Telia Company AB (publ)

Good morning everyone and welcome to this Q1 2021 results presentation from Celia Company. We have our president and CEO Alison Kirkby with us and CFO Per-Christian Merland as usual and also the IR team. And before we start I would just like to remind you all to please be disciplined and stick to one question each so that we have time for everyone to ask a question. Otherwise, you have a brilliant IR team that can take care of the rest, but please do be disciplined. And by that, I leave the word to Alison.

Good morning, everyone, from, can you believe it, a snowy day in Stockholm. So, apart from the weather, 2021 is the start of a journey to reinvent a better Telia. And I'm pleased that we, in this first quarter of the journey, delivered in line with our expectations, despite increased pandemic-related restrictions across our footprint during this past quarter. As in the prior quarter, our core telco business has remained resilient, while TV and media is rebounding. And ICT was a little bit softer in the quarter, but we believe that is pandemic related. So all in all, we had a service revenue that like for like declined by 2.3%, which is pretty much in line with the level we saw last quarter. EBITDA returned to growth on a like for like basis, thanks to OPEX reductions across the group, down 3%, and some special items in Norway. Indeed, if you look at Norway, TV and media, and our Baltic businesses, they all grew positively in the quarter, compensating for some headwinds in Sweden and Finland. CapEx is broadly flat, as our increased mobile network investment is replacing the cyber investment of Q1 last year. Operational free cash flow was particularly strong at 4 billion kronor, helped by a positive contribution from Working Capital. but the more structural element of operational free cash flow was also good and basically flat year on year at 2.3 billion kroner. This has contributed to a strong closing balance sheet position with pro forma leverage at 2.3 times. As you all know, we launched our new strategy and the turnaround plan for Kelia only in January. It's a multi-year journey. It will take time and investment, but I am encouraged by some of the early progress. So looking at each of the strategic priorities in turn, inspiring our customers, if you recall, is about creating the enablers that will return Telia to top-line growth. It's about combining our network leadership position with brands and digital experiences that will enable growth beyond connectivity. Strengthening our connectivity position, accelerating convergence, and creating differentiated superior customer experiences in both consumer and enterprise segments are our immediate priorities. During the quarter, customer satisfaction as measured by NPS was broadly stable. We're sustaining high levels in the Baltics and we're seeing improvements in Sweden and in Denmark. In Sweden, we're pleased to see the positive trends developing since we invested to increase availability in our call centers, which turned out to be very timely as we saw more restrictions in the quarter. In Norway and Finland, where we need to close the gap to competition, we are seeing now consideration and brand perception improve on the back of 5G, but clearly we have more to do there. We've made good progress on our converged customer base in the quarter, with Sweden growing 38,000, Norway growing 10, Lithuania growing 10, Finland growing 5,000, and also in Finland, we're seeing 50% of all 5Gs that add C-more to their mobile subscription. Convergence is not just beneficial for the consumer segment. And during the quarter, we also saw good progress in the enterprise segment, an example being a renewed but broader contract with the housing company Familia Bosteder, roughly 20,000 tenants, where we'll offer a unique combination of digital services, including broadband, TV, and smart home IoT solutions, with our Sygate business providing public wireless Wi-Fi throughout their estate. After the quarter ended, we landed another similar landlord contract as well, also an existing customer, but now with a larger scope. This is convergence at its best and combines Telia's strengths in the home, combined with our strengths in enterprise and our unique strengths in the IoT and ICT segments. Also in enterprise, we're winning new, highly important governmental contracts, such as a recent win with the Ministries of Foreign Affairs in both Sweden and Norway. Quality networks and security credentials are increasingly important these days for the large and key enterprise, and particularly the public sector. And our security credentials are second to none, and it's a segment that is growing, and we will be a part of that growth. As we explained in January, developing TV and media to its full potential is also a key priority for us, and we are delighted to see it rebounding. We're strengthening our position in both our ad-based free-to-air business and in our Seymour OTT business, gaining both commercial share of viewing in Sweden and Finland and in the growth of Seymour. Moving to the Connecting Everyone strategic priority, which aims to use the catalyst of 5G and gigabit speed-fixed networks to enhance our position in as the most trusted, reliable and efficient networks for the societies of the Nordics and the Baltics. Having secured the largest and best part of the 5G spectrum in Sweden in January, we have just this week secured the 5G spectrum we need in Denmark as well, also at rational pricing levels. The Danish option included many spectrum bands, but together with Telenor, recall we have the TTN shared network there, we secured 140 MHz in the 3.5 GHz spectrum, and two times 20 megahertz in the 2.1 spectrum. We also secured frequencies in the 1.5, 2.3, and 26 megahertz bands. This means that we can now accelerate our 5G network rollout in Denmark. 5G rollout and network modernization continued in the quarter, and we're continuing to see increased penetration of 5G-enabled handsets, now at 50% in Norway and 55% of new sales in Sweden. creating a foundation for monetisation opportunities that we plan for later in the year. Alongside 5G rollout, we're migrating away from and decommissioning legacy, with good progress in Sweden in the quarter, leading to structural cost reductions within both COGS and OPEC, worth 75 million kronor. And we were included again in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for world-leading network services. Finally, teleasset management is up and running, where our initial focus is in identifying partners for our tower portfolios in Norway and Finland. I think we can safely say that interest from external partners is very strong. Transforming to digital is the engine to take us from being a good company to a better and great digital company. As we presented at our investor brief, there are four cornerstones to our digital transformation. Product simplification, process automation, increased use of data analytics to support personalisation at scale, and a radically simplified and leaner IT organisation and infrastructure. The programme is ramping up with more than 500 initiatives identified and providing substance and confidence in our incremental 5 crore ambitions for 2025. 5 billion crore ambitions. We're on track with some visible effects that have contributed to the 3% reduction in our OPEX for the quarter. In the quarter, the progress is mainly being seen in further IT cost reduction through closing of legacy IT systems, generating savings of around 60 million kronor. On simplification, we've reduced the number of Danish products and price plans by 10% in the quarter, and we're now piloting radical product and process simplification in Finland. The headcount reduction target for this year is also on track, with over 400 of the targeted 1,000 exiting already on March 31st, and that will clearly start to benefit us in the coming quarters. And within our TV and media units, we offer customers a mix of analogue and digital inventory, maximising reach to prepare for the increased transition to digital. In recent quarters, we've made a significant step forward with our AVOD platforms, especially for TV4 Play, where we see time spent growing by 36%. This has yielded a strong digital ad revenue growth of 28% in March alone. And you might have seen already, TV4 is the most profitable broadcaster in Europe, still in 2020, despite the pandemic. But now we aim to be the most profitable and the most digitized broadcaster in Europe going forward. Finally, on delivering sustainably, we're off to the start we expected and guided on, even if the pandemic accelerated in our footprint in the quarter. Our dividend commitment is well on track to be fully covered from operating free cash flow, and the proceeds from the Telia carrier divestment are on track to be received in June, as we have now received all of the final approvals required, meaning that we will close the deal on June 1st. On sustainability, Just this week, we presented new targets aiming to support and empower societies within our footprint to reduce CO2 and waste to zero by 2023, to reach 1 million individuals through digital inclusion by 2025, and to continue to maintain and gain customers' trust through strong privacy and security strategies, and all underpinned by a strong governance, ethics, and human rights agenda. I was therefore pleased to see that the Sustainability Brand Index, Europe's largest brand study, measuring the perception of consumers in our markets, recognising our work as the rank of number one in Sweden and the Baltic. Moving to the market and Sweden first. Service revenues declined 2.7%, of which 1% relates to loss of roaming. The rest is explained by an increased decline of legacy copper products, That includes both fixed telephony and XDSL. If you exclude the legacy copper declines and roaming and the mobile one-offs from last year, underlying and sustainable revenue is growing by 1.4% in the quarter, driven by fibre broadband, predominantly through open city networks and TV. This level of underlying growth is very consistent with the level that we saw in the Q4, which was a high for last year. In the consumer segments, where basically stable X roaming with fibre and TV growth offsetting legacy declines. In enterprise, we have a similar stable development underlying, despite continued price pressure in core mobile and intensified competition in SME. Fixed price increases and a strong trend in the large segment are helping to offset these headwinds. Higher equipment volumes, as well as the revenue mix change away from high-margin copper products, did have an impact on gross margin and also EBITDA margins. Despite that, there's been good progress on network costs, as I mentioned earlier, and OPEX is down just over 3%, despite a continued higher staffing level in call centres to support the improvement in customer satisfaction. Just as we did across the footprint, Sweden made a number of staffing reductions at the end of the quarter, and with some pricing moves planned during the second quarter and an acceleration of the transformation programme, We expect to see improved trends in the second half of this year. Quickly, here are some of the underlying drivers of Swedish revenue, confirming the relative stability, if you exclude the roaming impacts. In our mobile business, you can see the stable ARPU ex-roaming. The consumer post-paid base is stable, while the enterprise base was impacted by the loss of a public customer with very low levels of ARPU, which we decided not to fight irrationally to retain. Regarding the mobile pricing environment, it does remain competitive, but no different from what we were experiencing in January. Our larger product portfolio gives us more tools to retain our customers, especially in the large key and public segments. And within SME, we have a large part of the customer base under binding contracts and are value loading mainly through SD-WAN solutions and IoT solutions within automated sustainability where necessary to retain our competitiveness. Within broadband, again, the consumer base is fairly stable, but as we indicated on the previous slide, we do see an accelerating shift from XDSL to fibre, predominantly as we increase penetration within open city networks. Our pool levels are flat as we aim to compensate the dilutive effect from the subscriber mix with price increases or higher speed fibre. On TV, we're continuing to add customers, especially in the MDU segment and from the sports packages we launched during last year. Harpu, as you can see here, is reduced to pre-pandemic levels and clearly the Euros in the summer, including Zlatan, and Champions League in the autumn, we expect TV to grow in the second half. Finland, however, did have a tough start to the year and there are a few factors explaining the 4.5% decline. Roaming was a third of the decline, especially in the enterprise segment. Excluding roaming, were flat in the consumer segment and down 1% in enterprise mobile. Fixed enterprise products, mainly ICT and business solutions, were another third of the decline. In general, we saw less activity and even some delayed projects, which could be to a large extent related to uncertainty following the tighter COVID restrictions. In fact, we did already see improved sales trends towards the end of the quarter. The final third is legacy declines and the legal impact that we have mentioned in prior quarters. OPEX reduced by 4%, predominantly related to lower resource costs, which helped mitigate some of the service revenue decline on EBITDA, which was down 2%. Utilising content and 5G to win the household and becoming the leading orchestrator of digital services to the enterprise are our two key commercial priorities to turn around our finished business. and despite the headline financials, there were some reasons to be cheerful in the quarter. Yes, we're still behind the market leader in 5G rollout, but we are accelerating, and Telia was the operator with the largest improvement in 5G perception during the quarter. This, combined with our content with Access 5G product, is starting to help us build our 5G base. It also helped deliver a strong growth in TV subscribers in the quarter, up 32,000, taking us to a total of direct-to-consumer TV customers of 860,000, which is Telia plus Seymour Subs. 5G rollout, convergence and digital transformation remain our key priorities to return Finland to sustainable, profitable growth. This quarter was clearly a wake-up call and has emphasised a need for speed. Moving on to Norway, service revenues declined by 3.5% light for lights, And this is entirely related to two factors, the first being lower revenues from ICE due to the new contract, and the second, lower roaming revenues. It was, however, good to see stability in the consumer mobile subscriber base at stable ARPU levels in the quarter. We're continuing to see good momentum and positive benefits from the premium Telia X proposition, which now represents 15% of our Telia post-paid customer base. Telia X is not only supporting ARPU, but also sustains a higher NPS level, as high as 37, and our fighter brand, OneCall, has now had 27 consecutive months of positive net ads. As I mentioned earlier, our FMC base is also growing nicely. On the enterprise side, we are gaining customers both in Telia and Fenero. Gradually, Fenero is increasing its scope and has been particularly successful in in the lower end of the SME segment this quarter. We've also just won our largest SD-WAN contract ever with the Norwegian Betting Agency, and we've increased the scope of our contract with the Norwegian Police, which just proves to show that we are building credibility for having very high-quality network position in Norway. Broadband revenues are showing strong growth, both from a slightly higher subscriber base but more importantly from the more-for-more price adjustment we activated in December. TV revenues, however, are declining, but we do have a stable MDU customer base, but churn on SDUs is diluting the ARPU level. OPEX reduced by 11% from continued good cost control and one-offs. This resulted in an excellent EBITDA growth of 16%, two-thirds of which are from non-recurring items. Sorry for the background noise, but that's our automatic blinds going up. Moving to the lead markets, the trend remains strong in our Baltic operations despite increased infection rates and restrictions. In Lithuania, we saw a 4% growth in both mobile and fixed services, where it's especially the consumer segment that is performing well, driven by mobile. In local currency, EBITDA remains at all-time high levels reached in Q2 2020, despite the roaming losses. In Estonia, service revenues were flat on a like-for-like basis as our mobile services were impacted by lower roaming, while fixed revenues continued to perform well, driven by broadband, TV and business solutions. Strong cost control led to an OPEC supply of 5%, supporting EBITDA to grow by 6% on a like-for-like basis. Denmark suffered relatively more than other countries from the loss of roaming revenues and from having the majority of shops closed during the quarter. Our revenues were also impacted by ongoing portfolio rationalisation. That being said, the consumer mobile segment was relatively stable, but we did see a decline in fixed services. The enterprise segment declined in both mobile and fixed. But a combination of lower resource costs, lower marketing, bad debt and effects from the simplification that we've spoken about from a product point of view and the digitalisation we're pursuing there reduced OPEX by 11%, allowing a flattish EBITDA in the quarter. Having now secured the spectrum we need along with Telenor to modernise our networks and roll out 5G, we will now continue to modernise, simplify and digitalise our Danish business. to return it to sustainable growth. And then finally to TV and media, where we had an excellent quarter as it rebounded from pandemic lows. Pay TV was up 10%, while advertising revenues declined by 1% in the quarter, but turned nicely positive in March. EBITDA also improved to deliver 120 million kroner from revenue growth and good cost control. I mentioned the commercial viewing market share progress earlier, supporting the recovery in our free-to-air channels. Late in the quarter, we premiered a new format, The Masked Singer, with more than 2 million viewers per episode on Friday evenings. Remember, Sweden only has 10 million population. It has turned out to be the most successful premiere in the history of TV4, which means TV4 now owns the weekend when it comes to commercial viewing. And here you can see the progress in pay TV, with Seymour OTT growing 20% year on year, and this is before Champions League. Which reminds me to remind you that there will be an increase in content costs ahead, as we have some sports events coming up that we could not broadcast last year due to COVID, for example, the Euros, as well as new content such as Champions League. Clearly, we are on our way to restore and reach our original ambitions from media ownership, driving convergence, increasing loyalty, and becoming the aggregator of all the digital experiences for the home regardless if it's media, connectivity or smart home services. But now I will pass over to PC who will take you through the numbers.

Thank you Alison. Let me quickly summarise the financials for you. As mentioned, total service revenue is down 2.3% in the quarter, or 450 million. As mentioned, around half of this is attributed to the roaming decline. If we take consumer across our footprint, the revenues are stable if we exclude the effect from roaming. Enterprise, however, across the footprint, see a decrease, which is a combination of roaming revenues, negative decline, but also price pressure in some of our key markets. If we break down the service revenue by our unit, of course, all units have impact from roaming. In addition, we see Sweden impacted by a legacy decline. We see that the fixed revenues are putting pressure on the Finland service revenues. In Norway, we see pressure from the revised wholesale agreement with PICE, as earlier announced. And that is partly offset by good growth momentum, both in the Baltics, but also in the TV and media units. So the report to surge revenue of minus 2.3% in quarter is below our outlook for the whole year as a whole, with a stable to slight growth surge revenue. However, if you're looking at... most of the roaming decline year-over-year behind us. Also looking at the good growth momentum and also the easier comparison, both on TV revenues and for our TV media unit. Combining the effect from initiated and planned pricing and high demonetization initiatives, we believe we are well on track to deliver on the outlook for the year in 2021. If we move over to operational expenses, It was a good start of the year, with OPEX more than 200 million down, life for life. Although, as mentioned, there is structural savings in the quarter, but it's not the whole effect that we see. Going forward, however, we expect to see more effects from our transformation agenda and related reductions in our resources, both FTE and also FTCs. If we break down the OPEX development by category, we see that we have a relatively stable resource cost development versus the quarter last year, and these are various cost initiatives implemented across our footprint, offsetting salary inflation and an increased pension cost in the quarter. And then, as Alessa mentioned, towards the end of the quarter, we have reduced our The IP cost is down 60 million in the quarter from structural cost initiatives, and this, we expect, will continue to develop in a positive direction from vendor consolidation, insourcing, and also nearshoring activities. And then over time, we will start to see more effect from the trade-off. transformation with product simplification, process automation, and also IT modernization. Combined travel and bad debt is down 100 million in the quarter versus last year. Travel is down due to lower travel activities from the pandemic. And some of this is expected to return when the societies open up again. But we also expect to see sort of permanent lower travel costs going forward. And I think for 2021, we don't expect any significant changes on the travel area. Bad debt is lower in the quarter, mainly driven by comparisons versus the first quarter last year. So overall, we are well on track to deliver the 1,000 reductions in resources in 2021. And we're also well on track to reduce OPEX by 2 billion by 2023 and 4 billion until 2025. If we move to EBITDA, we reported, as Alison has mentioned, an underlying growth of 2.2%, and this is where off-base and cost reductions are mitigating the pressure on the service revenue. In addition to the off-base decline, we see lower costs from roaming, interconnect, and also network costs. The reduction on the network cost is structural cost savings, particularly in our Swedish business units. If we look at total EBITDA development, how that has developed in a different unit, we see that Sweden is impacted by a combination of revenue declines, but also, as Alison mentioned, the mix of the revenues. Norway is positively impacted with a very strong EBITDA in the quarter, also impacted by the special item mentioned. And TV media is growing by a combination of revenue growth and also lower costs. And then we have smaller positives and negatives in the other business units netting each other out. Our EBITDA growth in Q1 is in line with the yearly outlook, and we are on track to deliver on the EBITDA outlook in 2021. On cash capex, last 12 months, we have delivered $13.4 billion, or 15.1% to net sales. that we have in most of our market. However, our teams have done a fantastic job to mitigate this and keep up to date on the sort of key investments that we have in our program. Going forward, we also see some risks related to the global supply chain situation that can have an impact on the timing of the investment activities and therefore some delays on our capital. But we will, of course, do what we can to mitigate this also going forward. If you look at CapEx in the quarter, we have a stable CapEx development on a cash basis versus last year. Even if we have increased the activities on the mobile network investment related to the mentioned modernization of 5G, we see a somewhat delayed impact on this because of the good payment terms we have on a large part of this spend. As mentioned also, we see a year-over-year decline on the fiber investment in Sweden with around 100 million. So even though the capex level in Q1 is somewhat lower than the full outlook for a year, this is mostly a combination of phasing between the quarters, but also a delayed impact coming from the long payment terms that we have on these activities. On cash flow, we report a rolling 12-month cash flow of 12.8 billion, supported by significant positive contribution from working capital. We also report cash flow excluding working capital at 8.8 billion, still above the minimum dividend commitment of 8.2 billion that is necessary to honor the 2.006 dividend per share that we communicated at the floor. Looking at the cash flow for the quarter, we see stable development on the key structural components of the cash flow, but a positive contribution in the quarter on net working capital versus the change last year of 800 million. And this is, as in the previous quarters, still supported by increased spend on our supplier financing arrangements that we have, and also vendor financing in some of our key markets. So overall, we are well on track to deliver cash flow in 2021 to cover the minimum dividend commitment and from 2022 onwards to cover the minimum dividend commitment by cash flow generation excluding change in working capital. In Q1, our net debt to EBITDA ratio has slightly improved to 2.52 times. Net debt is reduced by 1.1 billion despite a 2.7 billion negative impact from foreign exchange rates and also an increase in change of lease liabilities. As Alison mentioned, we will now close the transaction on the telecarrier deal June 1st. The proceeds from this transaction will reduce the net debt to EVSL ratio down to 2.29 times. And then that will put us well within our targeted leverage range of 2.0 to 2.5 times. If we then summarize with the outlook, I'm taking you through now our outlook on search revenue adjusted EBITDA and also on cash capex. And I mentioned we are well on track to deliver on that, and therefore reiterate our outlook for years. And with that, I will hand over to you, Alison, to summarise the quarter before going into Q&A.