2/29/2024

speaker
Laura
Event Coordinator

Hello and welcome to the SES full year 2023 results call. My name is Laura and I will be your 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 zero 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.

speaker
Richard Whiting
Head of Investor Relations

Thanks. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining this analyst and investor call for our full year 2023 results. This morning's presentation was uploaded along with the press release to the investors section at SES.com if you don't already have it. And as always, please note the disclaimer at the back of the document. The agenda is outlined on page two. In a moment, Adel Al-Saleh, CEO, will present the main business highlights, followed by Sandy Jalan, CFO, to cover the financials in more detail. After some closing remarks from Adel, we will take questions. So with that, I will hand over to Adel.

speaker
Adel Al-Saleh
Chief Executive Officer

Great. Thank you, Richard. I hope everybody can hear me well. Good morning, everyone. I'm delighted to be here in my new role as the CEO of SES. As everybody knows, I officially started February 1st, but in reality, I've been working with the company for a few months now, engaging with the leadership team, meeting key experts, learning the satellite business, getting on board. I joined SES at an exciting time. The industry is gaining traction and speed and attracting big investments. SES is a leader in satellite communications. We serve world-leading customers with critical infrastructures. We have a unique offering in our chosen market segments. We have talented people. We drive innovation. We have strong cash flow and industry-leading balance sheet. I'm pleased to say that all these fundamentals are evident when you look at our 2023 performance, starting with the key highlights on page number four. For the third consecutive year, we have delivered on our revenue and adjusted EBITDA objectives, as well as replenishing our contract backlog with substantial level of new customer deals. With the expansion of our network business, we'll reach an important crossover point whereby our growth revenues and growth segments make up the majority of our revenues. SES was the first to launch an NGSO constellation back in 2014, and the schedule for our next-generation MEO capability, O3B Empower, is on track and will go into commercial service from April this year. Additionally, we'll be launching another two upgraded NEO satellites already at the end of this year. Our next geo-satellite, Astra 1P, is on track to launch during the summer, bringing latest technology to replace the most valuable video neighborhood at 19.2 degrees east. We'll be replacing four satellites with one. With a combination of the CBAN cash and over €400 million of positive adjusted free cash flow in 2023, our industry-leading investment-grade balance sheet is even stronger now. As a result, we're in a privileged position with financial flexibility and resources to deploy capital. We're taking a conscious and cautious approach to the use of this cash to create value and deliver returns to our shareholders. It's a great position to be in. but it's also a tremendous responsibility, and we must make sure and we will make sure that we get it right. Overall, 1.6 billion euros have already been deployed or in the process of being deployed. We acquired DRS-GF earlier in 2023, which expanded our ability to serve valuable U.S. government customers. We're using another 1 billion euros to reduce our gross debt and are deploying 150 million than the share buyback program. We're currently evaluating multiple scenarios, including additional cash returns for shareholders. And we will have some news on this particular point a little bit later in the presentation. We'll apply an even greater level of discipline and financial rigor to ensure we're using this opportunity in the most profitable and value-accretive way. I would expect us to have substantially crystallized our thinking by this summer in time for the half-year results. Our financial performance on page 5 shows that 2023 was operationally a strong year in which we executed on all our financial objectives. A strong performance for networks in the second half of the year contributed to group revenue exceeding expectations, while video also came in at the high end of our outlook. Adjusted EBITDA was impacted by unplanned additional costs in Q4, which Sandeep will explain later. We also prioritized investments, spending 10% less capex and deferring some spending to 2024. Finally, we added to our sizable contract backlog an incredible lineup of customers with €1.5 billion of deals signed in 2023. Looking at just a few of the examples on page 6, you'll see how our offering resonates with customers who are at the center of everything we do. With O3B Empire, we have a strong value proposition for governments who look at us to provide high throughput and flexible connectivity. We have a mission-critical application, so guaranteed security, sovereignty is a must, and we can do that very well. With the Parliament's approval of Mio Global Services, or what we call MGS, the program is valued at 195 million euros over 10 years. With that, the Luxembourg government plans to leverage the O3B empowers to provide critical resilient SATCOM capabilities for Luxembourg, its partners, and NATO. SCS will bring high-performance connectivity for a wide range of sovereign government missions spanning defense, disaster recovery, operations, and digital inclusion. We are confident in our positioning and future trajectory in government segments, especially with Empower beginning service at the expanded portfolio of capabilities and solutions from our space and defense team. I'm going to talk a lot more about the innovative partnership we have with Starlink in a minute. But I'm delighted to say we've signed our first commercial customer for the joint Mio-Lio cruise product. Virgin Voyages offers exclusively adult cruises where passengers get the best of tech-savvy cabins, spas, and designer suites, plus festival-like entertainment and larger-than-life shows. All of this requires superior connectivity. will be empowering Virgin Voyages with unlimited Wi-Fi access across multiple devices to power the best connectivity experience for their customers and crew, as well as cutting-edge operational efficiency. With our video business, we're serving 11 million direct-to-home households in the UK, and our satellites at 28.2 degrees east reach over 60% of the total number of TV homes in the UK. When it comes to high-quality linear content distribution across competitive levels, Satellite is the best solution. This is exactly what our long-time customer, UKTV, said when they were committing to a new contract with SES. In addition to the capacity renewal of UKTV's bouquet of channels, which runs through the end of the decade, the agreement will see us provide new uplinking and ground services and give UKTV the flexibility to add additional capacity to expand to more channels in the future. These are just a few examples. of where SES is doing extraordinary things to empower world-leading customers with critical infrastructures to grow in their operational footprint. On top of that, improving efficiency and giving their end users amazing experience wherever they are on Earth. Those are just a few examples. If you look at page seven, we have a lot more examples. Unfortunately, we're constrained for time to talk about all of these great customers, world-leading companies. We're very proud of serving these customers. Looking at our two businesses in more detail, starting on page eight with networks, which now represents more than 60% of our total revenue. This is a really important crossover in our total portfolio. As you know, now more than half of our portfolio is in the growth segment. The network's growth was 6% last year, and it breaks down between 6% growth in government, with higher revenue from both U.S. and global government segments, double-digit growth of 11%, 11.5% in mobility, where cruise was the standoff performer with new ships added to our portfolio by multiple cruise brands. and we had a robust performance in fixed data. Our network team realized €940 million of signings across Empower, our classic MEO constellation, and our GEO fleet with key wins across all segments. As a result, the networks ended 2023 with a fully protected backlog of €2 billion. This number does not yet include the Luxembourg decision to commit 195 million euros over 10 years to use O3B and power for the MGS program that I mentioned earlier. We also expect this to lead to additional commitments from the U.S. government clients to the MGS program. Turning to video on page number nine, we delivered revenue of 967 million euros, which was at the high end of our expectations. While it's clear that the trend of revenue decline in mature markets will persist, STF delivers premium linear content to nearly 230 million homes across Europe and North America, what we call the mature markets. Because of this, our pricing remains stable and in some cases increasing. Contract duration continues to be long-term with either the same or less volume. This mix is what we will need to manage the business going forward. The long-term cash generation fundamentals of these highly valuable and profitable neighborhoods continue to be strong. And as a proof point, we continue to extend our relationship with these clients for long periods of time. On the other hand, in the international markets, where we serve another 130 million TV homes and growing, our revenue is solid. It's still relatively small today, but our sports and events business is continuing to grow, not only with major tournaments like the Women's World Club, but adding regular leagues and championships to its lineup, which includes English Football League and the NFL. This year's Super Bowl, as everybody knows, was the second most watched event in history, only second to the moon landing, by the way. You won't necessarily have noticed, but SES was there. And I can tell you the customers was really happy with what we did, saying that they had a tremendously successful season in no small part because of SES. We're very proud of that. The continuous relevance of our video business is evident in 540 million euro worth of signings in 2023. In addition to UK TV, which I talked about before, we also signed a major extension with Telefonica Movistar in Spain, a series of renewal with public and free-to-air broadcasters in Germany, and critical new deals in India. This means we have a backlog in video of 2.3 billion euros. Moving to page 10, I'm a huge believer in the importance of technology and innovations, and SEF's has been an innovator leader throughout the history, from being the first to co-locate satellites as a single orbital position, being the first operator in NGSO, being the first to use a reusable rocket, to being the first to deliver services across multiple orbits. Now, with our partnership with Starlink, we are first and the only satellite company that offers solutions across all three orbits. No single orbit is the solution for every customer needs. So being able to give them the ability to operate their networks using the best of all three orbits is compelling. It's compelling for our target customers, and it's compelling for their specific applications. I already talked about our first customer in cruise with Virgin Voyages, and we'd also expect this to be an attractive in other segments as well. The fact that Starlink were excited to collaborate with SCS on a joint solution also shows that we have something highly complementary to bring to the table. Another great example is a proof of concept we just developed with Planet Labs and NASA. where we brought a satellite-to-satellite data relay solution for NASA's operations and missions, including Neo-Leo data interlinks. I want to make sure everybody understands what I said. So this is an interconnection not just between our satellites. This is an intercollection of our satellites with other satellites. operators, satellite constellations. We're able to move data around real-time to deliver important solutions that are relevant to our clients. Lastly, on page 11, a quick update on our future technology. We're on track with all of our planned technology advancements in 2024. With the first six Amp Hour satellites now launched in orbit, we'll begin commercial services in April 2024. Our sales teams have been waiting for this patiently and are ready to go. With a committed customer now ramping up into the system, and of course, for the rest of the year, we'll see a huge uptake of that capability. Delivery of the first two upgraded satellites, which is number seven and eight, is also on track, and we expect to launch them by the end of the year. with satellites 9 through 11 planned to launches in 2025, will further increase our constellation resilience and capacity. With mPOWER, we bring high performance connectivity with an attractive combination of very high download and upload rates, which can scale from hundreds of megabits to multiple gigabits per second. A lot of flexibility and guaranteed service levels. On the ground, we have already delivered more than 150 new Empower customer terminals to clients all over the world, plus signed our first sovereign gateway, so customers are ready to go. We're also innovating in geo with Astra 1P, which is on track to launch this summer. This satellite will be positioned at the most valuable neighborhood 19.2 degrees east, which serves nearly 120 million TV homes worldwide. And it replaces the four existing satellites with the S1. That just tells you the advancement of the technology of this satellite. Later, we'll also add Astra 1Q, which in addition to providing redundancy, brings the ability to expand our network business further in Europe. A fully software-defined satellite, leveraging the latest in digital technology with both, by the way, wide beam and high throughput spot beams. So with that, I would like now to turn over to Sandeep to go through the financial in more detail. Thanks, Siddharth.

Disclaimer

This conference call transcript was computer generated and almost certianly contains errors. This transcript is provided for information purposes only.EarningsCall, LLC makes no representation about the accuracy of the aforementioned transcript, and you are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the information provided by the transcript.

-

-

Investor presentation