Hello.
Good day, and welcome to the GTN Limited Fiscal Year 2023 half-year earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. Representing the Company today are Bill Yde, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, and Scott Cody, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer. Before I turn the call over to Bill, I would like to remind the listeners that this call is subject to the disclaimer and important information included in the Company's half-year earnings presentation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bill Yde, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer. Bill, over to you.
Thank you. We made solid progress during the first half of Fiscal Year 2023 as Group revenue increased 11% compared to the first half of Fiscal Year 2022, which was a 14% increase compared to the prior year period. Group revenue has now almost rebounded to pre-pandemic levels as first half of Fiscal Year 2023 revenue was only 4% lower than first half of Fiscal Year 2019. The revenue increase led to an 18% increase in Adjusted EBITDA when compared to first half of Fiscal Year 2022. The government wage subsidies during the period partially hides the actual improvement in results. If the government subsidies of JobKeeper and Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy are disregarded, Adjusted EBITDA increased 26% over first half of Fiscal Year 2022.
Although operating expenses increased during the period, they were still less than 1% higher than 1H FY20. Australian revenue increased 21% over the prior period, which resulted in a solid growth in EBITDA. We feel this was a very good result, and the continued rebound in Australia is most welcome as this is our largest and most profitable market. Canada revenue increased 26% compared to 1H FY22. That's 22% in local currency, making it our fastest-growing market for the period. The strong revenue increase led to a significant increase in EBITDA for the period. Brazil increased 10% compared to 1H FY22, although it was 2% decrease in local currency. We believe that the revenue softness in Brazil is temporary as it was by far our fastest-growing market in the previous fiscal Year.
We continue to be very excited about the long-term prospects for our Brazil business. United Kingdom revenue decreased 11% compared to 1H FY22, a 6% decrease in local currency. The decrease in revenue mainly pertained to the beginning of the period and has since rebounded nicely. Despite the revenue decrease, our UK business continues to deliver solid results and remains a meaningful contributor to the Group's financial results. During 2H FY22, we began offering drone light shows in the Australian market for both advertising-supported shows and cash fees. Drone light shows involve the operation of many drones simultaneously to create images that are viewed by audience in a manner similar to traditional fireworks shows.
While these operations are still in startup phase, we have already performed a number of high-profile shows, including the Australian Open, Versace, and the Sydney Royal Easter Show. Our ongoing strategy is to focus on maintaining our unparalleled networks and sales infrastructure, as we believe this gives us the best opportunity to maximize revenue and profitability both now and in the future. While focusing on the core business, which we believe has a good deal of further growth potential, we are constantly looking for new opportunities that will complement our existing business, such as the investment in drone light shows. The drone light shows are high-impact visual messages that are supported by our high-impact audio traffic reports. Keeping a close watch on expenses helps us balance the demands of the core business and the investment required for new growth opportunities while still increasing profitability.
Our strong balance sheet has enabled our business to continue to be resilient regardless of the market conditions. I will now turn the call over to Scott for a complete review of the financials and capital management.
Thanks, Bill. Good morning, everyone. Revenue for 1H FY23 increased 11% to $93 million. Revenue increased in all of our operating geographies except the United Kingdom. When compared to 1H FY22, Australia revenue increased 21%, Canada revenue increased 26%, Brazil revenue increased 10%, and U.K. revenue decreased 11%. Revenue from our Canada and Brazil operations benefited from favorable foreign currency movements, while these movements had an adverse impact on our U.K. market. When measured in local currencies, Canada revenue increased 22%, while United Kingdom revenue decreased 6% and Brazil revenue decreased 2% compared to 1H FY22.
Adjusted EBITDA, which we define as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, adjusted to include the non-cash interest income generated by the financing component of our long-term station affiliation agreement with Southern Cross Austereo and exclude transaction costs, foreign exchange gains and losses, refinancing losses and gains on lease forgiveness. Was AUD 12.0 million compared to AUD 10.2 million in 1H FY22, an increase of 18%. We consider it appropriate to add the financing component of our long-term station affiliation agreement with Southern Cross Austereo to EBITDA because EBITDA includes a large amount of non-cash station compensation expense related to the agreement. By including both amounts in Adjusted EBITDA, we believe it provides a clearer view of the financial impact of the agreement. The Adjusted EBITDA increase was driven by an 11% increase in revenue for the period.
Operating expenses increased 10% compared to 1H FY22. The increase in operating expenses included AUD 1.2 million increase in station compensation, a AUD 1.5 million increase in network operations expense, a AUD 3.0 million increase in sales costs, a AUD 0.7 million reduction in JobKeeper Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy benefits, and a AUD 1.2 million increase in general administrative expenses. The increase in station compensation is primarily related to increased costs related to the renewal of two key affiliates in Australia, which occurred in November 2021 and July 2022, respectively, and thus were mostly not included in the prior period results. Network operations expense includes AUD 0.6 million of costs related to the aerial drone light shows. Drone operations commenced in the second half of FY22, and there were no expenses related to drones in the prior period.
General administrative costs increased primarily due to the accrual of year-end executive management bonuses related to the increased performance as well as foreign currency fluctuations. There was no accrual in 1H FY22 for executive management bonuses as the Group was behind its internal targets at 31 December 2021. Most of the Group's executive costs are denominated in USD, and the AUD-USD exchange rate has decreased approximately 600 basis points from 1H FY22 to 1H FY23, resulting in higher expenses when reported in Australian dollars. Adjusted NPAT, which is defined as net profit after tax, adjusted to add back the tax-affected non-cash amortization expense related to acquired intangible assets, increased 6% to AUD 5.3 million.
The increase is primarily related to the improved operating performance for the year, which is partially offset by higher depreciation expense related to the drone business as well as increased income tax expense. The Group extended its current debt facility to 22 December 2025 during the period. Previously, the debt facility was scheduled to mature on 30 September 2023. Other than the repayment date, there were no material modifications to the previous debt facility. Due to the Group's strong balance sheet and improving financial performance, the board has decided to declare an interim dividend for FY23 of AUD 0.014 per share. The dividend is unfranked. In addition, the board has adopted a target dividend policy of approximately 100% net profit after tax to be paid as an interim and final dividend annually.
This policy can be altered at any time based on the liquidity needs and performance of the Company and is subject to adjustment for non-recurring or non-cash items that may impact NPAT. Previously, the Company announced that it had initiated an on-market share buyback of up to 10% of its outstanding shares for a period of up to 12 months. As of 31 December 2022, the Company had repurchased and retired 1,946,205 shares for AUD 0.8 million, which is an average price per share repurchased of AUD 0.42. No target share price or minimum repurchase amount has been set. I will now turn the call back to Bill for an update on 2H FY23.
Thanks, Scott. January 2023 revenue increased by more than 20% compared to January of 2022. Revenue from all four of our operating segments increased significantly compared to last year. February 2023 revenue is anticipated to grow in a manner similar to that of January when compared to February of 2022. Once again, the growth is broad-based with all four of our operating segments anticipating significant increases in revenue. Future results are likely to be highly dependent on the economic conditions in the markets in which we operate. However, we are pleased with the revenue performance for the first two months of 2H FY23, as well as the 1H FY23 results. All four of our markets continue to be well-positioned with solid affiliate lineups, strong sales staffs, and virtually no direct competitors.
We have a strong balance sheet with ample liquidity and believe that everything is in place for strong financial performance as economic conditions continue to improve. Before opening the lines to questions, I would like to explain our decision to discontinue providing our spot inventory and sell-out spot rate information for our markets. I believe this information does not provide a full picture of our inventory and yield management since it can be influenced by the sales mix between regional and metro markets, new stations and markets, and many other factors that a single-digit data point cannot explain well. Often, developments that we consider positive, such as increasing sales in our regional markets, will have a negative impact in our spot rate, or adding additional stations may lower the sell-out rate even though the stations may make the network more attractive to advertisers.
This ends our prepared remarks, and we will now open the lines to questions.
Thank you. At this time, I would like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.
Your first question comes from the line of Julian Mulcahy from E&P. Your line is now open.
Bill, can you maybe talk through the various customer categories in the ad markets and like who's spending, who's not spending at the moment?
It's a really good question because we're doing extraordinarily well in all of our markets. The key category that is still down for us is the auto brand category, which is still down more than 50%. We're getting less than 50% pre-COVID levels from auto brand in Australia and in Brazil, and we're less than 24% of what we used to get in Canada. When you look at Canada's extraordinary growth this first half without auto, we believe that leads us to the place where we've got a lot of growth still left. Most of the other categories are coming back. Travel and tourism is coming back, the restaurants are coming back. Those three are some of our biggest categories.
auto still lagged behind largely because of a chip shortage issue and unavailability of inventory. We are getting better in all of those categories and.
Is anyone starting to drop off there from finance regards? Is any of the retail starting to drop off?
Retailers, I'd say like David Jones and Myer really started to drop off back in 2019. A lot of them, you know, a lot of them are still, you know, like JB Hi-Fi and things like that are still heavy advertisers with us. The big box stores are probably where we see it the most.
You mentioned-
Government too, have you, Bill?
Pardon?
Have you lost Some of the government's is backed off a little bit now that the COVID has recessed?
Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. That's correct.
Cool. You mentioned that the U.K. has recovered in recent months. Does that get back on track in the current half or just, you know, being impacted by the economy out of there?
Yeah. The U.K., when you look at what we booked year-to-date compared to where we booked year-to-date last year, we're almost back to even. Last year was a record year for the U.K. We're. It started out very, very slowly. Then of course, you know, you had the Queen die. That didn't help matters, you know, a whole lot either. They made a really good recovery.
Okay. With the drone business, can you kind of remind us again what this potentially could earn and will it be profitable in the current half?
Yeah. Look, I'll answer this a little bit long. The business plan for drones was we saw the exciting potential of it early. We just bought a few hundred drones. We did a lot of marketing with advertisers and a lot of events and functions and, you know, invested quite a bit of money in, you know, in pre-ops just to determine if there was interest. We got all our licenses, got all our organization done and approvals, and actually started performing shows for money. We did a lot of shows free just to establish our reputation. The first phase was organization, the second phase was testing. We did a lot of shows just to demonstrate our capability. They weren't really necessarily charging for all of them.
We were charging in places so we could determine pricing. Most recently we've gone out to start doing shows for cash or for ad sponsorship. We did example, the Versace show was an all-cash deal versus like we did a show where Chemist Warehouse was the sponsor. We believe that the potential is much larger than maybe people are giving us credit for. We're following the exact same business model. While people are out in the markets charging, you know, like Intel was charging Destination New South Wales about AUD 400,000 a show.
We're out there going to all the venues and saying, "We're gonna give the show to you free if you let us put an ad credit at the back." We are getting tons and tons of business, lots of interest. We've done phenomenal shows. The most recent one we did was during the men's final at the Australian Open and the men's semifinal at the Australian Open. We got worldwide attention for that. We look at these drone shows as like on average. There's gonna be bigger shows and smaller shows. Let's say on average, you can kind of expect to get about $100,000 for a show. On an average show, the show is gonna cost you about $30,000.
If you can do, if you can make AUD 70,000 a show and you can do 100 shows a year in each jurisdiction, that shows you the kind of EBITDA you can generate. We think it'll take 2 or 3 years to get there, but we've got a lot of shows already lined up. Our anticipation is there's gonna be 3 geographic areas where we're gonna be good at the start. That's in Europe, America, Canada, and Australia. Australia and Canada will have the best advantage because we'll be able to use our traffic networks to promote the shows. But it also has some crossover in that when we do a drone show, they frequently buy ad time on our network to promote their event. Which, it's like the Sydney Royal Easter Show coming up.
Last year, we had advertising revenue, not only money from the drone show, we had advertising revenue to support the Easter Show. It's a much bigger field than probably people are giving it credit for. It's not a new business model. We're following the exact same business model. We're using the exact same advertisers. It fits like a glove with our core model. You know, we don't have to go out and find different advertisers. Although new ones come in, like Versace would never advertise on radio, but they did, you know, spend quite a bit with us on the drone show. It doesn't.
Uh-huh.
It doesn't take for management time. The process is simple. You get a graphic designer design what you want on your show. Like tonight, you guys will see the Sydney WorldPride. That'll be our drone show that we're going on tonight with Sydney WorldPride. Graphic designer designs it, computer programmer programs it. We lay the drones down out in an open space, the pilot has to hit the play button. Pilot just has to be kind of sober, I guess, most of the time. Yeah.
Like, you're launching in Europe and the US, is that's like a longer-term plan, you know, that through that show tonight?
That's kinda phase three as we expand. Each show we do creates opportunities, the best sales tool we have is somebody seeing a drone show. At the Australian Open this year, we had a viewing audience of somewhere near 900 million people worldwide that were viewing the drone show. It was a massive thing for us. From that, we got interest from the French Open. We got interest indicated from the Formula One people. We have people for the US Open talking to us. We got the The Corrs concert we did up in Hunter Valley recently. We got interest from the Isle of Wight in Great Britain, where they're wanting to do a show. The French Open inquired after seeing the Australian Open.
We expect that each thing will take us to another. We think that the, you know, the football league, soccer leagues in European Union are gonna be fabulous venues for us to do with lots of viewing audience, lots of TV audience. Canada and America, North America has all kinds of sporting events, all kinds of concert events. One of the shows we did free just to get our credibility up was the Hollywood Christmas Parade, and that was that's the largest parade in North America, hundreds of thousands of people. We, we've established great credibility. We've established a great reputation. We're already one of the world's leaders in the last year in this, in this industry. The key thing is it fits our business model.
It's exact same business model, exact same advertisers pretty much, and takes very little management. We think it's going to be a great field for us.
Sure. Just following, so, the CapEx required, you've done the spend in Australia. That's pretty much done, and then it's over these markets where you'd see an increase?
Right now, Scott, you correct me if I'm wrong, I think we have about $4 million of capital expenditure between the two continents, North America and Australia. We're depreciating them fairly rapidly because we believe technology is advancing. We expect to probably double the number of drones that we have currently, but the, like all technology, the prices are falling for technology. If we double the amount of drones that we have, it would still not cost us probably what we put in there at the beginning.
Cool. Thanks, Bill.
Thanks, Julian.
Your next question comes from the line of Daniel Ireland from Petra Capital. Your line is now open.
Hi, Bill. Hi, Scott. Well done on the result. You know, I just had a question on the radio spots inventory for Australia in the first half just relative to PCP. Seems to be a little bit of an increase coming through in the inventory. I just wanted to see sort of get a bit more color as to where that's coming from. Then just a follow-on question from that. If that inventory wasn't to increase, what would the sell-out rate have been for Australia in the first half? Thanks.
Well, Scott, you can probably address where it came from.
you know, it's no big places. you know, some of the places was, you know, we added ACE Broadcasting as they picked up stations. We added them. That, you know, that was part of it. Some of our renewals brought some inventory in, and their time buys were higher as well because of the, you know, little stronger demand on the regional side. I think that would cover it off. I can actually if Bill has any other questions he can answer, I could probably figure out the answer to the what the sellout would have been on a kind of the same-store basis, if you just give me a you know, second or two.
So another thing-
I think that covers it. Go ahead, Bill.
Another thing that happens, we frequently will take on key stations that aren't rated, which are not added into the sell. They're added into our inventory, but very few people buy them. They're valuable because they make the product work. At the end of the day, our goal is to make sure that the product works for advertisers. you know, a lot of times, you know, key community stations and a lot of times you'll have Arabic stations or you'll have foreign language stations that we take on because they serve an audience and, but it's seldom anybody wants to buy them. They're usually put in as bonuses. That's another thing.
Quick back in that, Ken.
Is it?
I'm sorry. Quick back in that, can I say the sell was about 60%, same store. That, you know, that's obviously, you know, just real rough calculations because obviously that's not something I was tracking.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just with Canada, I mean, you've had quite an improve in the radio sell-out rate there. Can you just talk to what's driving that? If you look to future periods, do you see a lot of inventory expansion from that market as well?
Yeah. Look, Canada, prior to COVID, was really starting to ramp up. We'd gotten some, you know, we'd gotten a couple of contracts in, and the lineup was all set up, and then COVID hit. You know, I mean, Canada literally lost way more than half of its revenue overnight, you know, probably 75% of its revenue. Nobody's gotten to see the benefit. As we worked through COVID and things kinda came out of it, you're now seeing the benefit of the structure that we set up a while ago. We've been improving the sales staff and increasing their capability. You're kinda seeing, you know, the beginning of the growth that we kind of expected to see when we signed Rogers and some of the others that got delayed when COVID hit.
No, we're really, really pleased with Canada. We're really pleased with the, you know, the management we added right before COVID, and we're pleased with the improvements we made in the sales staff. We've always felt Canada would be a better contributor for us, and we think this is the beginning.
Okay, great. Thanks, and well done, results.
Thank you.
Thanks, Daniel.
Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions at this time. I turn the call back over to Bill.
All right. Thank you. We are pleased with the current performance and remain confident about the future. We have retained an excellent management team, maintained a strong balance sheet, implemented strategic cost reductions, and launched new growth initiatives. This positions us favorably to continue to capitalize on the recovery of the ad market. We look forward to speaking to you again after fiscal 2023 results. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.