Grupo Televisa, S.A.B. (BMV:TLEVISA.CPO)
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Earnings Call: Q3 2022

Oct 28, 2022

Moderator

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Grupo Televisa's third quarter 2022 conference call. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the press release, which explains the use of forward-looking statements and applies to everything discussed in today's call and in the earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Grupo Televisa. Please go ahead, sir.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thanks, Cole. Morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Pepe Toño González, CEO of Cable, Luis Malvido, CEO of Sky, and Carlos Phillips, CFO. During the third quarter, Grupo Televisa's consolidated revenue reached MXN 19.3 billion, representing year-on-year growth of 3.6%. While operating segment income reached MXN 7 billion, equivalent to a year-on-year decline of 6.7%, mainly driven by the amortization of costs related to the transmission rights of the World Cup at Sky. Adjusting for this, Grupo Televisa's consolidated operating segment income would have fallen only by 3.1%. Revenue growth in cable and our other business segment was partially offset by declining revenue at Sky.

Still, as we discussed in our previous earnings call, this is a transformational year for Sky, and we're confident that next year this business will experience a strong rebound, especially at the EBITDA level. Moreover, our expansion plan in cable is working very well this year, allowing us to gain market share of RGUs while keeping our ARPU flat. We expect the solid RGU net adds momentum to continue going forward. Antonio and Luis will elaborate on the operating and financial performance of each of our core consolidated segments in their remarks. Before, let me say that even though global financial conditions have tightened, economic activity in the U.S. and Mexico remains relatively healthy during the quarter. However, the global economic environment is likely to deteriorate as the hiking cycle continues, with interest rates potentially peaking at some point in 2023.

As we mentioned three months ago, we will continue to monitor the evolution of the macro variables and will not hesitate to act decisively, taking necessary measures to preserve free cash flow as has been the case in previous macroeconomic downturns. As a reminder, during the COVID recession in 2020, excluding the other businesses segment as most of them were fully closed for a significant portion of the year, Grupo Televisa's segment revenue and operating segment income for our three core operations grew by 2% and 2.1% year-on-year, respectively. We achieved this resilient operating and financial performance by implementing an aggressive cost reduction plan, which translated into MXN 2.2 billion in savings, or the equivalent to almost 4% of our full cost structure.

While the global economic outlook remains uncertain, Bernardo and I are confident that we're better positioned than ever after the merger of our media content and production assets with Univision, as our streaming portfolio is fully complete and very well positioned to capture the massive global streaming opportunity. Because both Grupo Televisa and TelevisaUnivision have much stronger balance sheets than in previous global economic downturns, with leverage ratios of 2.2 times and 5.7 times, respectively. Moreover, we have been taking advantage of market movements to pay down debt at more convenient terms. So far this year, we have reduced our total leverage by around $800 million with cash on hand.

In addition, we firmly believe that we will continue to deliver strong revenue growth at TelevisaUnivision and resilient operating performance at Grupo Televisa during the fourth quarter, driven by several factors such as the monetization of the World Cup rights, increased advertising spending in Mexico to the Qatar World Cup, midterm elections in the US, and solid RGU net adds for the remainder of the year at Cable. Now, let me walk you through TelevisaUnivision's third quarter results released yesterday morning. The company delivered another solid quarter with revenue at $1.2 billion, growing 5% year-on-year on a pro forma basis, while EBITDA of $411 million declined by 4% as streaming investments ramped up following the launch of ViX AVOD service on March thirty-first and the ViX+ SVOD service on July thirty-first.

Moreover, during the first nine months of the year, TelevisaUnivision's revenue has increased by 9%, while EBITDA has just declined by around 2%. A remarkable achievement considering the launch of ViX and ViX+, which illustrates the power and uniqueness of our combined assets, as well as the focus and discipline of our execution. During the quarter, revenue growth at TelevisaUnivision was driven by a solid increase in consolidated advertising and subscription and licensing revenue of 6% and 8% respectively. In the U.S., advertising revenue growth slowed 5% year-on-year. A 12% increase in the first half of the year moved to relocation of ad protection budgets from the third to fourth quarter, the lack of major soccer tournaments, and a soft media ad market. Still, this was partially offset by record political advertising ahead of the critical midterm election during the fourth quarter.

In Mexico, advertising revenue growth of 8% year-on-year also slowed compared to an increase of 11% in the first half of the year as clients pushed advertising spending to the fourth quarter to benefit from the World Cup transition. Subscription and licensing revenue grew by 8%, driven by growth in both the US and Mexico. This growth was primarily driven by the contract with YouTube TV in the US, which was signed in September 2021, pay television subscriber growth in Mexico, higher prices also in Mexico, and the inclusion of ViX+ subscriber revenue for the first time. Regarding our digital transformation strategy, we continue to make significant progress. Well, we are still at the early days of streaming. We've hit the ground running and are producing tangible results already.

With the July launch of our subscription tier of ViX+, we have now completed our comprehensive hybrid streaming platform with two tiers, AVOD and SVOD. Having two tiers inside the same app provides huge benefits to both our users and to us. Our users can have access to differentiated content within both tiers, streamlining their experience. For us, our hybrid platform provides structurally lower subscription acquisition costs through promotional capacity and churn management benefits. This strategy is already proving to be superior. ViX, the free ad-supported tier, has been a funnel to acquire customers with about half of the current ViX+ subscriber base coming from our ViX AVOD users. ViX AVOD has already been in the market for two quarters, and we are very encouraged that user and engagement metrics have been exceeding our initial expectations.

There are two main factors driving that impressive content consumption on ViX. First, our massive library, including some of the most powerful and culturally relevant content for the Spanish language audience, which has been driving 75% of all engagement on ViX. This has allowed us to monetize ViX Vault for the first time through this new window. Second, we are producing more than 12 hours a day of live news and sports content to drive habitual daily viewing. Turning to ViX+, while it is very early, our high-quality original content slate is resonating. Our originals are the larger driver for engagement and new subscription for the platform, specifically three of our original movies and the two of our original series. Our premium sports content is a huge differentiator and has also been a strong driver of growth.

In less than three months, we have aired about 3,000 hours of live soccer. This has been a huge driver of new subscriber acquisition and consumption. The breadth of our sports offering also provides huge value to advertisers who can reach incremental audiences in ViX+ through most of our sports content. Finally, distribution of ViX+ is critical. With our extensive and comprehensive distribution agreements, ViX+ was immediately available on all major platforms, from mobile and connected TVs to virtual MVPDs. T-Mobile had its exclusive offer to its customers free of charge, and in Mexico, Izzi was an exclusive MVPD distributor and also facilitates cash payments at any of their 20,000 retail locations. This quarter, we expanded our global distribution to Tigo in Central America. We continue to grow these relationships and expect to add more partners in the future.

The last point I'll make on streaming is on the economics of the business. We believe ours is fundamentally different and better than any other major streaming service in the market. Our structural cost advantages come from two things, content and marketing. Our content costs are just a fraction of comparable quality services. We own the largest and highest quality Spanish language library, which exceeds 300,000 hours in size. Regarding marketing, on top of the benefits of the two-tier application, we also have an advantage with our reach in linear, with more than 60% share of Spanish language market in the US and Mexico. Altogether, we believe this creates a superior economic model that will put us on the fastest path to profitability when compared to any other major streaming service. We expect to turn our streaming service profitable by the end of 2023.

To sum up, we've had another great quarter that puts us on track to deliver our full year goals. In the near term, despite macro headwinds, we have a fantastic setup into the fourth quarter. While it's early days, we're demonstrating our ability to deliver a high-growth service alongside our core business. This is a significant long-term opportunity ahead, and we believe we have the right team, the right assets, and the right strategy to succeed. Now let me just turn the call over to Pepe Toño, CEO of Cable.

Pepe Toño González
CEO of Cable, Grupo Televisa

Thank you, Alfonso. In the third quarter, residential operations of our cable segment continued their solid turnaround and strong growth in operating metrics for a full year. Let me provide some highlights for the third quarter. Net adds grew by 320,000 fixed revenue-generating units, RGUs, the highest quarter of the year and the third consecutive quarter over 300,000 RGUs. This compares well to an average of 110,000 per quarter in 2021. Gross adds were 1.2 million RGUs, the highest figure in the history of the company, even exceeding the lockdown months during the pandemic. We added 71,000 video RGUs. A full year with positive and record levels of net adds. Video continues to be a success story. Moreover, our distribution agreement with ViX+ is gaining traction.

Broadband RGUs continued to accelerate to 96,000, the strongest quarter of the year, and reached 2018 levels. Our product mix remains stable. Triple play packages account for close to two-thirds of our sales. Double play packages also continue to grow, underpinning our broadband net adds. This is our highest margin service, so we continue to enhance its product offering. We added 71,000 subscribers, the fourth consecutive positive quarter and the highest quarter of the year. To sum up, the strategies implemented around the realignment and simplification of our product suite, the improvements in the quality of service and customer experience, and our home staff expansion plan, have translated into almost all operating metrics reaching record levels and/or the highest since 2018, despite the economic headwinds. Now let me turn to some significant developments during the quarter.

We implemented a bottoms-up simplification of our product design system. The new building block modules allow us to, first, quickly create and modify new products. Second, adjust prices at a more granular level rather than complete metropolitan area. At the same time, the simplification provides more flexibilities to our customers to pick their preferred combination. In a sense, we're going back to basics. With Izzi, it's easy to choose your package. The year-long strategy to improve the quality of our service that included the digitalization of our customer experience, fiber training for our technicians, well-focused investments to improve our network, and strengthening of our best-in-class client call center is starting to pay off. Our Net Promoter Score, our net satisfaction score, have improved in the last quarters, and we continue to consistently remain at the top in the Netflix ISP Speed Index.

More importantly, the IFT, the Federal Telecommunications Institute in Mexico, just published its report on customer complaints. Overall, Izzi has the lowest complaints per 100,000 customers in all services versus our cable competitors, and our average response time is the best by far and has remained so for the past two and a half years. We plan to surpass our original 700,000 new home pass goal for 2022 and finish with 850,000 without adjusting our CapEx. This is on top of the 2 million we built last year. I'm glad to report that by the end of the year, we are going to reach 12% penetration in a major city and close to 20% in a medium one.

The goal we set a year ago in our residential operations was to regain RGUs and subscriber growth to solidify our market share while keeping our ARPU stable. We have achieved that. Going forward, these strong operating metrics in the residential segment will begin to translate into gradual revenue growth starting in the quarter. Additionally, we are in the process of a major relaunching of our mobile strategy that eliminates restrictions on mobile device compatibility and incorporates new, more competitive products. This will be offered to our 6.5 million subscriber base, providing additional revenue, increasing client loyalty, and lowering churn. At Iusacell, the residential segment financials in the third quarter face tough comparisons because of the price increase we implemented last year. However, while we did not raise prices this year, our ARPU has remained stable year-on-year.

While that of ours, some of our peers have suffered significant pressure. Our residential segment revenue growth was 2.0% for the quarter. We continue implementing cost efficiency projects in order to improve our EBITDA. Enterprise operations, which account for around 13% of total cable revenue, show the effect of a very tough comparative base last year in which we have the Red Jalisco project. Revenue grew 3.8%. Excluding this effect, revenue would have grown 22.8%. EBITDA figures have also been affected by this. Over the coming quarters, we expect first, residential RGU net adds to remain solid and at similar levels to those of the last few quarters. ARPU to remain stable, while residential segment revenue growth will continue to gradually improve. There are still some challenges with the growth in the enterprise segment revenue, although we would expect to begin to incorporate new projects going forward.

Before turning the call back to Alfonso, let me say that we are confident that the expansion plan to selected locations last year, as well as the expansion of 850,000 homes passed this year, has allowed us to deliver solid operating results and should continue to do so in the remainder of the year.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thank you, Pepe Toño. Now let me turn the call over to Luis Malvido, CEO of Sky. If you are

Luis Malvido
CEO of Sky, Grupo Televisa

In our previous call, I introduced the key highlights of our strategic program, and today I will share with you the progress of the described initiatives as well as an overview of the third quarter operating and financial results. As explained in that call, the most significant opportunity for Sky comes from improving sales quality by rebalancing channels mix and redefining sales commission model. To this end, during the second quarter, we took control of all digital channels efforts previously mostly led by our dealers. We introduced artificial intelligence tools to optimize digital advertising investment and increase sales while improving overall customer experience. In only five months of operations, we managed to continue delivering on expectations by increasing sales volumes by 75% while improving postpaid mix by six percentage points and reducing average subscriber acquisition cost by 19%.

Regarding sales channels, during Q3, we radically changed Sky sales commission model. In September, we went from a upfront payment model to a new customer revenue share model that creates incentives for dealers to enhance product mix while improving customer tenure. Initial results are encouraging. As expected, total growth has went down by 12%, but with a significant improvement in postpaid additions. We went from 11% to 23% postpaid share in October, and we expect Q4 to be the first quarter in two years to be postpaid net add positive. In terms of strategic alliances to increase Sky telecom revenue stream, in our previous call, I mentioned that in second half of this year we would be launching a new mobile service with our AT&T network, like an MVNO model.

AT&T has a robust and reliable network with competitive 5G coverage and is a leading player in the mobile industry. Also mentioned that our initial addressable market would be Sky postpaid and high-value prepaid customers. We plan to offer competitive individual plan, family plans with attractive cross-product benefits leveraging on our video content. Today, I'm happy to report that as of last week, this service is live, and our customers are reacting very positively to this new bundle offer. Focus on enhancing our value proposition with high-quality content. Last month, we launched a new advertising campaign aiming to take advantage of being the only paid TV operator in Mexico to offer the 64 matches of the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.

We decided to leverage on this exclusive content to reinforce Sky's positioning as an innovative brand, being the first event to be broadcasted in 4K, and to strengthen relationship with all our customers by offering the entire tournament and the Blue To Go mobile app for free, with the only requirement for customers of being registered. During third quarter, we implemented several initiatives to improve sales quality, which had an impact on growth at some level. In July, we introduced Sky Silver HD only in the single play version. Today, this package generates 60% of postpaid sales. In addition, in September, we discontinued Sky Black HD and Sky Prepaid Plus for new customers to simplify Sky product portfolio. In broadband, Altán's financial struggles continue to affect churn and sales due to the congestion and lack of available areas to promote the service.

As I mentioned before, Altán recently completed its financial restructuring process, which should allow Altán to gradually improve its service and network footprint, which in turn should allow us to continue expanding our fixed wireless business. On the cancellation side, in this third quarter, churn stabilized after negative trend as a result of low quality additions, mostly in H2 2021. However, in July, we discontinued one of our prepaid reactivation promotions because it's no longer covering its operating and content costs. This added 205,000 cancellations in the quarter. This decision, as I already mentioned, had no impact on revenues nor EBITDA. As a result, we lost 412,000 RGUs, half of that is coming from this promotion we canceled during the second quarter.

In terms of financial performance, revenue declined 8.7% compared to last year third quarter, driven primarily by lower prepaid recharges and a decline in our postpaid customer base in Mexico and more importantly, in Central America. Operating segment income fell 24.7% due to lower revenue and an increase in costs and expenses due primarily to the amortization of MXN 268 million in World Cup rights. Excluding these rights, operating segment income would have fell by 12.9%. On the CapEx side, we expect to close the year with a total CapEx of around $190 million, representing a decrease of 21% compared to previous year. This result is mainly due to the measures we have taken along the year to improve sales quality and return on investments, which will have a full year impact before turning impact next year.

Before turning back to Alfonso, let me emphasize that this is a transformational year for Sky. The implementation of our strategic program, together with the non-recurring costs and expenses related to the World Cup, will make this year look particularly challenging. Still, we have confidence that the next year Sky will experience a strong rebound at EBITDA level and CapEx will show an additional double-digit drop.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thanks, Luis. Before wrapping up, I want to share with you that yesterday our board of directors approved a proposal to spin off all businesses that are part of our other businesses segment, except for the broadcasting concessions and infrastructure which will remain at Televisa given the TelevisaUnivision merger. These businesses include our soccer team, América, the Estadio Azteca, the gaming operations, and publishing and distribution of magazines. Through the spin-off, we will create a new controlling entity that will be listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange, and that will have the same shareholding structure of Televisa via distribution of the stock of that entity.

This plan will allow both Televisa and the new entity resulting from the spin-off to focus on their respective business models and growth opportunities, enhancing their ability to generate better conditions for access to capital, financing sources and investors that are aligned with each of those businesses. We expect that the reorganization will be completed by the first half of next year, which will be subject to several conditions, including obtaining all required corporate and regulatory authorizations and the approval of the spin-off by Televisa's shareholders meeting. Year to date, the spun-off businesses account for around 7.4% of our consolidated revenue and approximately 3.4% of EBITDA.

In closing, despite the more challenging macroeconomic environment than initially expected, Bernardo and I continue to be laser-focused on the execution of our strategies to achieve our medium-term goals and create shareholder value, both at TelevisaUnivision and Grupo Televisa. At TelevisaUnivision, solid operating and financial performance during the first nine months of 2022, with year-on-year revenue growth of 9%, midterm elections in the U.S., the Qatar World Cup, and the successful launch of our global streaming platform should allow us to deliver double-digit revenue growth for the second consecutive year, which has allowed us to finance our digital transformation strategy and the launch of our two-tier global streaming platform. At Grupo Televisa, the ongoing strong RGU net adds momentum driven by our expansion plan should contribute to accelerated residential revenue growth at Cable over the coming quarters.

While Sky and the enterprise segment of Cable have been facing challenges, we are convinced that the strategies under implementation will contribute to improve their operating and financial performance in 2023. Now we're ready to take your questions. Cole, please, provide us with instructions.

Moderator

Certainly. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, I'll pause momentarily to assemble the roster. Our first question today will come from David Joyce with Barclays. Please go ahead.

David Joyce
Senior Analyst, Barclays

Thank you. First on the Cable business, if you could please provide some more color on where you are in terms of your network upgrades. You know, how much more you expect to do this year and next year. Related to that, given you've had some very strong net adds in some of your new passings, how have the competitors been responding? Like, where are they in your markets in terms of their upgrades, be it América Móvil, Totalplay, Megacable? Secondly, on Sky, I was just wondering when you would be done with cleaning up the subscriber base, or has that one prepaid model that you shut down earlier this summer, you know, mostly taken care of that for you? Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thank you, David. Well, as to your last question, I'll ask Luis to answer it. Before, as to your first question, Pepe Tono can go into further detail, but we're very happy with our expansion strategy. I would say that it's starting to pay off. You saw, we had record gross additions and we are experiencing high penetrations in the new cities. As Pepetono mentioned, just as an example, penetration in a very large new city will reach 12% this year and will reach 20% in other medium-sized cities, which is reat. We have accomplished this, maintaining ARPU flat, which has not been the case of our competitors. Pepe Toño can expand on this, and then Luis can take your last question.

Pepe Toño González
CEO of Cable, Grupo Televisa

Thank you. Thank you, Alfonso. As he said, our expansion plan is on track, and our ARPU is stable. That's the goal we set a year ago to increase and solidify our market share in the market. As you saw, the operating metrics are very strong. Growth stats are in record levels, which means we're near our sweet spot in pricing and in product offering. Regarding our expansion to selective locations, our philosophy is when we're going into new areas, we're going with fiber. That has been going well, and our penetration numbers are increasing, healthy in the numbers we had last year and in our expanded expansion plan, so to speak, for this year. We are very happy with that.

We are in our areas where some of our competitors are responding, we're upgrading quickly. As you know, all of our new investments are in fiber, but in our HFC network, we're expanding. Most of our network is fiber deep, and we're expanding to DOCSIS 3.1 to allow us to go into 1 giga in speed to make sure that we can compete with anybody who comes along. We have been doing this for quite a few years now. We think we're ready, and we feel confident that this is working well.

Luis Malvido
CEO of Sky, Grupo Televisa

I take your second question. Let me go a little bit backwards to answer your question directly. In the beginning of the year, around 90% of our growth stats were coming from our door-to-door channel, our master dealers and distributors. Probably this channel with an incentive based on a prompt payment was appropriate for a growth period. Since the last couple of years where we stopped growing and we are protecting our base, this was bringing more churn than growth. We needed to replace this commission scheme.

We believe that with the change in the channel mix that I already mentioned, on top of that, the change in the commission scheme, we will be bringing healthier customers, higher ARPU, and customers stay longer with us. This is very important because our outlook for next year is churn going down, significantly down, not only in postpaid, but also in prepaid. At the same time, we'll be saving significant amount of CapEx, as I mentioned, going down over 20%, or high two-digit in CapEx for next year. To your question.

We will have still some churn coming from prepaid in the first half of the year because You know that prepaid takes over 200 days to be considered churn after the customer starts to stop topping up. Focusing on these customers that were on the last call promotion, I mentioned in previous calls that they were around 250,000. We expect to finish the cleanup of these customers by the end of this year. That means during Q4. I will repeat, even though we are cleaning up these 450,000 customers this year, it will have no impact on, first, underlying churn, and second, EBITDA or revenues.

David Joyce
Senior Analyst, Barclays

Thank you very much.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Carlos Legarreta with Itaú. Please go ahead.

Carlos Legarreta
VP of Equity Research, Itaú BBA

Hi, gentlemen. Good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I have two brief ones, actually. The first one regarding the share buyback program, we noticed you started share buyback, buying back stock, but at the end of August. I'm just wondering how aggressive you're going to be in this regard, given where the share is currently trading at. Secondly, with the spin-off, if we think it would be reasonable to expect to continue seeing further decreasing in corporate spending. I mean, I know the business is not proportionately big at the consolidated level, but perhaps what you said, Alfonso, a little under 10%. I just wonder if that's something reasonable.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yeah. Thank you, Carlos. As to our buybacks of our own stock, as you have seen, we have been doing it. We believe that it's a great opportunity for us. We have been doing two things, reducing leverage and taking advantage of market opportunities in terms of the debt. As I mentioned in my remarks, we have reduced leverage with cash on hand by $800 million, taking advantage of those opportunities. Buying back stock, we will continue to look at both of them and continue to do both of them. As to the spin-off, I guess conceptually, as a result of the TelevisaUnivision merger.

After that, it didn't make a lot of sense to keep the other businesses under the Grupo's umbrella. We want to simplify the Grupo Televisa story and simplify basically Grupo as a cable and telecom operator. What Bernardo and I saw is that those businesses made more sense I mean in terms of having them as a separate company, and that will allow them to have a more strategic focus and flexibility being a separate and independent company. Of course, I mean, this group will have a dedicated management team. I think this will be a smaller company, but it will be a very nice sports and gaming company, which makes sense.

It will be traded on the Mexican Stock Exchange, so it'll be a public company. That's the rationale behind that. Of course, I mean, as we mentioned, it's around 7.4% of consolidated revenue and approximately 3.4% of EBITDA.

Carlos Legarreta
VP of Equity Research, Itaú BBA

Thank you. Also, that makes a lot of sense. Do you think it could make sense to assume a reduction in the corporate spend, say, from the pro forma level ex content to expect a further reduction in corporate spend given the spin-off?

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

I think you're safe to assume that, yes.

Carlos Legarreta
VP of Equity Research, Itaú BBA

Thank you so much.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Alejandro Chavelo with Credit Suisse. Please go ahead.

Alejandro Chavelas
Associate Analyst Equity Research, Credit Suisse

Hi, Televisa team. Thanks for taking my question. I think following up on Carlos's question, I was wondering if you can share more about perhaps if this new spin-off company will receive any debt and how the spin-off will impact debt metrics, if it would have any impact. Anything you can share on that front would be useful. Perhaps a little bit more on the strategic rationale, why or why not keep Sky within the Televisa umbrella? Thanks.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yeah. Thank you, Alejandro. The spin-off company will not have debt originally or as part of the spin-off. I mean, as I mentioned, we're trying to simplify the Televisa story, the Grupo Televisa story, and it will remain as a cable and telecom operator. In that simplification and that streamlining of this Grupo Televisa story, we're talking basically about Izzi as a cable operator and Sky as a telecommunications and video DTH operator. That makes sense to have these two companies as part of the group.

It also, as I mentioned before, makes sense to create a gaming and sports company that will be traded separately and will be considered just a distribution of the shares or a dividend in essence.

Alejandro Chavelas
Associate Analyst Equity Research, Credit Suisse

That's very clear. Thanks a lot.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Soomit Datta with New Street Research. Please go ahead.

Soomit Datta
Partner and Research Analyst, New Street Research

Hi there. Yeah, thanks very much. A couple of questions, please. First of all, on cable. You talked about some shifts in the pricing model. I think more granularity in terms of pricing, a bit more modular, which sounds interesting. I guess in broad terms, how are you thinking about price increases going forward? Are you able to, you know, does this new model allow you to do that, but in a sort of less kind of nationwide fashion? Are you still keen to kind of increase prices? You talked about finding a sweet spot in terms of gross adds. Be interested in your perspectives there, please. And then the second one, if I could please, on TelevisaUnivision on the content business.

I appreciate you're not in a position to give any subscriber numbers yet, but I'm just interested in where you've had take-up from ViX+ users. The subscription service, what has been the kind of behavioral response? You talked about 50% of customers moving from the kind of AVOD platform and then moving on to ViX+. Are they staying on the ViX+? Are they signing up for one or two months and then churning off? Are they also using kind of AVOD latter on ViX+? I'm just interested in any kind of qualitative comments you can make around that behavioral usage. Thanks very much./

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thank you, Sumit. What I can say, and Pepe Toño can expand on your first question that has to do with pricing on Cable, is that, there's not a national market of Cable nor national pricing of Cable, and that's why we have restructured the company to gain flexibility in terms of local pricing. Competition has intensified as we have all seen, and it's really important to have flexibility in terms of determining the prices on a regional basis and being able to move in that sense quickly and efficiently. What I can say also, I mean, is that, our expansion and our growth has not been at the cost of prices. As I mentioned before, ARPU has remained flat, which has been great. I'll ask Pepe Toño to expand on this question, and then I'll go to your question that has to do with TelevisaUnivision.

Pepe Toño González
CEO of Cable, Grupo Televisa

Yeah. Well, thank you. As Alfonso mentioned, when we did this on a modular basis, it's a way to create products. Before, the products were created from the beginning to end, and this was very cumbersome and time-consuming. Now the way we create our products is very intuitive, in which you have a module for broadband, a module for video, a module for streaming, and you can add the different modules and combine them. This gives us flexibility in our product offering, but also we're able to change price. We're able to adjust our offers at the hub level instead of at a city level. You know, when you think of a city, that would make sense, but, you know, a city will include Mexico City, which is, you know, a large share of our market.

We're very happy with this new increased flexibility. We haven't moved our prices this year. Our ARPU has remained stable. Moving forward, we will continue to look, as we have, at market dynamics, at how our operating metrics are performing, what our competitors are doing. As you know, inflation in Mexico has been increasing by about 9% year-on-year, like in the rest of the world. It's an inflationary year. We will remain and we will follow our competitors to see what we do in the future.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Sumit, as to ViX+ and ViX, what I can say is the AVOD part, which is ViX, has been live for two full quarters. As I mentioned before, we're seeing substantial success with our ad sales effort on that side of the business and onboarding new streaming online advertisers. In Mexico specifically, it was an educational process with agencies and with advertisers because nobody was selling this kind of advertising with the volume that we're offering. That is picking up, and we're happy with it. We're very excited also about the early results we have seen at ViX. We set some very aggressive goals in terms of users and engagement.

Both of those have been performing better than expected. We have great momentum. As to your question, we believe that it is early to draw conclusions on trends from these results. We're just 2 quarters into this journey, we're not sharing more specific numbers regarding monthly average users right now, as we work to keep growing, nor we have shared the numbers that have to do with ViX+ and the subscribers, which is a more recent type of offering.

What I can say is that, the idea and the concept that we established for the two platforms, which is having a single app, has turned out to be amazing in the sense that it allows us to use ViX, the AVOD service, as a funnel, as I mentioned. You got the numbers right. 50% of the ViX+ subscribers are coming from the AVOD funnel. Also it allows us to have a better churn management, having everybody in the same app. We're very happy with having determined that, and we're very happy with the early results.

Soomit Datta
Partner and Research Analyst, New Street Research

All right. Thanks.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Marcelo Santos with JPMorgan. Please go ahead.

Marcelo Santos
VP and Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. The first question would be about the assets to be spun off. This would be basically those assets, all the assets that fall under the other businesses. Could you just give us an idea, like, can you consider those margins and those levels as normalized levels going forward? What are kind of the CapEx levels of these assets? Anything you could help us to shape those assets. The second question is about the CapEx outlook for 2023. You said that Sky CapEx is going to have a high double-digit decline. What about the other CapEx levels? What is the outlook? Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thank you, Marcelo. Yeah. As to the spin-off, it includes the other businesses segment except for the concession and transmission business, which is tied to the TelevisaUnivision deal. So it includes the Azteca Stadium, the Club América team, the publishing division, and gaming. The most important component of other businesses is gaming. I can say that those businesses, very specifically the stadium, the soccer team, and gaming have not fully recovered yet from COVID. We expect, of course, that spin-off company to have better numbers in terms of revenue and better margins as this normalizes.

In terms of CapEx, I could say that the only one of those businesses that requires additional CapEx of magnitude would be The Stadium, as it has commitments that have to do with the next World Cup that will take place in Canada, the United States, and Mexico. One of the places where that World Cup will be hosted is the Azteca Stadium, and it requires substantial CapEx going forward to modernize the stadium. Aside from that, we don't require CapEx of any magnitude as to the other businesses. As to your second question, I'll ask Luis to answer it.

Luis Malvido
CEO of Sky, Grupo Televisa

In terms of CapEx, I mentioned we are dropping year-on-year. We started this year because of our change in our model, and excluding those we consider bad sales. We already lowered 20% from previous year, and we expect to have a two-digit drop, additional two-digit drop for 2023. This is for Sky.

Marcelo Santos
VP and Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

Thank you. I wanted to know the CapEx for the others as well, like for Latin Pepe Toño can talk about the CapEx for cable.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yeah.

Marcelo Santos
VP and Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

I wanted to know whole CapEx outlook for 2023, if possible. Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Well, yeah. What I can tell you, Marcelo, is that we will continue to expand on the EC side. As you saw, we have had great results in terms of net additions, record results. We're very happy with that. As I have mentioned, I think twice, we have been able to do that maintaining ARPU, which has not been the case with competitors of ours on that side. But it's too early to say and to talk about CapEx for 2023. We're finalizing our budgets. Of course, we're analyzing each of those markets that I mentioned, and we'll be ready to share CapEx with you at the beginning of the year.

Marcelo Santos
VP and Equity Research Analyst, JPMorgan

Perfect. Thank you very much.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Luca Brandão with Bank of America. Please go ahead.

Luca Lorenzoni
Investment Banking Associate, Bank of America

Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my question. So, two questions from my side. First of all, looking at the enterprise business, what should we expect in terms of the profile of the projects you're taking? Should we continue to see projects with a lower margin, at least in the short term? The second one, if you could give us an update on how operations are going in Central America and then the expansion plans you have for the region. Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Thank you, Luca. I'll ask for Pepe Toño to answer your first question. I guess you referred to Central America in terms of of Sky?

Luca Lorenzoni
Investment Banking Associate, Bank of America

Yes. Yes.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Luis will answer your second question.

Pepe Toño González
CEO of Cable, Grupo Televisa

Thank you. Thank you, Luca. Well, what we're trying to do and what we have done this year is we partially, and I emphasize the part partially, replaced the Red Jalisco project with an expansion of Red Jalisco, which is both good news because, you know, it means that, you know, our project was well-received, and we were commissioned another project of smaller magnitude to include schools and et cetera. What we are trying to do is trying to find projects that are similar in this vein, which remain with high margins. These, you know, these are hard to come by. We're working on that, and we should be able to land one. We're working on a few prospects for those. As you rightly said, the rest of our portfolio does have a lower margin.

We have to also live with that. That's the way we're trying to do. In the process, we're restructuring the company to make sure we can face these challenges.

Luis Malvido
CEO of Sky, Grupo Televisa

To your question on Central America, Central America is a big market. 60 million people, at least the seven countries we are present in. 60 million people, 60 million households, and we are only 3% market share altogether. That means, it's a big opportunity for us. Of course, being small means, we need to go very carefully. Our plan is to first, replace the current channel distribution that we have there based on only two master dealers. We are settling with our own teams in the five markets we selected of these seven, out of these seven. We're introducing local channels. We're reinforcing our offer, adjusting our prices, billing in local currency. More importantly, we extended the rights for La Liga, which means we have a very important content that is very attractive for the region.

Doing all this, we are sure we will manage to turn around the decline in the business. We lead to this new distribution channels, new repairing and installation teams, and we are building on all that in country by country. Our expectations is to turn around the top line decline that we have been experiencing until this year start growing in next year. Year-on-year will be almost flat, slight growth of low double digit. We expect to grow even in revenues starting next year. Of course, for 2024, the growth will be much more visible.

Luca Lorenzoni
Investment Banking Associate, Bank of America

Very clear. Thank you.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Alejandro Gallostra with BBVA. Please go ahead.

Alejandro Gallostra
Senior Equity Research Analyst, BBVA

Hi, good morning, everyone. I would like to go back to the rationale of spinning off these other businesses. What makes you think that the market will adequately value these businesses separately, given that it will be a very small company, a conglomerate, with very few synergies in my view? Wouldn't it be better for you to directly sell these businesses to someone else? That's my question.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yeah. Thank you, Alejandro. We have tried to sell. As you might remember, we had a strategic decision to sell most of the other businesses. We were able to sell our minority position in OCESA to Live Nation, which was a very successful transaction. We also sold our radio assets. However, we believe that it's quicker for us to do a spin off of these businesses in order for us to focus 100% of our attention into Sky, Izzi and our position within TelevisaUnivision. If you look at sports groups in the United States and in Europe, it's ideal to have a soccer team and a stadium put together, which makes a lot of sense.

Gaming, which is already part of other businesses, is a large, I mean, a large component of that is sports betting. If you create a group that has all those three components, it makes sense. The synergies, of course, are more, they have to do more with the stadium and the soccer team. As to the other components, I guess, the new company will have to decide what it wants to do with the migration of print into digital with our magazines and also the distribution company of the printed magazines. That'll be a strategic decision for that company.

I think the market doesn't give, in my opinion, a lot of value to other businesses as part of Grupo Televisa, and that's why we believe that more value can be generated as an independent company with those components.

Alejandro Gallostra
Senior Equity Research Analyst, BBVA

Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for the answer.

Moderator

Our next question will come from Gil Luria with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Gil Luria
Head of Technology Research, D.A. Davidson

Hello, thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if the overall slimming down of the business is going to have any other secondary effects we should be aware of, like for example, unlocking of significant real estate value that could be monetized.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yes. I mean, that has to do with Azteca Stadium. As I mentioned, one of the challenges of the new company, the spinoff company, will be to modernize the Azteca Stadium, as part of the commitments that company has in respect to the World Cup that will be hosted in Mexico, the United States and Canada. That company will have to finance that pretty big CapEx and develop that land. Yeah, that will unlock probably that real estate.

Gil Luria
Head of Technology Research, D.A. Davidson

Your corporate headquarters?

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

I'm sorry?

Gil Luria
Head of Technology Research, D.A. Davidson

Are they the right size? Do you still own this massive corporate headquarters campus that you have? Do you think it's the right size after becoming a much smaller company?

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yes. We, Grupo Televisa still owns the headquarters in Mexico City, in the area of Santa Fe. We're of course optimizing that. Next year, izzi will move into the Santa Fe facilities rather than renting space in other buildings. Yeah, of course, I mean, we're always considering options in respect to that real estate.

Gil Luria
Head of Technology Research, D.A. Davidson

Okay, thank you.

Moderator

This will conclude our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to you, Alfonso de Angoitia, for any closing remarks.

Alfonso de Angoitia
Co-CEO, Grupo Televisa

Yes. Cole, thank you for participating in our call and, please call Rodrigo or us with any questions that you might have. Enjoy the weekend. Thank you.

Moderator

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines at this time.

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