Telekom Austria Ag

Good morning. We're looking forward to presenting you the events of Q3, not only the results of Q3. And the two best people to do so is our management board, our CEO, Alejandro Plata, and our deputy CEO, Thomas Arnoldner. I may hand over to Alejandro to start with, please.

Hello, good morning everyone and thank you for joining our call. We will give you a little bit of highlights of Q3 at some focus points and then a little bit of additional information. Let me start with the highlights of Q3. As you were aware of, it was an eventful quarter as we had anticipated in different calls and in capital market days since We executed the spin-off of our tower business by the creation of euro tele-sites. Of course, that had a lot of implications in our results. One of the implications, and I will explain this in a little bit more detail, is that Telecom Austria reduced financial debt by 1 billion euros. which takes our debt excluding leases to a beta ratio to 0.4 times, very, very low, now probably the lowest in our industry, but that we had anticipated already. But as a consequence of that, we had also several special effects in the quarter that I will explain a little bit later. Revenues grew 3%, driven primarily by service revenue, which went up 4.5%. We saw a little bit slow decline in equipment sales in Austria due to very large business last year, and also in Bulgaria for the same reason, but the service revenue trends are very solid. We also had in the quarter a big impact on the exchange rate in Belarus, affecting revenues by 33 million and EBITDA by 14 million. And as I said before, EBITDA was affected by several one-off effects. These special factors had a negative impact of 7 million euro. On top of that, we had a 14 million euro impact of currency in Belarus, and also effect on restructuring provisions that we did last year and adjustment on the restructuring provision. If we remove all these effects, one of effects, EBITDA growth would have been close to 6% in the quarter, which I believe is very solid performance. We also been informed that we are going to be, we have been put back in the ATX as part September 18th of 2023. Also, we share in our capital market days our ambition for 2024 to 2026. which you can see in the slide. So we expect revenue to increase between 3% and 4% per year during the period, EBITDA between 4% and 5%. Our total investment in the period will be close to 3 billion euro plus frequencies. And we have put our baseline dividend now at 32 cents. Development of the dividend will depend on the performance of the company moving forward. If we move into customer-related information, we still see a nice growth on the mobile subscriber base, primarily driven by M2M SIM cards or IoT contracts. If you exclude that M2M, the mobile base is pretty stable. And when you look at the fixed use, you can see that on the quarter has been quarter of a quarter stable. But what is more important is year over year broadband and TVR use has been growing close to 4%, which is, I think it's a very. solid performance in the business that is actually driving growth. We still see a decline in fixed-voice ARP use, and this will continue as that service is losing, of course, momentum. RPLs and ARP has been also growing steadily. This is in local currency because we want to extract the impact of the valuation in order to see the true performance on operational performance. So you see RPL growing close to 3% and ARPU 5.4%. If we go to the next slide, you can see a summary of the group results. Keep in mind that we have a span of the towers basically the last week of September. Therefore, all these numbers are not including that. You will see that fully reported in the full year results. So you can see that service revenue grew in the quarter 4.5%. As I said before, equipment revenues driven primarily by LACE ICT hardware projects declined almost 6%. with an impact of total revenues of 2.6%. And we are very, very happy with the performance on service revenues of 4.5%. In cost and currency, of course, this is even a faster growth. When you see the components of growth, you see that the mobile core business is growing 5%. Qs, or FMS as we call it, is growing 14.4% year-to-date. and broadband ITV is growing 8.3%. There are two areas that are declining. One is fixed voice revenues, primarily in Austria, and the other one is interconnection that is mostly, but not only, regulated interconnection impacts. Solution and connectivity, or what we call ICT services, is still growing very heavily at almost 11%. When you see revenue growth per market, you can see that the outliers have been Bulgaria with 18% revenue growth year-to-date, followed by Croatia, which has also been improving performance in Q3 due to primarily indexation, and all the international business performing pretty good. If we read down a little bit on Austrian numbers, and again, Austria, especially the beta, has been highly influenced by all these one-off effects that I was describing at the beginning of the presentation. Service revenue grew 2.5%. Unfortunately, with lower equipment sales, we see a little bit of two trends there. We had a very big ICT business last year that we did not replicate in this September. That's one effect. But also we see a little bit losing momentum hardware sales for the mobile business as well that we see that is coming with a slight shift into SIM only tariffs. On the fixed, we are working a lot to stabilize the fixed broadband install base. We see improvements slowly by being very strategic in our promotional activities. Now we have 10 months for free for broadband and TV, and we continue to do different commercial activities in order to protect our customer base in PBI. If I move to the international business, Well, it's very strong performance in almost all operations, despite the negative effects that we just described. Bulgaria, very solid in all business areas, ICT, fixed and mobile, driven by a combination of indexation, upselling the base, and also growing customer base. Croatia, a very good quarter as well. We were postponing indexation. We executed after the summer, and you see in service revenues now the full impact of that activity. Belarus, in local currency, performing very well, despite the fact that we have not done a lot of price increases, but unfortunately, due to the FX effects, have a negative Euro development. Serbia still remains very solid. in customer growth and ARPU growth, very stable and good performance, and probably the most challenging market that we have today is Slovenia with high competition. We are managing to grow service revenues and revenues, but we are struggling a little bit delivering a beta due to, among other reasons, electricity prices, but not only that. If I move to the P&L, I want to emphasize again that these are preliminary results. The Euro tele-site business has yet to be deconsolidated. Not a lot of impact in the quarter, but nevertheless, I have to mention this. We will, at the end of the year, show the full impact of the full deconsolidation of the tower business. If I move to the implications on the debt, on the Euro-Telesites creation, if you go to the next one, thank you, you can see that our total financial debt has been decreased to 878 million euro, which is an average cost of debt of just below 2%, and with a maturity of almost three years. We still have a line of credits of close to 1.5 billion that we can use in case of need, which I don't think so. Credit ratings have been, of course, reflecting our operational performance. And it's good to mention that now, after the spin-off, our debt to EBITDA is 0.4, as we have been anticipating, you know, the calls once we deconsolidate our tower business. This financial flexibility, we are planning to use it in three areas. One is to find CapEx opportunities or investments opportunities in different markets to accelerate growth. The other area, we are going to look at targeted M&A. We have nothing concrete now, more focusing in market consolidation. And the third one is to analyze our long-term dividend policy aligned with basically our operational performance. So having said that, I would like to hand over to Thomas to drive us to some focus points and afterwards to close the meeting.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Alejandro. Also, welcome from my side. Obviously, the most significant event in the past quarter was the spin-off of our tower business, which I would like to recap briefly. The company named Eurotelesites, or ETS as we now usually call it, was spun off and listed on the prime market of the Vienna Stock Exchange at the 22nd of September. As you know, Telekom Austria shareholders received one ETS share for every four Telecom Austria shares. As of today, the combined market capitalization of Telecom Austria and ETS is around about $900 million above what it was when we first announced the transaction in February. So I believe it was a nice value creation for our shareholders. As you know, and as we have explained in much more detail on the Capital Markets Day in September, we have contractually secured long-term access to the towers for Telekom Austria. As Alejandro just pointed out, this spin-off allows us to focus much more on our core business, which does not obviously include the management of the towers, and it allows us to allocate our budget more efficiently. As it was explained previously on the financial side, the impact is very limited, especially on the revenue side, based on the pro forma figures in 2022. However, what is significant, as it was just explained, is that we transferred one billion of debt to Eurotailor's side, and our financial debt has increased by the same extent. And it was just explained net debt over EBITDA after leases now roughly halved to 0.4. On the BLEEP side, our pre-cash flow will increase by roughly 60 million euros per year on average as a result of this transaction. If we move to the next slide, as we did in previous calls, we like to point out our activities on the ESG side from time to time because it's very fundamental for us. one of the key enablers within our strategy. You know that when it comes to sustainability, a key challenge is to reduce our emissions. We have progressed a lot on Scope 1 and 2 emissions. Today, we would like to focus a little bit on Scope 3 emissions. These are those emissions which we cannot influence directly, but only indirectly, because they are generated in our value chain. We see that out of our overall emissions, 85% of our emissions are scope 3 emissions. And within scope 3 emissions, 65% are coming from purchased goods and services. And therefore, it's really essential for us to address those and to address those in close collaboration with our suppliers. We have set up a dedicated program for that. which I would like to explain in a little detail. In order to reflect the different ESG profiles which we have among our suppliers, we have performed this year a category-based risk mapping, which covers around 80% of our total spend and our suppliers we categorized based on two dimensions on the average ESG risk and their supply chain complexity as you can see here on the left-hand side. And with the categorization, we took different steps for each of the vendors. The low-risk vendors obviously were not required to do anything. The medium-risk vendors were required to submit a sales declaration at this stage. In high-risk vendors, we even performed site audits based on the check standards. we are quite happy i must say with the engagement level of our suppliers and their commitment to the process because so far more than 95 percent of them um have responded on the other side of the supply chain downstream on the customer side is also our aim to support a more sustainable behavior we have a huge number of initiatives um few i wanna point uh out uh they all have uh the objective um to offer products and incentives in favor of lower emission behavior and in favor of circularity. You can see here a few, for example, working with trade-in oil vouchers in various markets so that customers return their devices. Or we have also launched an eco phone, which has higher standards of sustainability. With that, we remain 100% committed over both the short, medium, and long term to achieve our target goal, which on Group 3 emissions is a reduction of 60% until 2030. When we move to the next slide, a few words on the fiber rollout in Austria. First of all, I want to point out that clearly the number one in terms of fiber rollout volume and speed also this year. We see that within our rollout now, average takeoff rates are going up. They are at 35% roughly now, which is still below our expectations, but significantly higher than it was in the last year, which shows the positive effect of our promotions. in a market that traditionally favors mobile solution. And we believe this is a strong confirmation of our FIBA strategy. For this year, we plan to add additionally around 160,000 homes passed both in FIBA to the home and FIBA To the building, as previously announced, we would like to do even a little bit more, but there are quite some bottlenecks as the market is a little bit overheated. At the moment, we have bottlenecks on the available resources and with rising prices, and we don't want to additionally overheat the market, so it's the 160,000 we are aiming for now this year. And two last words on the outlook. First, for the remainder of this year, 2023, where we are confirming The guidance, we have not changed it. Again, total revenue growth of around 5%, and CapEx, including Spectrum, expected to come in at around 950 million euros. Last reminder, as Alejandro said at the very beginning, here the ambition we laid out at the capital markets, the September revenue growth, 3% to 4%, EBITDA growth, 4% to 5% per year over the period 2024 to 2026, in graphics to come in at around 2.8 billion euros plus. Assuming current inflation and exchange rate expectations. And as Alejandro explained, we have raised the dividend baseline to 32 cents per share to grow aligned with the improvement of the operational and financial development of the company. With that, thank you for this.