Earnings Call: Q2 2023

Aug 2, 2023

Good evening, everybody. Thank you for joining StarHub's first half 2023 results update call. My name is Amelia, and I take care of investor relations for StarHub. This evening, we have with us our Chief Executive, Nikhil Eapen, Dennis Chia, our CFO, Johan Buse, Chief of Consumer, and Tan Kit Yong, our Head of Enterprise Business Group. We'll start off with opening remarks and an overview of our performance from Nikhil, followed by Dennis on financial, and then Johan and Kit on business highlights. We'll then open the floor to Q&A thereafter. Nikhil, over to you. Thanks, Amelia, and good evening to everyone, and welcome to our Q2 and H1 2023 earnings. It's a pleasure to have you, as always. I'll start with the financial highlights, and let's start right with service revenue. We grew across every business segment year-on-year, despite the competition that we're all aware of in the market, in particular on mobile. Overall service revenue, as you can see from these numbers, grew 7.8% year-on-year for the first half, and in fact about 3.2% quarter-on-quarter from the first quarter of 2023 to the second quarter of 2023. Service EBITDA was reflected of our DARE+ investment cost and elevated OpEx levels as a result. Notwithstanding that, we did see net profit trending very positively at SGD 77 million for the full year or SGD 39 million for Q2. For the first half of 2023, we registered 26% year-on-year growth, which was, if you recall, the similar growth trend that we saw in the first quarter of 2023. Not on this page, but I should also note that our continuing trend on free cash flow remains strong and our net debt to EBITDA remain low and healthy at 1.57 times, well south of the regional telco average. Moving on to segmented revenue on the next page. As I mentioned, we saw year-on-year growth across all segments for first half 2023. Mobile first. Mobile grew substantially year-on-year by 13% with some growth in subscribers, but more important, growth in ARPU. Most of this ARPU uplift has come because we have been able to capture and not devalue the return of roaming. We have also not devalued our base ARPU, which we have in fact increased despite market competition. Emphasis on this last point, intense market competition, against which we have focused on delivering customer experience differentiation, allowing us to monetize. Proof positive of this is the strong growth contrasts with the recent disclosure of the number two operator who has reported ongoing contraction in consumer revenue whilst adding to subscriber count. We believe our revenue market share lead to the number three operator is now in the hundreds of basis points. Broadband continued to grow with a solid number 1 position, together with our subsidiary, MyRepublic Broadband, again, despite intensifying competition and reduced promotion from us. We are working on leveraging our joint position to execute on revenue and cost enhancements together with MyRepublic Broadband. Entertainment, as you can see, continued to register strong growth year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter, lifted by Premier League, but as well as the pull-through by Premier League of other high-value packages in entertainment. Here in entertainment, we are a very significant market leader, as you know, with a differentiated offering. Overall for consumer, we saw, as I'd mentioned, year-on-year ARPU stable or growing across the board due to differentiation with our focus on increasing customer lifetime value through InfinityPlay strategy. On enterprise, we saw sustained year-on-year growth from all lines of business except for regional ICT and specifically, JOS Singapore. Network solutions has continued its turnaround with 4.6% year-on-year growth in the first half of 2023, driven by 21% growth in managed services. Ensign, cybersecurity, and in particular Ensign, grew strongly. Cybersecurity grew 42% quarter-on-quarter and 7% year-on-year in the first half of 2023. This is a business, as always, where the projects are lumpy. The continuing growth trend is strong with strong pipeline, and we continue to invest in Ensign's growth, which is high quality growth. Next page, please. Reviewing our performance versus guidance and our guidance revision. For the first half, we have performed versus our guidance. We were in line with service revenue at 8% year-on-year. We were above on service EBITDA margin coming in for the first half at almost 23% versus 20% guidance. For CapEx, we came in for the first half at 5.5% of service total revenue, including investments relative to the 13%-15% guidance that we had provided. Taking into account the first half as well as our outlook for the year, we are improving on our overall fiscal 2023 guidance. On service revenue, we are reducing our guidance on growth to 3%-5%. This is as a result of D'Crypt and JOS Singapore. On D'Crypt is experiencing project delays. On JOS Singapore, we are rationalizing their pipeline as we integrate our regional ICT businesses more closely into StarHub. However, I should state there is minimal impact on EBITDA from this revision of our service revenue guidance. On service EBITDA on the other hand, we are increasing our guidance from 20%-22%. Hence, you should expect to see an increase in service EBITDA versus our original expectation. When you put together the revisions and guidance for service EBITDA as well as CapEx, you should expect overall an increase in EBITDA and free cash flow versus our original expectations for the year. With that, I will pass on as always to our esteemed CFO. Thanks, Nikhil, and good evening and thanks for joining us on this call on this Thursday evening. Some key financial metrics. Total revenue reported for the first half is SGD 1.106 billion, and that translates into a 4.5% year-on-year growth. Service revenue of SGD 938 million, representing 8% growth. EBITDA for the first half was SGD 229.8 million, and our service gross margin is 22.7% for the first half. Net profit attributable to shareholders, SGD 76.7 million, translating to SGD 0.041 on an earnings per share basis. Our free cash flow for the first half was flat at 0. Notable, I do want to note that we expect a significantly higher free cash flow for the second half, translating to a significant and meaningful free cash flow for the full year. Our free cash flow for the first half was flat at zero due to certain working capital changes as well as timing of capital payments. Our cash and cash equivalent at the end of Q2 and the first half was SGD 490 million on our balance sheet, and our net debt to EBITDA ratio was 1.57 times. On the next slide, we'd like to provide an update on our DARE+ trajectory and our investment. We are now one and a half years into the DARE+ investments and initiatives, which we started at the start of 2022. At that time, we subsequently had guided that we would be incurring SGD 310 million over a 3-year period. Halfway into the program, we have now incurred SGD 106 million last year, or 34% in 2022. For this year, for 2023, we expect to incur about 40% or SGD 120 million. The CapEx to OpEx ratio of that investment is about 60% to 40%. The rest of the investments we expect to incur in 2024 next year. Now I just want to note that, we are in the process of rationalizing all our initiatives as always, as well as the total investments that we would be making. We expect the total investments to be lower than the SGD 310, not because of the reduction initiatives, but because of the rationalization and optimization of the initiatives as we go along. We will provide an update on the total spend of that initiative as we go into 2024. On that note, we'll pass on to Johan to update on consumer. A very good evening, everyone. Hope everyone is fine and thanks to those who wished me a get-well after the last call when I really weren't very well. Let's start with mobile today. You can see that both in post-paid as well as in pre-paid, we gained 60K each subs, which is sort of totaling 6% of the base increase year-on-year. ARPU is steady on post-paid. It's actually up year-on-year, if you see by SGD 3. That is a combination of roaming as well as local subscription revenue, which almost sounds counterintuitive if you look at the competitive intensity. That I think is a good display of rational behavior in the market, managing both the subscriber base as well as the ARPU well. In summary, what you see here is a almost 13% service revenue increase in combination with a 6% base increase. For those of you who follow the results, you'll probably have noticed that it's quite different compared to some of the others in the market. We're very proud of that. The churn monthly rate is at 0.8%, and I think also that is a splendid performance in this market, so it's slightly up compared to last year at 0.1%. In overall context, that's a really good churn number. Proud of that. We're closing off SGD 302.7 for the first half year. We're on a good to start off, and you can see that the gigs as you would expect is continuously increasing. We're close to 19 GB across the board. That's good because we've got 2 networks, 4G and 5G. That's good. Moving to broadband. Broadband, we saw a marginal dip in the base, 1,000. We are, we're down to 577,000 customers, thousands obviously. ARPU is SGD 34. Stable. We do see more and more customers actually taking higher speed plans, which is good and the churn remains low, very low, 0.6%. The revenue increase is mainly driven by what you can see, speed upgrades and that results in higher subscription revenue. Of course, we included MyRepublic Broadband in it as well. That's a good performance on broadband. If those of you who haven't seen, we actually launched last quarter, the first and only XGS-PON offer in the market. If you're really keen on getting great speeds and fantastic Zoom experience at your home, StarHub is the one to go for. Entertainment on the next page. Entertainment, very high ARPU, SGD 45. We clocked SGD 2 incremental ARPU on the back of Premier League. Linked to Premier League also, we see more customers taking more content passes, which is very encouraging. The base went down to 355. Just remind everyone, end of Q1, we started measuring entertainment as active base. These are real active customers. Before that, some customers were entitled with certain passes or all the key solutions we had, not necessarily using it. Of course, we have at this point in time, what we call the mid-season Premier League dip, which we actually already see coming back into the base. Monthly churn therefore slightly higher than it was before, but still I would say quite in line, at 1%, so that's good. That delivered a good revenue uplift, 18.2%. We closed the first half year close to SGD 140 million, and that's driven across the board, by the way. There's both in commercial TV revenue as well as in subscription revenue for consumers and advertising revenue, and partially driven by, indeed, Premier League. That brings me to the end of my section. I'm handing you over to Ken for the enterprise update. Thanks very much. All right. Thank you, Johan. Now coming to Enterprise. As Nikhil has mentioned, for Enterprise services, service revenue grew 1.8%. If you look at the bottom left, the revenue mix, which is well distributed between data, internet, cybersecurity, regional ICT services and managed services. Coming to network solutions, right? We have a higher revenue thanks to contribution of data and internet products that we have. Managed services grew significantly for us for more project completions. Our growth has been offset by the lower voice services revenue due to lower domestic and international traffic. When it come to the cybersecurity services, it registered a 10% growth of revenue. We also note that there's a operating loss of SGD 8.9 million for first half, right? Due to the lower income and continued investment in the talent to support growth. Coming to regional ICT services, you can see with a decline of 10% of revenue due to lower hardware sales, right? The operating profit remains stable, right, year-on-year at SGD 900K. All right. With that, I move on to the next slide, and over to Nikhil. Thank you. I'd like to make a few comments by business line on what we're focused on for the residual of FY 2023. Also by way of that, what we expect. For mobile, we expect continued growth. Our target is for ARPU to remain stable. As I had mentioned, we are continuingly focused on excellence and differentiation and monetization of our core mobile products, as well as Infinity Play strategies around cross-sell and upsell. Now, for broadband, we are looking forward to and are focused on growth for this segment for the rest of the year. We are focused on broadband for our core presence in the household. We are focused on driving penetration as we have been very strongly of high-speed subscription, so 2 gigabit and 10 gigabit as the fuel for growth. With that core position in the household, strong cross-sell and upsell against the rest of our Infinity Play products. On entertainment, we are focused on growth for the residual of the year. Continuing to drive Premier League penetration of our base, as well as cross-bundling against Premier League and other entertainment packages. On network solutions, we continue to drive our managed services order book, which remains healthy, giving us good forward earnings visibility. On cybersecurity, we have two businesses, as you know. We have D'Crypt, which is experiencing project delays, but Ensign InfoSecurity, we expect continued and strong growth. We are supporting and will continue investing in building of expertise as well as capabilities, leveraging artificial intelligence and other threat detection technology. But also evolving the revenue book much more towards managed services than what we call data services. On regional ICT, we expect continued growth from our Malaysia businesses, which are the largest segments of this business by far, Strateq and JOS Malaysia. On JOS Singapore, as reflected in our revised revenue guidance, we are rationalizing the pipeline and hence reducing the revenue outlook. In terms of foundation, as part of Cloud Infinity, what we are doing is we are building what we call the world's first autonomous metropolitan cloud network. As we move our network to the cloud, as the first telecom operator in the world to do so, we are focused on enhancing resiliency, agility, scalability of our network, security of our network, and we will be making those capabilities externally available to customers. Our enterprise customers will be empowered themselves to self-serve and harness multi-cloud as well as hybrid, so hybrid and public cloud options securely and effectively from core to edge with security by design, which is what I mean by security. But this is something that is on a timeframe alongside their clocks for the next 12 to 18 months. Now on digital transformation, we had, as you know, in last November, launched our consumer all-in-one app, as well as our cloud stack for consumer. By the end of this year, we expect to have put most, if not all of our product, and hence complete this journey, by the end of this year. On M&A, we continue to remain positioned for M&A. While we can't predict M&A timing and outcomes. We have good visibility on DARE+ and are trending well against our DARE+ objectives. We see rising profitability. We have continuing strong free cash flow and low leverage. As and when consolidation opportunities rise, we see ourselves as very well positioned to acquire. I will hand back to Amelia. Thank you, Nikhil. Now we'll open the floor to Q&A. As usual, you know, if you have a question, please raise your hand and we'll get to you. First off, Sachin, would you like to unmute yourself? Thanks, Amelia. Thanks for the opportunity. Three questions from me. Firstly, we have seen another delay in transformation program. As you see, SGD 155 million was targeted and now SGD 130 million. Is there a clawback mechanism because of, you know, we are seeing a lot of delay in transformation programs starting from the last year. Anything clawback which the company can get from the vendors? That's question number one. Question number two, if you look on a quarterly basis, transformation costs, there's hardly any transformation cost incurred in this quarter. I think probably SGD 5 million versus SGD 35 last quarter. We don't see that impact on the net profit. Does it mean without transformation, profit would have declined a lot? Where is it coming from, this profit squeeze in 2Q if you exclude the transformation cost? Lastly, yes, I mean, we have seen that M1 ARPU has declined quite significantly in the first half, 22%. I mean, you're doing much better, but there is a real concern that all those 5G SIM-only plans are way too cheap. Is this a concern going into second half for you? Thank you. Thanks, Sachin. Dennis, would you like to take the first two questions and Johan can comment on the third? Hi, Sachin, good evening. I'll respond to your first two questions. Firstly, on the delays in transformation. I just want to point out that, you know, on this slide we had previously guided that we expect to incur about 50% of the transformation investments in 2023, which translates to the SGD 155 number that you referred to. We're now guiding to SGD 120 or approximately SGD 120 or 40%. Most of this reduction is due to rationalization of our transformation initiatives and programs, including the negotiation of transformation investments with various vendors. That is why we're actually reducing the guidance in terms of the total spend that we expect to incur this year. We do acknowledge there's been, there still remains, some delays of certain initiatives into 2024. The bulk of this reduction is from the rationalization and optimization of our spend as opposed to delays. That means that we're still very committed to delivering on the DARE+ outcomes, and the transformation outcomes in the years that we have committed to doing so as well. Hope that answers your question on that. Dennis- -the first one. Optimization should have reduced the total transformation cost from SGD 310. Are you saying there's a chance that it could be lower than SGD 310 million? Right. Yeah. Yeah. the original guidance? That's correct. Yeah. Given that we expect to complete the transformation initiatives in 2024, as we draw closer to the completion of those initiatives in next year, we will provide guidance as to the total investments that we will incur. At this point, we do have confidence in guiding to the fact that it will be a lower number than SGD 310. Just for total clarity, Sachin, I do wanna reemphasize a point that Dennis made loud and clear. We are not reducing the scope of our transformation. We are not reducing the number of initiatives. We're not reducing the specific outcomes and aspiration associated with each transformation initiative. What we are doing, as Dennis said, is optimization, rationalization, and getting to the same outcomes with lower dollars. Understand. Okay. Okay. Sachin, on your second question, you know, despite the relatively lower transformation investments in the first half, why our operating profits are not significantly higher. Now if you look at the first half results, embedded in that, are certain losses that were incurred by our subsidiaries, namely, the cybersecurity operations. This is a function of the timing of recognition of certain delivery of projects, which are typically back ended in the second half, right? Because of the relatively lower number of projects and therefore the lower number in terms of revenue recognition for the first half, there is about SGD 9 million of losses embedded in the numbers for the first half, without which our operating performance would have been significantly higher. That's the reason behind it, not so much, anything else. You know, across StarHub, we still continue to drive operating efficiencies, and that's, that you see has translated into the results that we've delivered for the first half. The last question, Sachin, on the, let's call it, revenue concern you called out, right? Look, it is, I mean, in a market like this, which is to this level, competitive, obviously, we are vigilant. We're on the lookout, and we monitor things very closely. Key indicators obviously would be churn. You saw the churn numbers. That's the first indicator. We're tracking well on that. Having said that, obviously we are concerned for the rest of the year. There's two buckets which we closely monitor. Let's call it the movement between the different type of plans, SIM-only device and then within SIM-only. Secondly, roaming. I think what is serving us very well at the moment is the deployment of giga! four years ago as a flank brand. The team is doing a fantastic job on churn management. We defend fiercely, and we attack fiercely at the same time, and that's so far working for us. We continue to monitor the market. Thank you. We hope those answers your question. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Amelia. Thanks. Thanks, Sachin. Maybe one addition to your question. Yes I forgot to highlight that, Sachin. Obviously, what we're also very actively working with is bundling of products and services, which is in the core of our DNA. As you know, probably, bundled customers have a significantly lower churn as well, so that's also something we're very actively doing at the moment. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, Johan. Thanks, Sachin. Next up we have Neil. Hi, Neil. Hi. Thanks, Johan. Thanks Nikhil, Dennis, and team for hosting this. I have two questions. The first is very broad brush, right? Your revenue guidance is almost halved. Can I get a sense across the four large business buckets where that is coming from, what's driving it? My second question is largely to do with enterprise. Now, look, I mean, if you think about JOS, Ensign, MyRepublic, D'Crypt, et cetera, surely that doesn't translate to just a SGD 6 million-SGD 7 million half on half increase in revenues. I'm talking about revenues here, so it's not about the one-off losses or write-off. What am I missing here? Has there been loss of customers? If so, in which markets? Some color on that would be great. Thank you. Thank you. Nikhil. Let me start off on the first on the revenue guidance, Neil. The change in the revenue guidance, you know, almost entirely comes from two businesses: D'Crypt and JOS Singapore. D'Crypt is, as you know, one piece of our cybersecurity business. The other is Ensign, which continues to perform strongly. D'Crypt has, or is experiencing some material delays in project timing, and therefore, revenue delivery, which does affect its outlook quite materially for the rest of fiscal 2023. On JOS Singapore, JOS Singapore is one of three regional ICT businesses. The bigger business, regional ICT businesses are Strateq and JOS Malaysia, which continue to perform. With all three businesses, Strateq, JOS Malaysia, which are the two Malaysian businesses, as well as JOS Singapore, we are more tightly integrating them into StarHub. As we integrate them, we have, obviously, worked through, you know, joint business planning. As a result of that joint business planning, we have worked through the JOS Singapore pipeline. We have rationalized that pipeline in an effort to trim down the number of deals and focus on better quality deals with higher margins. As a result of that, we are revising the revenue outlook for JOS Singapore. Yeah. Between D'Crypt, which is project delays, and JOS Singapore, which is the rationalization of pipeline, that in essence, is almost all of the revenue guidance. As I said, that reduction of revenue guidance, which is largely from those two entities, has very minimal EBITDA impact. Dennis, you wanna add or take a crack at it? Thanks, Nikhil. Second question then. Right. Now, the second question as to where are the gaps that you think there may be in enterprise business given that we had several subsidiary, right? If you look at the Going back to the enterprise. Can I just jump in there? Like, I'm trying to understand when you bought, when the Enterprise Business Group bought all of these other entities, I have to open my spreadsheet here to. Obviously the add-on or the bolt-on was not just SGD 6 or 7 million. Regardless of certain situations where, which may involve a write down at the bottom line level, why is the revenue just SGD 7 million up half on half from all these entities? I mean, MyRepublic was, like, 10 times larger than that when you all bought it, so after it's consolidated. I'm struggling to understand that. Some insight would be great. Yeah. If you look at the regional ICT services, a lot of them are actually one-off, right, project services, right? They need to have order booking first. After they got the order book, they got to deliver hardware. Hardware delivery got delayed, the revenue comes in later. That's why in enterprise business for ICT, we are focusing on the order book, right? Order book will indicate the health level of the business. Just that when it comes to delivery, there is a hardware delivery issue, there will be services we need to perform, and then eventually there's the maintenance. When you chop that into pieces, it, you will see it's a bit lumpy thing, right? If we were to get the order book in, let's say, Q4 last year, you realize it's revenue into the second half, right? The first half of the year. There is a timing issue here as well. That is on the order book. The other aspect is that in enterprise business, right? There is also network solutions as well, right? We are still having fierce competition from the market itself. That also add on the pressure to the revenue offset. Things that we grow on the order book for enterprise services is being offset by competition of our network services itself. There's a offset and there are growth, overall, if you struggle about the dollar of the revenue because the timing required to turn order book into a revenue. If you are aware, we're having last 2 years we have a hardware delivery issues. Some of the vendors takes 9 months to 1 year to deliver hardware. There's re-revenue impact to all these ICT services. Neil, I just want to point out. So- Sorry, Neil. If I can point out that we, JOS, Strateq was acquired in 2020. JOS was completed on the start of 2022. The numbers and the consolidated numbers in terms of revenues from contributions from all these acquisitions have already been embedded into our 2022 numbers. Therefore, this is the year-on-year comparison between our first half performance and last year's performance which, you know, it's just a year-on-year. There's no full impact. The acquisitions were all completed previously already. Yep, I'm aware of that, Dennis. Thank you. It's just that I thought the incremental half and half growth was just really soft. Quick follow-up. Does that mean that if hardware solutions and sales have been delayed, that we should expect this side to recover over the next two to four quarters, or is it a longer tail? No, I would say that. Entirely. I think the timeline, you look at 12 to 18 months, not immediate, because as we acquire these entities, we need to integrate them, create new value proposition surrounding our core strategy, right? We are in motion of transition of transforming their business as well. Like, for example, JOS Singapore has some legacy services that we choose not to do anymore. There will be revenue loss, and we have to focus on reprioritize on the services that's of high margin, that's aligned to what StarHub want to do. We are in this transition mode now, right? Using the Cloud Infinity as our backbone, as foundation. We are pivot towards that direction. That it will be a 12 to 18 month conversation to getting MVPs done, convince the client, and then the revenue starts to flow in based on the new product and services that we want to offer to the market, and not based on the legacy business when we acquire them. Correctly said, so Neil, when you look at the five businesses in question, Ensign, D'Crypt and Cybersecurity, Strateq, JOS Malaysia, and JOS Singapore and Regional ICT, what you should expect is continued growth from Ensign, Strateq and JOS Malaysia. The way you should look at D'Crypt and JOS Singapore is essentially a reset. All right. Thank you, gentlemen. I think I've got my answers. Thank you. Thanks for the call. Thank you. Okay. Next up we have Hussaini Saifee. Hi, good evening and thanks for the opportunity. Just 2 questions from me. First is on the revision and guidance. Is it possible to give breakdown between D'Crypt and JOS Singapore? Is D'Crypt, the reduction, is it a pushback of revenues or, you know, we are rationalizing over there as well? A related question on JOS Singapore, the revenues which are being rationalized, were they EBITDA positive or they were dilutive in nature? That's question number one. Second question is on mobile business. Viren, I see that mobile revenues have declined on a quarter-on-quarter basis slightly. I just want to understand, is it because of some seasonality issue or is it a factor of competition? Thank you. Thanks, Hussaini. Dennis, maybe you can start off with the first two questions, and then Kit can add on regarding JOS. Then Johan can take the question on mobile. Hi, Hussaini. In terms of the revenue guidance, as Nikhil has pointed out, it was the combination of D'Crypt and JOS Singapore. We're not in a position to provide the exact breakdown between the two, suffice to say that, you know, the four-point revision or thereabout in the guidance down is a contribution from these two businesses. With, you know, as said, it was a reset of the JOS Singapore business in terms of the lines of business that JOS Singapore is focusing on. They are EBITDA positive, they're not significantly positive, which is why we're looking at going up the value chain in terms of delivering. Better and value-added solutions to our enterprise customers through JOS Singapore. That's why we are looking at doing a reset and rationalization of lines of businesses that they are involved in. D'Crypt is a question of a delay of certain key projects, that delay we expect to go into next year, that's why there's impact for this financial year. Kit Yong, you wanna add? Yeah. I just add on the JOS Singapore. Mm-hmm. Right? We're changing the transaction profile of the clients from small value, low-value transaction. We are emulating all these small transaction that is procurement transaction, moving to solution and services. That includes bundling our SaaS network services, right? As part of the evolution, we'll be dropping all these top line, right? Or we call anti-churn without much margin impact at all, right? That's how we are gonna rationalize it, we are upskilling the people that we have, right? Mm-hmm. New technology stack that we are bringing in Cloud Infinity, where from on-prem capabilities that they bring in, now they are transforming into cloud services, cloud use stack, security use stack. It's a mix of doing this, and that's how we are gonna leave the EBITDA of the business. Johan? Okay. Thanks, Annie. I'm number three answering your third question on the revenue outlook. That was your question. We actually don't specify it here. Johan, I think the question was on quarterly mobile revenue. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. I'm going to go. Not full agenda slide. Yeah. I'm going to that. Sorry. Go ahead. I mean, in terms of the mobile revenue, there was an earlier question from Sachin on that as well. We do see a lot of competition, but we don't expect any further impact at this point in time right now. The drop from Q1 to Q2, or Q2 to Q1 I should say, is actually pre-COVID seasonality. We checked that, the last 3 years with COVID, because of everything else, that shifted a little bit, but that's pretty normal. As you probably know, typically Q3, Q4 are a bit heavier on revenue on the back of the device launches. That's hopefully clarifying the entire landscape for you. Hussaini, I hope we've addressed your question. Yeah. Yeah. Very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Now moving on to Arthur. Hi, Arthur. Hi. Hey, good evening. Yeah. Hi. Two questions, please. Firstly, can you clarify on the guidance? Of course, you've mentioned store revenues and higher margins, lower CapEx. Is this CapEx change based on identified savings, or are these linked to the delays in the revenue trends for certain projects into 2024? I'm just wondering how to look at this, whether I should push back CapEx to the next year. The second question I had is with regard to M&A. Nikhil, you'd mentioned earlier in your comments that this is something which is, of course, hard to predict. I'm just wondering what areas would you be looking at. Would this be more in the consumer segment, enterprise segment, or others? Thank you. Okay. Dennis, would you like to take the first question? Sure. Hi, Arthur. On your first question on CapEx, or rather the reduction in the CapEx, from 13 to 15 to 11 to 13, the 2-point drop is largely due to rationalization of initiatives, as mentioned. This applies to both the operating expenses that we expect to incur, as well as the capital investments that we expect to incur as well. The bulk of it, about 70%, is due to rationalization as well as vendor negotiations to bring down the total investment. There is about 30% of that reduction that is attributable to delays, and that's pushed out into 2024. However, I do want to reiterate the fact that, despite these delays, management is still working towards delivering on the DARE+ outcomes that we have articulated to the market. That still remains very much on track. Nikhil, on the M&A question. On the first question, if I can just reiterate the point that we've made to Sachin, which is, the reduction of our DARE+ outlay from SGD 310 million, which reflects in both CapEx and OpEx, is not as a result of reducing our aspiration, reducing the number of initiatives and reducing kind of the technical outcomes that we would like from each of the initiatives. It is really just a pure optimization and renegotiation, which has resulted in improved SGD. Not higher, but lower. With that, I'll take your second question. There are really two areas. The first is continued acquisitions on the enterprise segment. Now, as I mentioned earlier in this call, we are in the process of fully integrating Strateq, JOS Malaysia, and JOS Singapore. Once that's done, we will be in a good position to continue to deepen and expand. Mm ... you know, our footprint, in regional ICT. Really focused on, as Kit Yong alluded to, large scale projects, high value businesses, with recurring revenue streams, and, you know, quite cloud centric, leveraging off the work that we're doing here in Singapore on Cloud Infinity. Now, that's one area. However, the bigger area as far as, potential dollar outlay is domestic consolidation, and that's obviously where we can't, you know, predict timing, we can't predict outcomes. With strong visibility on DARE+ and improving outcomes on DARE+. With good free cash flow generation, as well as low leverage, you know, we wanna preserve our position. That positioning is well-positioned to acquire as the case may read. Understood. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Arthur. Next up we have Paul. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, thanks so much for the presentation. Just a few questions for me. The first was just a jump in allowance for receivables, so just wondering who's not paying their phone bills? No, no. Okay. The question is like why is it related to mobile or is it enterprise? That's the first question. The second on mobile, I can understand the improvement in roaming, but maybe could you elaborate a bit on the Value-Added Services and Johan mentioned voice and data. Maybe a bit more clarification on what's driving that apart from, of course, higher subscribers. My third one, if I could, the In terms of the DARE+ spending that you have incurred so far in the first half, the SGD 30 million, I'm just wondering, at the OpEx line I'm just trying to understand which line item, will your DARE+ be recording this spending? My last one, sorry to ask you so many questions. No problem. My last one just on the entertainment. You know, if you do some back of envelope numbers, you know, 15% growth in ARPU, but 4% decline in subscribers. My only guess is that your advertising revenue might have contributed a little bit more. I just wanted to try and understand how to kind of reconcile those numbers. Yeah. Thanks again for taking my questions. Thanks, Paul. Dennis, could you please comment on the receivables as well as the DARE+ spend? Then Johan on mobile and entertainment. Okay. Hi, Paul. On the provision for doubtful debts, I just want to state that we adhere to an accounting policy that we consistently apply. Regardless of certain collections that we get after the quarter end or the month end, we still record the provision based on the policy so that there's no question of adjusting it up and down to our whims and fancies. I just want to note therefore that this is actually a timing difference in the first half of what we've recorded, and these were largely in relation to certain age receivables from our enterprise customers. We have actually subsequently collected the, you know, these amounts from them, and so we expect to be able to reverse some of these, or most of these in the second half. Of course, this will be again subject to timing of receivables that will appear in our balance sheets as at year-end again. This is always a timing issue. There's no real concern around collectability of these amounts other than, you know, the ones that happen from time to time. Our consumers still continue to pay us. It's worthy to note that if they don't, then, you know, there's stopping of services and so forth that we apply as a matter of process. On, you know, DARE+ investments, you know, the SGD 30 million of investments again is broken down to 60/40, 60 CapEx, 40 of OpEx. Most of the OpEx is recorded in the line item called repair and maintenance. Paul. Handing over to me, I guess. Yeah. For question B and D on my list. First and foremost, mobile revenue. It was sort of stated on the page as well, Paul, that it's not only roaming, it's also indeed subscription and VAS. To give you a bit more color and context, I think the team has done a great job upselling, especially our CyberProtect VAS. That's not an insignificant number. There's been, I would say a relatively smart marketing approach that has been driving. We continue to see basically PPU revenues being offset by subscription revenues and also the anti-churn team as we're doing a good job trying to at least cross and upsell or recontract customers on a similar or higher plans. Those are the contributing factors when it comes to mobile revenue and holding the ARPU. Entertainment, I think your observation, well spotted. That's across the board in terms of advertising revenue as well as commercial revenue. What PL Premier League has done really well for us is opening doors for SMEs, hotels, bars and restaurants. Also on the consumer side, a side effect of what we have been witnessing is that we saw a significant increase of customers taking additional passes. Besides Premier League, quite a few customers take the sports pass as well. I think we have also become a little bit better and smarter on monetizing some of the OTT solutions we have running in the back. There's a combination of things leading to the observed outcome. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks, Paul. We have maybe time for 2 more questions, if anybody has anything to ask. Sachin, no more question? Hello. Yeah. again, I'm a bit surprised, that. Sachin that you haven't reduced the magnitude of your transformation cost. I mean, if it is because to be able to negotiate lower price is kind of success, right? But what we are seeing, that if you don't reduce that number, it's seen as a delay, you know? I'm a bit perplexed by your choice of action, you know, of not reducing the transformation cost overall despite successful negotiation. This is a bit confusing for me. Sachin, I mean, if you look at the slide where we have guided to the transmission investment. Mm-hmm ... we've actually reduced it from SGD 155 to SGD 120. I've also stated that, you know, 70% of that reduction is due to renegotiation and 30% due to delays. We've actually embedded that into our numbers, in terms of investments, that we're making this year, in 2023. That's been embedded into our numbers and our margin guidance for the full year as well. Sachin, the SGD 310 will come down. Yeah. We will give you visibility on that next year. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Does anybody else have a- I think, Sachin, you've successfully got more data out of Dennis. Not sure but. By asking the same question again. Yeah. Paul, do you have a fifth question for us as usual? No. I'm gonna go eat my durian now. Okay. I'm serious. Okay. I guess, okay. Kenneth. We have a question from Kenneth. Hi, management. This is Kenneth from CGS-CIMB. Thanks for taking my question. I've just one question on the entertainment side of things. Regarding the launch of M1's EZTV two days ago, I think they are pricing it at SGD 19 per month. It's just slightly the TV pricing. What is management's view on competing against this? Is there an intention to perhaps lower prices of your TV plans over the coming months? Yeah, just some color on this. Thank you. Johan. Wow, Kenneth. Closing question, very interesting. Look, we have analyzed this at length. We were not surprised by this offering coming into the market. As you saw, the regular, the normal consumer price is SGD 25 and it's an introduction price for SGD 20. It comes with 75 channels. A bit of a mix of the Asian, Indian, Asian, and English, with a little bit of VOD, box less app. We're going to observe that. We strongly believe that the core of our entertainment strategy, which is centered around aggregation of OTT solutions in combination with bespoke sports content is the way to differentiate. We have been seeing and we're witnessing and we're analyzing it every month, a continuous change in consumer behavior when it comes to specifically linear channels. As we have expressed in our strategy updates regularly is that our intention is to move to OTT and to offer a full suite of relevant and appealing content. On the back of that, we do see that the future of, let's call it linear channels, is declining slowly, if you can debate what slowly means. We're going to observe that, and we have our response tactics clear, ready. For us it's clear that our customers appreciate our product. Most of our customers are anyway contracted, so we're going to observe that closely and we'll do our best to make sure that we perform against that. Stay tuned. That's it. Hopefully that's answering your question well enough, Kenneth. Thank you, Johan. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, I'll start the 5-second countdown to the next question, otherwise we can end the call early. Oh, sorry, since no one's asking. Oh, you are asking the fifth question after all. Oh, yeah, sorry, sorry to keep delaying this. Just a quick one. No problem. on the consumer all-in-one app, I know you're gonna launch it at end of 2023. I'm just wondering anything you can share or that you that was mentioned in the slide. Just any color. Cause it, I guess it's one of the key objectives behind the DARE+, if I'm not mistaken. That's a wonderful question, and I can answer in a way that you have all the time in the world to eat your durian. Let me try to explain a little bit more. Like many telcos, traditionally we have had multiple apps. Believe it or not, we still have a separate prepaid app. We had an app for this and an app for that. Obviously that's not the way forward. On the back of the consumer transformation program, which moves to a new stack, it enables us to centralize everything into one new app. Sort of very quietly, we have been doing that over the last eight, nine months. We will be finishing that entire piece of work by the end of this year. It's probably also noteworthy that this is a conscious different strategy than some of the other operators have in the business. I will not mention any names. We took a bit more pain at the start to make sure that we can end up organically in 1 app, so there's no customer pain. We're not creating a new app then expect customers to move to that new app. If you look at the current StarHub app, I would say it's like 50%, 60% there. What comes into play till the end of the year are components related to campaign management system capabilities in combination with data lakes, which will lead to a very personalized real-time offering suite. It will also be enhanced further with components around loyalty and rewards, and it will host all the products and services. There was earlier a question related to mobile revenue. One of the things we are already benefiting from, I'll just give you an example, and probably I give a bit too much information, but I think it's fine, is that it just enables customers, and it makes it easier for customers to click through on additional products and services. That's what we see at the moment happening, and that's helping us a lot. Do have a bit of patience with that. In the last quarter, ask the question again, and I will give you more details based on what we have completed by then. Hopefully, that's helping you to have a wonderful day and dinner. Yeah. Thanks so much, Johan. That's very clear. Thanks so much. Okay. Okay. We have a question from Arthur. Hi. Sorry, just a follow-up on 5G. Are you able to disclose 5G adoption levels and pricing trends? Is this still driving up or are we seeing thinning trends here? Wow. Okay. Good question. Thanks, Arthur. We don't disclose at this point in time, we haven't been disclosing 5G subs for a while. It's probably worthwhile to ask that question next quarter because we do have a few plans around 5G. In terms of the premium, the price premium, again, I think we have done a good job maintaining price premium. Our current price premium on 5G and the current market situation still ranges between SGD 5-SGD 10 at least, depending on whether it's a SIM-only plan or a device plan. We do see customers consciously buying 5G connectivity either in a SIM or a device. The price premium is there and maintaining as it is. Customer numbers, we have some interesting plans which hopefully we update you in the near future. Understood. You're not seeing any increased competition from the MVNOs with their, with their 5G offers? Okay, now you're asking me a question on hypothesis. My hypothesis, I should say at the moment is that the competition is very much around 4G SIM-only. There is a segment in the market which is extremely price conscious. That's a specific subsegment in the market. Customers, and this is a hypothesis, from what we see, who are opting for 5G value quality and are willing to pay more. 5G is not a pricing game. Understood. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thanks, Arthur. Do we have a last question? Going once, going twice. Okay. I guess we can end the call early today. Thank you very much for joining. Thanks, guys. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thank you. Thanks for the question. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye.