo-capacity, which are a very important part of our fleet. So this is not an annual guidance. This aims to give you a magnitude of the impact that we currently see and transparently tell you our expectation and where the consensus currently stands.

And if I may add on the second question, the third one, Sandeep captured it really well. We have a very diverse business with geocapacity, multi-orbit, neoclassic, video and media, some services, and so on. We do believe that once we dig deep into the planning for 2024, we'll be able to mitigate some of the impact of the power delay. But we're being very upfront here so that you have full visibility of our thinking and we'll come back, as Sandeep mentioned, in February with a fully formed view. There are, for example, programs that we don't put into our business plan because they are speculative or at an early stage. And if we can forecast what we could expect from those programs in 2024, these numbers can change in the right direction. And finally, in terms of growth for 2025, we fully expect that by the end of 24, Q4, or MQ-125, we will have additional capacity coming online in Empower that will not be limited by these small and understandable operational shortcomings. So that we'll be able then to perhaps even have an upside on the Empower growth trajectory depending on market conditions. So I'm actually more optimistic about 2025 because of the plan that we have in place.

Okay, that's clear. Thank you so much.

Thank you. And we'll take our final question from Carl Murdoch-Smith at Barenburg. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

That's great. Thank you very much. Two questions from me. In the presentation, you say that the buyback will start in November. just practically when is the first day that you can go into the market and buy shares? So I take it it's not today, is it? And then, sorry, following on from that, or following on from a question Roshan asked actually, I'd wonder if you could provide a bit more detail on the risk sharing that you've mentioned, Boeing. Is that something new in relation to the scale of delays that there have been over time or is it retrospective and something that's in contracts up front and kind of any detail you can provide in terms of the nature of that risk sharing and how that works practically would be great. Thank you.

So I'll take the first one and give the second one to Uwe. So as you know, we are coming out now out of the closed period. We will start the share buyback as soon as possible. Now the money as well is in the bank. So you could expect that in the coming days. I mean, we are just setting up the mandate, et cetera, as we go out of the closed period starting tomorrow. We will start the buyback as soon as possible.

And on your second question, so the risk sharing, we have reshaped our agreement with Boeing. Boeing and SES, both companies have a strong interest in the success of Empower. It's new technology that is working in space. It's important for Boeing and for SES that that new technology works flawlessly in space and that we can deploy it with our customers. So having a common objective with Boeing was essential to a negotiation that involved the reshaping of the contract, of the agreement where both companies took an element of risk in the delivery and in the capital expenditure and in adding to the capabilities of the constellation. Of course, I cannot disclose any details, but I can tell you that we are together in sharing the risk and investing further on Empower, both buying and SES.

That's great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. There are no further questions in queue. I will now hand it back to Richard for closing remarks. Thank you.

Thanks all. Thanks for joining us. As we said at the start, thanks for accommodating the earlier timing. As ever, myself and the IELTS team remain available if there are any follow-up questions. Have a great day, and if we don't speak, have a wonderful Christmas. Thank you. Goodbye. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. Stay safe. You may now disconnect.