Liberty Latin America Ltd. (NASDAQ:LILA) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
Liberty Latin America Ltd. (NASDAQ:LILA) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript February 23, 2024
Liberty Latin America Ltd. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for standing by. Today's call is being recorded. I will turn the call over to Eduardo Diaz Corona, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Liberty Puerto Rico.
Eduardo Diaz Corona: Good morning. And welcome to Liberty Latin America's Full-Year 2023 Investor Call. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. Following today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. Today's remarks may include forward-looking statements, including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook, its future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical fact. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements.
For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Liberty Latin America's most recently filed annual report on Form 10-K along with the associated press release. Liberty Latin America disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement or information is based. In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, which can be found in the appendices to this presentation, which is accessible under the Investors section of our website. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Balan Nair.
Balan Nair: Thank you, Eduardo. And welcome everyone to Liberty Latin America's fourth quarter results presentation. I'll begin with a group highlights and an overview of our operating results by reporting segment. Chris Noyes, our CFO, will then follow with a review of the company's financial performance. After that, we will get straight to your questions. As always, I'm joined by my executive team from across the region and I will invite them to contribute as needed during the Q&A following our prepared remarks. As a point of housekeeping, we will both be working from slides, which you can find on our website at www.lla.com. Starting on slide 4 and our highlights for the year. We consistently grew our high speed internet and postpaid mobile bases through the year, adding 186,000 subscribers in total.
This represents an overall increase of 5% in our base and is evidence of the volume growth potential in our regions we have previously discussed. Broadband performance was particularly robust, with growth across our reporting segments. We reported adjusted OIBDA of $1.7 billion in the year, representing a 6% year-over-year increase. This is our best rebased growth performance since 2019 and was driven by double-digit growth in C&W Caribbean, Panama, and Costa Rica. We grew despite the shortfall in Puerto Rico. We continued to also allocate capital for buyback programs with $300 million between stock and convertible purchases in the year. We anticipate that convertible bonds will represent the majority of our buyback this year, with $220 million currently outstanding and due in July.
Finally, we are making progress with our key business integration activity in Puerto Rico, with over 80% of our customers now successfully moved to a new mobile core and IT platform. I'll provide more details later in the presentation. But the key message here is that we are on track with the timeline we communicated when we last updated the market in November. Turning to slide 5. I'll begin our operating review with C&W Caribbean where we saw good momentum throughout the year, consistently adding subscribers and positioning the business to continue its growth profile in 2024. Starting on the left of the slide with our subscriber additions. We delivered nearly 100,000 additional subscribers across Internet and mobile postpaid in the year. This represented a 9% uplift in adds year-over-year and was driven by growth of over 30% in Jamaica.
Our FMC strategy continues to drive performance in these two product lines, growing volumes and improving our churn levels. We intend on taking price increases this year consistent with inflation. We will be tactical and thoughtful about it to optimize price increases versus churn and retention kickbacks. Moving to the center of the slide and our revenue by product. The pie chart depicts the well diversified nature of C&W Caribbean's revenue with B2B and consumer fixed the largest elements followed by consumer mobile. Revenue was flat year-over-year underlying growth was offset by the discontinuation of transit business, which we have mentioned throughout the year. Adjusting for this, our rebased growth rate for the year would have been nearly 300 basis points higher.
Overall, 2023 was a good operational year for C&W Caribbean and, as Chris will come on to, this helped drive strong double-digit adjusted OIBDA growth. Moving to slide 6 and our C&W Panama segment. Starting on the left of the slide, we continued our broadband momentum in 2023, adding 29,000 subscribers which was 12% higher year-over-year. We're continuing to invest in our network, expanding and upgrading with FTTH home passings, and I'm pleased to say that only 6% of our footprint is now covered by copper. Our focus is to remove this substantially by the end of 2024. In mobile, we reported modest postpaid losses driven by retail disruption during some protests in the quarter. Looking ahead, we are focused on prepaid to postpaid migration, increasing the use of our digital channels, improving the effectiveness of our campaigns, and achieving better retention.
Similar strategy to the one which has brought us success in neighboring Costa Rica. Moving to the center of the slide and our revenue streams, which in aggregate drove our top line 5% higher in the year. Growth was driven by B2B and fixed products, which were up by 12% and 7%, respectively. B2B had a strong year following a number of high profile contract wins and growth in underlying recurring revenue. Our fixed performance was supported by higher volume from our successful commercial strategy, including a focus on triple play plants, which now represents over half of our customer base. In mobile, revenue was broadly flat. And as mentioned, we are focusing on the strategy to drive growth in 2024. We plan on moving our prepaid pricing up through a thoughtful value ladder.
This and adjustments to postpaid pricing is expected to drive mobile revenue growth this year. Finally, through our integration update in the lower right of the slide. We have made good progress with our plans and achieved $70 million of total run rate synergies by the end of 2023, of which approximately $20 million related to cutbacks, providing a tailwind for the business into 2024. The main outstanding area is to complete the migration of acquired customers. To date, we have successfully brought across 100% of the prepaid base, and we plan to have all customers across in the first half of the year. Note that this is not expected to be as challenging as in Puerto Rico, given our existing mobile platforms and capabilities in Panama. Next to slide 7 and Liberty Puerto Rico.
Starting on the left of the slide. We delivered a robust year of in net additions, growing our subscriber base by 4%. Our business has continued to invest in products and infrastructure with over 50,000 new fiber to the homes passed or upgraded to fiber to the home in the year, an increase of over 20%. We now have 150,000 fiber to the home or 13% of our network with FTTH, while the majority of HSC is at DOCSIS 3 level. Turning to mobile, we've had a challenging year, particularly in the fourth quarter as we accelerated our migration efforts. I would highlight a couple of points here. Firstly, we have been impacted by the withdrawal of ECF funding for schools in Puerto Rico. This is a program funded by the Department of Education. This drove 15,000 subscriber losses in Q4 2023 and we anticipate a further 50,000 headwind in Q1 2024.
ARPU for these customers is less than half our average across the base. Secondly, I mentioned our new prepaid offers during the last call, and these have started to show positive results. Overall, however, sales have been challenged as we have repurposed our in-store customer facing colleagues to focus on migration activities. This will reverse once we are through the migration, with our sales force primed to [indiscernible] towards driving volume growth. We also plan to bolster this year with our proposed acquisition of Boost customers from Dish Networks later this year. These actions should help drive an anticipated inflection in the second half, as I'll come on to. In the center of the slide, we show the revenue mix in Puerto Rico and our overall 3% top line decline in the year.
This was driven by growth in our fixed consumer and B2B operations being more than offset by mobile challenges. We plan to reverse the mobile trend in the second half of 2024. When we are done with the migrations in our stores, plus call center channels can get back to selling. Finally to our integration update. We have made significant progress in migration activities since we last updated the market in November, and have now moved over 800,000 customers to our network and billing platform. This represents nearly all of our prepaid base and over 90% of our postpaid and over 40% of our B2B customers. We have stopped selling new consumers on the AT&T IP stack, and this is a major step in our integration. We continue to anticipate completing the project in April and ending the TSAs in June.
This will drive volatility in the first half. However, we anticipate achieving monthly adjusted OIBDA above $45 million at some point in the second half of the year. Clearly, Puerto Rico is a tale of two halves. We will get through the migration and exit the PSAs by the end of June. And then we will redirect our teams to sell utilizing the flexibility of our new systems. Turning to slide 8 and Liberty Costa Rica. Starting on the left of the slide. We saw a stable end to the year for our broadband subscriber base in what is our most competitive fixed market. We continue to expand our footprint, adding over 40,000 fiber to the home homes in the year, taking our total network to 750,000 homes passed. We now have 20% of our network on FTTH, and we expect that to be about 40% by the end of this year.
In mobile, we grew net adds again, reporting our strongest quarter of the year in Q4, and taking the year's postpaid subscriber adds to 87,000. FMC continues to be a key commercial factor driving this growth. We have also launched our first 5G trials, and are prepared to be at the forefront of this development with spectrum that's allocated by the regulator. Moving to the center of the slide. Consumer mobile remains our largest product with close to 60% share of revenue. This is followed by our consumer fixed business, representing just nearly 30%, and then the small but fast growing B2B operations. Finally, our integration activities are now substantially complete with some smaller TSA supported activities anticipated to be migrated this year.
Moving to slide 9 and our Liberty Networks segment. This continues to be a great business for us, with exceptional free cash flow generation, but there is some volatility from quarter to quarter, driven by non-recurring and often non-cash factors. To provide some visibility of the underlying trends in the business, on the left side of the slide, we present the third party monthly recurring revenue for December in each of the last three years. Here you can see that the business grew at a healthy top line CAGR of 8% over the period. Enterprise has been the fastest grower, up 9% relative to 7% in wholesale, driven by increased volume market share as we drove sales of our value added services. Lastly, in December, we announced a collaboration with Gold Data to connect key data center location in Querétaro, Mexico with the US.
This will open up a new subsea route from Veracruz in Mexico to Apalachee bay in the Florida Panhandle and from Cancun to North Miami. Liberty Networks will interconnect with the new system, providing an additional route for the increasing Colombia and Panama traffic and increasing capacity on an existing route, CFX, which provides the lowest latency route to the US today. Finally, to slide 10 and our strategic focus areas as we look to 2024 and longer term shareholder value creation. These priorities are split across three pillars, and consistent with those we have previously identified. First, networks and IT. We have progressed our strategy to create a giga ready network, adding or upgrading 350,000 homes in 2023. And in 2024, we plan to add another 350,000 to 400,000 homes.
Over 80% of our network is now capable of receiving 1 gig speeds and we are targeting approximately 95% by the end of this year. As previously mentioned, the new mobile core in Puerto Rico is now fully operational. And we are strengthening our 5G position in Puerto Rico, specifically through the announced acquisition of spectrum there, while preparing for 5G launches in other markets with trials. Second, our commercial approach. We continue to be focused on reducing churn. This is a material value driver for us commercially, and a KPI for our management team. Our push to drive FMC adoption is aligned with this and we continue to see good traction with our offers. Delivering a strong digital platform is vital to meeting our customers where they want to interact with us, improving the customer journey and also an important area where we can drive cost efficiency.
In 2023, we achieved 18% digital sales across the group and the target is to get into the low 20s in 2024. Product development includes investment across our portfolio, but specifically in the high growth B2B segment and driving eSIM enablement. Lastly, in this area, customer care is always a key focus with Quick Connect for installation proving popular and our self-care app adoption increasing. Third, and finally, capital allocation. We completed the monetization of our tower assets in five of six markets with promise [ph] to complete in the coming months. We also continue to work towards getting the required approvals for the DISH spectrum and mobile subscribers in Puerto Rico and USPI later this year. We continue to see a lot of value in our stock and have a buyback program in place.
This year, our focus will be on redeeming the residual 220 million of outstanding convertible notes, but we will also look to continue repurchasing stock, particularly at the current levels. Our balance sheet remains in great shape with a long dated maturity profile. And through adjusted OIBDA growth, we anticipate our leverage will naturally delever towards 3.5 in the coming years. Finally, as always, we will continue to consider inorganic opportunities, which can drive additional stakeholder value, including opportunities to combine and rationalize infrastructure assets. With that, I'll pass you over to Chris Noyes, our Chief Financial Officer, who will talk you through our financial performance before we take your questions. Chris?
Christopher Noyes : Thanks, Balan. On this slide, we highlight both our consolidated Q4 and full year 2023 results versus the prior year. Q4 is the first quarter where we didn't comp against VTR, which was deconsolidated at the start of Q4 2022. We reported revenue of $1.16 billion in Q4 and $4.5 billion for 2023, reflecting a 1% rebased decline in Q4 and flat full year rebased growth. As a reminder, we discontinued a legacy non-core B2B voice transit arrangement in C&W at the start of 2023, which depressed this year's quarterly revenue by $10 million and full year revenue by $40 million, adversely impacting our rebased growth rates by about 1%. Our best rebased revenue growth performers on a full-year basis were C&W Panama, Liberty Costa Rica and Liberty Networks.
We delivered adjusted OIBDA of $432 million in Q4 and $1.7 billion for the full year. For both periods, rebased adjusted OIBDA growth was 6% year-over-year, with double digit performances in Liberty Costa Rica, C&W Panama and C&W Caribbean. We achieved our 2023 adjusted OIBDA guidance and a 37.7% margin, which improved over 100 basis points as compared to 2022. For both reported revenue and adjusted OIBDA, our Q4 results showed sequential improvement to Q3 in absolute terms. Slide 13 recaps our segment results and I will focus on Q4 specifically. Starting with C&W Caribbean, we reported $366 million of revenue in Q4, reflecting flat year-over-year rebased growth. And adjusting for the aforementioned transit revenue, rebased growth would have expanded to 3%.
Specifically, we achieved rebased residential, mobile and fixed revenue growth of 5% and 3%, respectively, over the prior-year quarter, helped in large part by 70,000, postpaid and 27,000 broadband additions since the beginning of 2023. Adjusted OIBDA expanded significantly in Q4 to $116 million for 16% rebased growth. The primary driver of this growth was due to reductions in direct costs, especially with respect to handset and programming expenses and lower bad debt expense. As a result of our cost improvement, we drove our adjusted OIBDA margin to nearly 44% in Q4 and 42% for the full year. Next to Cable & Wireless Panama. The business continued its strong performance into Q4, delivering $206 million of revenue and $67 million of adjusted OIBDA, the highest totals of the year.
Revenue expanded by 2%, while adjusted OIBDA increased by 17% year-over-year. Q4 revenue growth was driven by 8% growth in B2B on the back of new project wins and 6% increase in residential fixed as a result of a 10% expansion in the RGU base over the last year. Offsetting in part was a 5% decline in residential mobile, primarily due to a decrease in prepaid RGUs, exacerbated by countrywide protests during the quarter. As had been the case all year, our adjusted OIBDA performance was helped by value capture from the 2022 Claro acquisition, which should further act as a tailwind into 2024. Turning to Liberty Networks, we reported $114 million in revenue and $62 million in adjusted OIBDA, reflecting rebased declines of 9% and 22%, respectively.
The comparison to Q4 2022 was difficult as the prior-year quarter benefited from higher revenue from a customer that's recognized on a cash basis, IRU accelerations and higher amounts of deferred revenue amortization. The combined quarter-over-quarter impact of these factors was approximately $16 million. With that being said, Liberty Networks revenue was broadly similar to Q3 and adjusted OIBDA was only lower by $3 million. Consequently, our adjusted OIBDA margin remained very high at 54%. Second from the right, Liberty Puerto Rico. Our revenue in Q4 was $354 million and adjusted OIBDA was $104 million, representing rebased declines of 5% and 12%, respectively. As compared to Q4 last year, residential fixed revenues was up 5%, driven by a combination of volume and pricing, which was more than offset by a 11% decline in residential mobile revenue, primarily due to a decline in equipment sales, and to a lesser extent, a decline in mobile subscription revenue, mainly pertaining to prepaid subscribers.
Our Q4 adjusted OIBDA of $104 million compares to $118 million in Q4 2022 and $116 million in Q3 2023. A key factor in our lower adjusted OIBDA as compared to both periods is the result of significantly higher operating costs attributable to our migration and integration activities. We incurred $7 million of incremental integration OpEx in Q4 2023 as compared to the prior year quarter, driven by a ramp up in migration activities. In addition, we're experiencing higher expenses in general during this period, where we are running parallel operations across our new platform and the AT&T platform. On a full year basis, we incurred roughly $45 million of integration costs, with $20 million attributable to operating costs and $25 million relating to CapEx. In addition, we incurred approximately $90 million of cost to AT&T through the TSA arrangement.
With respect to the upcoming quarters, our expectation is that Q1 will be the toughest quarter to date from a reporting perspective, given elevated integration migration activities and the continued duplication of certain costs. We expect to build from Q1 as migration related and duplicative costs run off, we begin to execute on our revenue growth plan and we drive our cost takeout strategy. This should enable us to deliver what Balan had noted, which is reaching a monthly adjusted OIBDA of 45 plus million dollars at a point during H2. As such, we expect the leverage to be high sided through Q1 and Q2 and begin the path to a more normal state in the second half of the year and furthermore into 2025. Concluding with Costa Rica on the far right.
We generated Q4 revenue of $149 million and $58 million of adjusted OIBDA, reflecting strong rebased revenue growth of 10% and an LOA segment-leading 36% rebased adjusted OIBDA growth. Year-over-year revenue performance was driven by B2B and residential mobile revenue, helped in large part by over 85,000 postpaid additions during the year. Similar to previous quarters, adjusted OIBDA expanded significantly year-over-year, benefiting from the continued strengthening of the Costa Rican colón to the US dollar as we have certain costs denominated in US dollars. As a result of the strong quarter, our adjusted OIBDA margin hit 39%, our best result in over two years. Turning to slide 14, I will discuss 2023 P&E additions and adjusted FCM. First, we incurred $207 million of P&E additions in Q4 and $731 million for the full year, with the latter representing 16% of revenue, in line with our 2023 guidance target.
Of note, as Balan mentioned, we built or upgraded about 350,000 homes during the year. And second, we delivered adjusted free cash flow of $184 million for Q4 and $198 million for 2023 after distributions to our partners of $34 million for Q4 and $75 million for 2023. For the full year, we had targeted $300 million in adjusted free cash flow before partner distributions and finished the year with $273 million, a good result year-over-year. However, the risks that we had identified at Q3 did come to fruition, including a shortfall in B2G collections in Panama. Moving to slide 15, we finished 2023 with total debt of $8.2 billion, cash of $1 billion, and access to over $850 million in revolving facilities. Our gross and net debt ratios to L2QA adjusted OIBDA were 4.8 times and 4.2 times, respectively, and over 95% of our debt is due in 2027 and beyond.
As a result of the tower transaction at year-end, in which we completed five of the six countries, with Bahamas to complete in the next few months, we recorded cash and debt of $244 million. The transaction is accounted for as a financing transaction. In terms of our equity and equity-linked repurchase activity, we bought $300 million in 2023, including $118 million of our shares and $182 million of our convertible bonds. We finished 2023 with a fraction less than $140 million of our equity authorization remaining through year-end 2025. On the right hand part of the slide, we thought it'd be helpful to provide a longer term set of financial targets that we are aiming to achieve. Over the next three years, through 2026, we are targeting to grow adjusted OIBDA at a mid to high-single-digit rebased CAGR.
Similarly, like in 2023, we are targeting 16% of revenue for P&E additions annually, which should be able to support our growth and maintenance requirements. Finally, we are targeting to deliver over $1 billion of aggregate adjusted free cash flow before distributions over the next three years. Important to note, as a result of the tower transaction, we will incur, among other items, transaction related taxes and currently intend to apply a substantial amount of the Panamanian net proceeds to repay high cost vendor financing debt versus 4.25% term loans. These factors would reduce our expected reported free cash flow by over $100 million in the year. In summary, we remain focused on our customers and have been investing across our operations to improve their journey from sale to install to experience.
We are beginning to see the fruits from these investments, as Balan touched on earlier. Additionally, we remain focused on volume growth and improving our pricing effectiveness through utilization of AI tools and capabilities, which should underpin our top line expansion in 2024. Importantly, we are near the finish line in Puerto Rico and are looking forward to inflecting the business in H2 and driving improved financial performance on the back of cross sell activities, more compelling CVPs and cost rationalization, including the elimination of the AT&T TSA expenditures. As Balan said, Puerto Rico is a tale of two halves. We will get through the migration and the team is poised to launch strong commercial plans in the second half. Inorganically, we had two key announcements in 2023 – our tower modernization, which unlocks capital and enhances flexibility across the group, and the DISH transaction which upon expected close in 2024 should further strengthen our Puerto Rico business and help us further accelerate our mobile growth.
In terms of capital deployment, we continue to shrink our equity in 2023 and reduce the outstanding principal on our LLA convertible bond. We expect to see more of that in 2024, including the repayment of the remaining outstanding balance of the convertible bond this summer. Wrapping up, we delivered 2023 growth in terms of adjusted OIBDA and adjusted FCF before partner distributions, which is a solid result when viewed across the industry and the overall business climate across the region. Today, we have also shared our three year targets, which we're working hard to execute and which highlight the potential to create significant value over the coming years. With that, operator, happy to open the lines to take questions.
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