Earnings Call: Q1 2022

Jul 29, 2021

Quarterly report

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Quarter One of 2022 results question and answers conference call for Airtel Africa PLC. On the line from Airtel Africa are Raghunath Mandava, Chief Executive Officer, Jaideep Paul, Chief Financial Officer, and Pierre Falcioni, Deputy CFO and Head of Investor Relations. Following a brief introduction, you will be given an opportunity to ask questions. If you would like to ask a question, please log your request by pressing star and then one on your keypad. This conference call is being recorded and a transcript will be posted on the Airtel Africa website. I will now hand the conference over to Mr. Raghunath Mandava to introduce the session. Please go ahead, sir. Good morning or afternoon, wherever you are. Welcome. Thank you for joining us on today's call. I am Raghunath Mandava, the CEO of Airtel Africa, and I'm joined on the line with CFO Jaideep Paul and Deputy CFO and Head of Investor Relations, Pierre Falcioni. We will be answering any questions you may have. First, I would like to give a few words of introduction and a brief overview of our Q1. This is the last set of Airtel Africa results that I have the pleasure of presenting to you all with my retirement coming at the end of September. I believe that I'm handing over the reins of an organization that is in good health. I'm sure that Segun Ogunsanya will continue to take this organization further on its path to transforming lives across the sub-Saharan Africa where we are present. Let me take you through the highlights and a few of the details before we open up for questions. The group has delivered very strong revenue progression in Q1, with group revenue reaching $1.112 billion for the quarter, a year-on-year constant currency growth of 33.1%. With our continued improvement in operating efficiency, we have posted an even stronger growth in EBITDA, up 46.2% to $534 million for the quarter. The first quarter of last year was when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit us, and with the consequential and appropriate actions by government in our footprint to constrain the contagion, this ultimately led to slightly weaker results last year in the same quarter. That weaker comparative has slightly flattered our year-on-year growth trends this quarter. Even after we adjust for these effects, our revenue progression for the group and across all regions and segments was still ahead of the growth trends we saw in our most recent Quarter Four results. The underlying revenue growth trends for the group are therefore not quite at the 33.1% constant currency metric we have reported today, but significantly higher than the 21.7% we reported in Quarter Four. I guess the real growth trend lies around halfway between the two. Voice delivered very strong double-digit growth, up 26%, earning our core usual growth drivers of data, which is up 37.5%, and mobile money, which is up 53.7%. Each of these products similarly benefited from a weaker comparative quarter last year. Even after adjusting these effects, the growth trends are well ahead of the Q4 growth that we delivered. With our continuous focus on increasing customer penetration, it was pleasing to see that our total customer base has returned to growth this quarter, with accelerated growth in both East Africa and Francophone regions, compensating for the negative net additions in Nigeria, arising from the recent changes in the customer registration requirements. With the easing of these restrictions in late April, we have since been able to gradually increase the number of locations we can use for activation in line with regulatory compliance across Nigeria, and we have begun adding new customers accordingly. For the group as a whole, we added a net of 2.6 million customers this quarter and 9.3 million customers year-on-year, up 8.4%. The customer base outside Nigeria growing at about 15.9%. Due to increased voice calling, we have seen a 14.3% increase in minutes per customer, now calling about 249 minutes per customer per month, up from 218 a year ago. That's about 14.3% up. This has driven up our voice ARPU by 16% and taken voice revenue growth to 26%. Our stronger voice performance this quarter reinforces our belief that due to the low unique customer penetration levels and the low usage of minutes in our market, there is still a long runway for voice revenue growth to come. Our strong data revenue growth of 37.4% was a result of our continued customer base growth, up 17.8%, and strong data ARPU growth of 18.5%, which was in turn driven by increased data consumption per customer, up 26.7% to 3.2 GB per month now. Our 4G customers now consume over 5 GB per month. Our early investments in 4G continue to play a key part in driving this growth, with 79.4% of our group sites now offering 4G, up from 66.7% in the prior period. While there have been an even greater acceleration of mobile money revenue growth in Q1 to 53%, part of the acceleration has come from the benefit of a weaker comparative last year, and the waiver of charges that we implemented accordingly during the last year. After adjusting for these effects, our revenue growth for Airtel Money was up strongly Q4 31%. The story is similar by geography. We have accelerated growth across all our reporting regions. Nigeria revenues were up 32% on year for the quarter. East Africa continued, reaching 32.8%. Still continuing to benefit from our 4G network investment, Africa revenue growth has now climbed to 34.9% on constant currency basis. As mentioned earlier, the strong revenue growth led to an increased flow-through, helping take our EBITDA margin in Q1 to 48%, a jump of around 400 basis points over Q1 last year. Forex fluctuation had an adverse impact of $14.3 billion on constant currency revenue and 8 point on underlying EBITDA for the quarter, largely driven by devaluation of the Nigerian naira and the Zambian kwacha, partially offset by appreciation in the Central African franc and the Ugandan shilling. Briefly, in terms of the balance sheet and cash flow, at the end of the month, our leverage ratio was down to 1.8 times underlying EBITDA, with net debt at $3.5 billion. In Q1, we generated an operating free cash flow of $428 million, up 38% on Q1 last year, despite a $40 million higher CapEx, largely due to the logistics challenge faced making investments during the pandemic last year. There are a few other significant updates I would like to mention. Firstly, in June, we signed a deal for the sale of our tower portfolio in Tanzania. We sold the 1,400 towers to SBA Communications Corporation for $175 million, of which $157.5 million will be paid on first closing, expected in the second half of our financial year. Except for the few towers in session, this transaction, along with the fulfillment of the MOUs signed years earlier in the year, completes our monetization program for the tower portfolio. Second, in terms of the new registration rules in Nigeria, the deadline for customers to register their NIN with their SIM card has moved further, reflecting some of the logistical challenges involved, and it is currently 31st October 2021. We continue to make progress capturing National Identification Numbers and building our database in collaboration with National Identity Management Commission. Out of Airtel Nigeria's 40.9 million customers, 25 million or 61% have been linked to the National Identification Numbers. Since April, we have resumed new customer acquisition through 3,100 regulatory approved outlets. A lot more needs to be added to make new outlets accessible to all our customers. For the still significant portion of the population and our customers that do not have NIN, we have opened enrollment centers in collaboration with the National Identity Management Commission, and we are in the process of rolling out thousands of devices to further enhance the National Identity Number enrollment. We continue to work closely with the government to ensure full compliance. Finally, in terms of outlook, while the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have a much more limited impact on our results, certainly compared to Q1 last year, a third wave of the pandemic is currently sweeping through Sub-Saharan Africa, with the potential for further appropriate actions that may be required by governments to minimize its contagion. For several quarters now, we have shown that our operations are quite resilient. We continue to be vigilant and cautious. Fundamentally, the opportunities for sustainable profitable growth from our under-penetrated markets for voice, data, and mobile money services remain hugely attractive, and we are confident of continuing to deliver our growth strategy. With that, I would now like to open the lines of questions for which I am joined by JD and Pierre. Operator, I now hand over to you to please open and manage the Q&A process. The first question comes from Jonathan Kennedy-Good of J.P. Morgan. Good afternoon, thanks for the opportunity to ask questions. Congratulations on the great set of numbers. Wanted to check in with you on some of the guidance that you do provide around your capital allocation model. If I recall correctly, below 2 times net debt to EBITDA, you were perhaps considering faster growth in the dividend. I didn't see any mention of any change on dividend guidance. Was wondering if we could look forward to slightly stronger growth in your dividend if this kind of growth rate continues. Perhaps more operationally, there seems to be quite a significant step up across the operations in R2 expansion across voice data and mobile money. Trying to get a sense of whether we should expect those kind of growth rates to flatten off, or are you still seeing growth in ARPU across the regions? I'll address the operational question, and I'll request on the net debt and dividend, J.D. to help me. Firstly on the operations reasons, while we told you that our current growth rate is 33%, it should be more around 27%, 28%, in between what you saw last quarter and this. However, even if you look at 27%, 28%, I think it's surely a significant jump. Jonathan, we've been seeing this growth. If you see the trend of our growth lines over the last eight or 10 quarters, we were at 10%, 11%, then we moved up to 13%, then we moved up to 17%, 18% and then the early 20s, and now we see, hopefully this is, if I'm right, it's about 27%, 28%. There has been a regular and consistent jump up. If you see over the last couple of years, our customer growth rates are healthy, well in double digits. Suddenly you saw without Nigeria, the rest of the market actually grew 15%, 16% last quarter. First, this customer growth is happening. Second is data plus money today is contributing 43% of our business. Now, this 43% of our business at a weighted average is growing well above 40 odd percent. Third, voice itself, which contributes 50% of our business, is also accelerated to 30 odd percent. Why is this happening? I don't think there are any short-term activities happening. It's more about fundamentals in the business that we've been driving. One, our network rollout has been consistent. We have invested in 4G well ahead of the industry. We are seeing benefits of it in our data growth. Mobile money and voice, our distribution infrastructure has got deeper and deeper, we have continuously invested very heavily in this. This is giving us lot more customer confidence in our brand, and we are seeing this growth. Consumption in Africa has always been low. Voice per minute is about 240 minutes for us. Actually, across Africa, average is closer to 160, 170. We seem to be getting because of a simplicity with which we have driven our pricing and our propositions. We believe that telecom has to be run as a very simple service industry, and I think our customers are happy with that, and we are continuously seeing them increase their consumption and ARPU as well. We are now seeing both customer additions handsomely in mid-teens, and also along with that, an ARPU growth. Thank you. JD? Yeah. Thank you, Raghu. Good morning, everyone. On the question of dividend policy, the business has continued to execute well, and we have seen that we have achieved 1.8 times leverage ratio due to expansion of underlying EBITDA. Previously, we have reported that board would reassess the dividend policy if the leverage ratio falls below 2 times on a sustainable basis. As and when the board decides to relook at the dividend policy, which I would presume that it will be at the half year, and any change thereof, we will make necessary announcement in appropriate time. The current policy is to grow the dividend annually by mid to high single digit percentage from a base of $0.04 as declared last year. Thank you. Jonathan, does that conclude your questions? It does. Thank you. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, just to remind you, if you'd like to ask a question, you're welcome to press star and then one. Next question comes from Alastair Jones of New Street Research. Hi. Thank you for the call, and also, yeah, congrats on good set of results. 3 questions from me. Wanted to explore the outlook, I guess more broadly in Nigeria, specifically around data pricing. If I look at the last 3 quarters or so, data pricing in Nigeria, if you look at the revenues divided by the traffic carried, looks to have been pretty stable. Is that, do you think, sustainable? As you obviously get that momentum around the demand coming through, obviously that all plays through into revenues, which is extremely encouraging. Is there a sort of expectation that potentially there could be additional pressure on pricing, where could that come from? The 2nd question is around the mobile money transaction value. Over the last 3 or 4 quarters or so, it's been relatively stable at the high $12 billion. This quarter is actually a big jump up to about $14.6 billion, which is great. Just trying to get an understanding of what's driven that sort of step increase, because it definitely does seem to be a more aggressive increase than we've seen historically. Just trying to understand if there was anything specific that drove that. Then just finally, you mentioned the number of outlets which are able to register subscribers in Nigeria. It's about 2,100, I think you mentioned. Can you give us a sort of indication as to what is the total amount of outlets that previously could have been able to register subscribers, just to get an idea on the percentage, and also how do you expect that evolving over the next sort of maybe two, three quarters? Thank you. Thank you. Firstly, let's look at pricing. We've stopped looking at pricing in isolation, and that's how we've always managed this business. There are two principles of pricing, and that we will continue to follow. Firstly, if you buy more on larger bundles, we will start giving you at a lower price. I know it looks like such a simple thing that every grocer does it, but telecoms with all their intelligent segmentations and pricings don't always follow that principle. We benefited from it. Whenever we drop price also, it only happens when ARPU goes up. The real metric that we really measure is customers and ARPU, and that we've been consistently growing. As long as we hold the price and grow at 48%, 47% as currently we've grown, or if we can get a better elasticity and do the right pricing, we will continue to do that. I don't see too much of changes there. I don't worry about pricing. There are countries which take a little drop in pricing, as long as they can maintain their usage elasticity, right? Currently, we are still getting that usage elasticity in Nigeria, and hence we are confident of this growth rate. Second is mobile money. What is that? Mobile money has been actually strong in about seven, eight countries of ours. There are one or two countries among these seven that have picked up an accelerated growth based on some of the good stuff that they've done, especially during the entire distribution machinery that we built. As I told before, why we have many hundred thousands of agents who are freelancing, we also built an exclusive network of kiosk and Airtel Money branches. As we've been able to expand these, I think in these difficult periods, people have got greater confidence in the availability of mobile money, and we are seeing that jump. Lastly, the third question of yours is on Nigeria. I agree with you. In the earlier system, we had close to 45,000-odd SIM selling outlets. What is the difference between them? You could buy a SIM, and you could register on a KYC application if you had a smartphone and a fingerprinting device given by us. It didn't mean that they were all very highly productive, and they were all spread out across. The way I look at it now is you will have much lesser number of these outlets, but they should have greater, much better productivity depending on customer need. Second is in countries where we have implemented such rigorous processes, we've also seen benefit in terms of the decay of customers. We don't see people arbitrarily taking customers or retailers adding customers and creating wrong behavior. I do know 2,100 is not yet there. I would not like to reveal the numbers, but we have very aggressive plans to be close to each of our customers. We have about a little more than 12,000-odd sites, and we should be there towards that number or closer to that over the period so that we are close enough to customers. Thank you. That's great. Just, if I can sneak in one final one, just around, if you look at things like food inflation, particularly in a place like Nigeria, I guess there is sometimes the question of do you decide to eat or use your phone? Obviously with such strong growth, clearly the decision, not necessarily it's come down to that, but certainly it doesn't appear like your numbers are being impacted at all, demand is being impacted at all by the sort of inflationary pressure. Any sort of context you can give around that? Is that just clearly demand coming through and inflation hasn't really taken off? There is an Irish economist called Giffen who spoke about what are Giffen goods. Giffen goods are actually replacement goods. It's like potato in Ireland was lamb meat. Whenever people have more money, they buy more potatoes and more lamb. When people have less money, they can't afford lamb, so they buy more potatoes. Potatoes grow irrespective whether prices are going up or coming down, or people have more money or less money. Telecom is like the potato. What are we doing? Today, you and I could be talking, if I had flown down to London or whichever town you were. We are replacing this telecommunication or replacing a costly mode of transport. If I'm talking to someone on the phone, it is a replacement to my physical travel. In my mind, telecom has always been a Giffen good. The importance of a Giffen good is that it should be widely available, easily serviceable, and continue to be affordable. I think as long as we maintain those principles, I continue to believe telecom will grow irrespective of the economic situation. I'm a firm believer telecom replaces costly transportation, travel, and others, and hence is a Giffen good. That's fair. Secondly, current penetration of mobile is very, very low in Africa. 50% of customers have a telephone, of which 40, that's about 20-odd %, have a smartphone. Mobile money penetration is still in infancy. Financial inclusion is not very strong. I think these are all directions that there is huge potential in the way we serve our customers, and I think that should be our primary focus. Revenue is an outcome that will happen, I guess. Right. That's great. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you're welcome to press star and then one on your touchtone phone or the keypad on your screen. At this time, I see in the question queue. The next question comes from Viraj Dasani of Access Investment Partners. Hi. Hello. Thanks for the opportunity to ask a question, and congratulations on the splendid results, I have to say. My question pertains mainly to operations in Nigeria. To what extent is management worried about the foreign exchange management locally, especially given the fact that the CBN yesterday banned FX to the bureau de change, and there is a significant FX backlog in the country locally? That's it, yeah. Jaideep, would you address this, please? Sorry. Can you just please repeat the question? The first part I could not understand because my net connection was not stable. Okay. Yeah. My question is fairly simple. It pertains to operations in Nigeria. To what extent is management worried about the current foreign exchange situation locally, given the fact that the central bank, yesterday, banned FX to bureau de change, and there is a significant backlog of US dollars on the market locally. Do you see that as a reason of concern? Yeah, that's it. Yes. Obviously, it's a cause of concern for us because we have vendor liability, especially on the CapEx side, where 60%-70% of our CapEx is imported. Therefore, we have a vendor liability to meet. Non-availability of Forex is definitely a cause of concern to meet the vendor liabilities. Of course, the second cause of concern is our ability to upstream the dividend, because as you know, Nigeria is a dividend-paying company, and we are not able to upstream that. Obviously, these are cause of concern for us, but we are keeping a close watch and looking at all the options available to us to take care of both the CapEx part of it, as well as on upstreaming possibilities or opportunities. In the last few quarters, we have taken foreign currency loan in Nigeria to meet the vendor liability, and we are hopeful that over a period of time, this situation will improve and Forex should be available to the telecom companies, especially when Nigeria is heavily dependent on the import for CapEx. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next question comes from Myuran Rajaratnam of Mirabaud. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for the opportunity. My question is also on Nigeria, and you mentioned you're keeping a close watch. Where are we on the mobile money PSP licenses? There appears to be some movement in that space, and versus the telco versus the non-telco-led model and the bank-led model. Maybe some thoughts on how you think this might roll out. Thank you. Rajaratnam, this is a tough question. Every time we are discussing this for quite a few quarters now. I believe that the telco-led model has a lot to add value. We could help financial inclusion, especially in the northern belt, where big distribution and mobile networks have reached, but banking infrastructure has not reached to the extent available. Two of the telecom operators have got the license, but I don't know how much has been the progress. We don't see too much of it. I believe that our application has not been rejected. We are hopeful that at some point we should. If we do get it, I think we can make a substantial difference to financial inclusion in that country. We are all glad to see some positive signs in this direction, but we are all waiting eagerly ourselves with fingers crossed. I have nothing more concrete to add to this. Thanks. The news in the media that telco-led model is not favored by the CBN, and there are some documentations on the CBN website that suggest this as well. Any comment on this? No, I don't know if it is right or it's speculative at this stage. I would like to have a view on that. Thank you so much. Thank you. The next question comes from Abdulrauf Aremu Bello of WSTC Financial Services. Yeah, good afternoon. Abdul. Thank you. Yes. My question has been asked by the previous analyst. I wanted to ask about the PSP license stuff. It's been answered. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We have a follow-up question from Laurent of Axis Investment Partners. Yeah, just a second question with regard to Airtel Mobile Commerce, the spin-off that was done last quarter. I remember in the last call, management stated that there is a total potential for up to 25% of minority investment and a target IPO within four years. Is that strategy still in line? Have you had any updates since then with regards to minority investment? Thank you. Thank you. The strategy is still in line. We believe in that strategy. We are in discussions with various people who are keen to work with us, who can also bring value to us and the investment. As and when it is ready and materialized, we will keep you informed. I have nothing more to add, but we are very clear on that strategy. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just a final reminder. If you would like to ask a question, you're welcome to press star and then one. We have a follow-up question from Alastair Jones of New Street Research. Hi, thanks. Just a quick one, and I know the PSP licensing, and you sort of mentioned, you talked about that a lot. I'm just trying to understand, how do you sort of balance between waiting for a potential PSP license versus actually taking the initiative to talk to potential banking partners and start rolling out a service in partnership with them? How do you sort of think about that strategy and the sort of timing around that? Obviously you're losing sort of momentum by waiting and could you not potentially get a partnership and try and drive it forward, before that. Thank you. We actually have already a partnership with Access Bank in Nigeria. It's an Access Bank Money, Access Money powered by Airtel, and we are running that. There are a lot of services that do happen through that. Also, certain support programs and money disbursements are happening in that. However, we believe that a payment service bank or a separate license would give a greater impetus to the way we drive this business. It's already there. Thanks. Next, we have a follow-up question from Jonathan Kennedy-Good of J.P. Morgan. Thanks. Yeah, just a housekeeping issue for me on Mobile Money. Do you no longer supply us with the regional breakdown of Mobile Money revenue and EBITDA? I just can't find it, unless I'm looking in the wrong places. JD, I thought we never did. Go ahead, JD. Hello. Just give me a second. I'm just going to that place. In the regional side, if you go to page 9 in the RNS announcement which we made, you see the Mobile Money revenue for East Africa, Francophone Africa in the next page, it has been given. We have not changed anything in the format. We give a consolidated Mobile Money number, and we also give the revenue number for respective regions. Okay, great. I was looking at the IR packs. Perhaps not in there. I'll look at the RNS. Thank you. Yeah. If you can go to the RNS, you can see that region-wide revenue numbers have been given. Thank you. Next, we have a follow-up question from Ron Rodger-Ratnam of Nutmeg. Hi, Raghu. I have a follow-up on the PSP license. I know you mentioned you don't have a further comment, but you're welcome to say so again. Is there anything preventing you from legally separating the entire Mobile Money business in Nigeria and partnering with the bank? Conceptually, there's nothing that prevents that, right? Even if it's not a telco-led model, because that's a separate financial institution that partners with the bank and drives forward Mobile Money. Because I can't see how Nigeria gets financial inclusion, especially like you mentioned in the North where banking penetration is not even in the teens in some places, without the help of the mobile operators. I'm just struggling to see how this will work out. Good question. Even the Airtel, the payment bank service that we have applied for license to the central bank, is a separate company from the telecom business, firstly. It's a separate company. The second question is, should we work with a bank or wait for this license? We believe that we should get the license soon, and if the government would see this call favorably, and then I think this will help. We've perhaps not worked out anything yet with any of the banks. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, just one further final reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, you're welcome to press star and then 1 to place yourself in the question queue. We don't seem to have any further questions on the line, so I'd like to hand over back to Raghu for closing comments. Thank you. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. This is my last earnings call, and wishing you and Airtel Africa the very best. I'm sure this company will continue to go to greater heights. Thank you for being on the call today, and good day to all. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. That concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.