Earnings Call: Q4 2022

Feb 6, 2023

Hi. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for joining StarHub's FY 2022 results update call. My name is Amelia, and I take care of StarHub's investor relations. This evening, we have with us our Chief Executive, Nikhil Eapen, our CFO, Dennis Chia, Johan Buse, our Chief of Consumer, and also Kiat, our Head of Enterprise Business Group. We'll start off with opening remarks and an overview of our performance by Nikhil, followed by Dennis on financial, and Johan and Kiat on business highlights. We'll open the floor to Q&A thereafter. Just before we start, a gentle reminder to please mute yourself when you're not speaking. Nikhil, over to you, please. Hi, everyone, thank you very much for making time for us this evening. It's that time of the year again. I was reminded by my team that every year this usually happens on Valentine's Day, hopefully it's much appreciated that today is not Valentine's Day. With that, let's start with the financial highlights, let me just start by focusing on service revenue. Service revenue for fiscal 2022, we achieved SGD 1.9 billion. For the second half, we achieved SGD 1.27 billion. For Q4, we achieved SGD 535 million of service revenue. When you look at the growth trends associated with those numbers, fiscal 2022 year-on-year, we grew 17%. If one extracts the acquisitions that we made in the year, in FY 2022, namely MyRepublic, and JOS, the growth rate for FY 2022 year-on-year is 6.6%. For the fourth quarter, we grew 29% with the acquisitions and 17% year-on-year for the fourth quarter without the acquisitions. Quarter-on-quarter service revenue growth, where the acquisitions don't really matter since they weren't acquired and make their first contributions in Q3, we actually grew 11% quarter-on-quarter. That was service revenue. On service EBITDA, as you recall, when we ended 2021, we ended at about a 30% margin, and we went into DARE+ and we guided down to 20%. That's where we've ended. As you recall and as we've been talking about, our service EBITDA number reflects three things. It reflects our DARE+ investment, but it also re-reflects on macro costs, namely utilities and other things, as well as early investments that we've made on product and platforms. Overall, 2022 for service EBITDA was a trough year for us. You will see in our guidance that we anticipate recovery into 2023 and acceleration into our DARE+ outcomes. Now, our net income is reflective of that EBITDA trough in fiscal 2022 for DARE+, but it is also impacted by roughly about SGD 31 million in non-recurring provisions as well as impairments, which Dennis will elaborate on further. Last but not least, not on this page, despite the DARE+ investments that we've made, which are significant, we generated for the year strong free cash flow of about SGD 220 odd million and remain at low leverage of about 1.38 times. Therefore, we intend to accelerate into DARE+ in 2023, and to continue to and actually accelerate the harvesting process. Perhaps we can move on to segment revenue. For segment revenue, we recorded growth across all segments, across all business lines. We recorded growth across postpaid mobile, prepaid mobile, broadband, entertainment, cyber, regional ICT, and network solutions. We grew across all business lines, for the quarter and for the year-on-year. Now, zoning in on mobile, we generated for fiscal 2022 SGD 564 million, for the second half, SGD 296 million, and for the fourth quarter, SGD 153 million. When we look at some of those growth rates, for fiscal 2022, for mobile, we were up 7.5%. For the fourth quarter, we were up year-on-year 13%, and sequentially quarter-on-quarter we were up 7%. These growth rates, these strong growth rates were driven by subs growth, and we have continued to be very judicious about how we take subs without diluting our ARPU. They were also driven by roaming increase, which we were able to capture while holding a stable ARPU ex-roamings. Our intent is with Infinity Play to drive greater consumption, greater customer lifetime value. With all of that, one of the things that we were happy with was, based on the recent results that we've seen, we were able to extend our lead in revenue market share, vis-a-vis the player below us. On broadband, we saw higher revenue scale as a result of our acquisition of MyRepublic and some moderate revenue growth, due to improved ARPU as we continue to do what we do, which is to drive increased penetration of 2 Gigabit plans into our base. On entertainment, Johan will elaborate, but we saw very healthy year-on-year growth of 16% lifted by Premier League, FIFA World Cup, as well as our other content offering. On enterprise, last but not least, this continues to be a key growth engine. Cyber continues to grow strongly at double-digit annual revenue growth rates with improved profitability this year. Regional ICT, with or without acquisitions, grew year-on-year. Network solutions, which if you recall a year ago was something that was eroding, is now stabilized and growing, driven by strategic services and our order book, particularly in new product and platform lines rising rapidly. Next page, please. Our checklist versus our guidance. If you recall, at the beginning of fiscal 2022, we had guided service revenue growth of 10%. After Q3, we upgraded that service revenue guidance to 12%-15%, and we are ending the year with service revenue growth exceeding that revised guidance and achieving 17%. For service EBITDA margin, at the beginning of the year, we had guided to 20%, and we are ending the year in line with that expectation at 20%, which when you couple with the service revenue growth outperformance therefore implies higher EBITDA than we had anticipated in 2022. For CapEx commitment, this was again, something that we started the year with a level of guidance, which we've since revised after Q3 to 9%-12% including investments. We have beaten that revised guidance ending the year at 7.3%, including investments. Last but not least, we had guided to our dividend policy of SGD 0.05, and we are reiterating and reaffirming our payout of SGD 0.05 per share. With that, I'll hand off to our esteemed CFO, Dennis Chia. Thank you, Nikhil, and good evening to everyone. Recapping on our full year results. For the second half, we reported revenues of SGD 1.269 billion, SGD 2.327 billion in terms of the full year total revenue, representing a year-on-year increase of 14%. Service revenue for the second half was SGD 1.018 billion. The full year was SGD 1.888 billion, representing a 17% growth in service revenue. We reported second half EBITDA of SGD 187 million. Excluding the provisions that we've taken, which are non-recurring, our EBITDA that we would have reported for second half would have been SGD 215 million. Full year reported EBITDA, SGD 417 million, or SGD 445 if you exclude the provisions which are non-recurring. This represents a 21.6% service EBITDA margin, adjusting for these non-recurring items. The second half profit that was reported was SGD 1 million. Adjusting for non-recurring items and impairments that we took at year-end, the second half net profit after tax attributable to shareholders would have been SGD 57 million. For the full year, we reported net profit after tax attributable to shareholders of SGD 62 million. Excluding these items, it would have been SGD 119 million or SGD 0.069 on an EPS. Our full year free cash flow that we generated was SGD 222 million or SGD 0.129 on a FCF per share basis. We ended the year with SGD 573.6 million of cash and cash equivalents on our balance sheet. The short-term debt that will be maturing in the next 12 months would be SGD 120 million. There's no debt maturing in the year 2024, which implies that we've got long-term liquidity and a very strong balance sheet to take us forward to fund our DARE+ transformation initiatives and other opportunities that come along. With the strong results that we've generated on the back of strong revenue growth and ongoing strategic cost optimization initiatives that we've taken to pave the way for the DARE+ transformation initiatives that we're still in the midst of executing. The dividend, as Nikhil reiterated, we're declaring a final dividend of SGD 0.025, making the full year dividend to be SGD 0.05. On that, our net debt to EBITDA ratio ended the year at 1.3 times, well below industry average. On that note, I'll hand the floor to Johan, our Chief of Consumer. Thanks, Dennis, and good evening, everyone. I'll take you through some of the highlights in terms of consumer. First and foremost, ARPU. We really had a good quarter on mobile. ARPU at 32, up from the previous quarter and SGD 3 up year-on-year. On top of that, we saw a healthy growth in the subscriber base, 19,000 in a quarter and year-on-year 81,000. That has translated into revenue growth, as you've heard earlier from Nikhil. Underlying components to that, the revenue growth are roaming, but also the organic growth in terms of the postpaid base and value-added services. Prepaid, the ARPU is at 8. Customer base increased significantly. That has to do with the reopening of the borders. We also have been very forthcoming in working on the local segment, the local foreign worker segment. That's for mobile. Moving to broadband on the next slide. Broadband also a good performance, I would dare to say. SGD 34 ARPU. Customer base at 578. That's really good. What is also important to highlight there is that the churn remains low. Churn is at 0.6%. On the previous slide, you saw that the postpaid churn is at 0.8%. We're holding our ground, which is a good indicator in terms of satisfaction level of our customers with our services. Segment revenue was explained earlier on, so I will not repeat that. You saw organically, for StarHub, a 5.6% growth year-on-year and almost 3% for the last half year. That is strong performance from my point of view. Entertainment. Entertainment is something which has been a busy year, as you all know. Pleased to inform you that the ARPU stands at SGD 36 coming to the end of this year, which is SGD 4 up year-on-year. Bit of tapering of the base, 492 to 478, year-on-year still a significant growth that has to do with some of the OTT elements. Churn is low. Actually, churn is lower than the previous year. We managed to churn further to 0.9%. Our revenue growth, as explained earlier, 16% for a full year and 27% for the second half of the year. Obviously, driven by Premier League as well as World Cup, but also the other OTT components we have, which we're offering to our customers like Disney+, Netflix and so forth. Moving forward, a few words around something which is close to our heart and which may be of interest to you. Besides being commercially busy, we actually in Q4 launched first sets of deliverables of what we call the Infinity Play for consumer, DARE+, which is a new app. A link to that, part of our mobile offerings are on a new platform. That new platform is end-to-end digital. It enables customers to transact any piece of service or a purchase fully digital without any intervention, either in shops or physical customer care. That's important because obviously that delivers a significantly better customer experience and it also creates efficiency. Why do we call this Infinity? As we go forward in this quarter, we'll expand that, and during the year, we'll end up having all our products and services in a similar fashion on this platform, which is envisioned and basically experienced by customers in the form of this app. That is important because Infinity Play basically means that on this app, you will be able to transact and subscribe to other services than the traditional services we have. You do not need to be a traditional StarHub customer to do that. We're talking about gaming, protection, cybersecurity services and so forth, as well as our health, LifeHub+, our healthcare solution. Those are well beyond traditional StarHub services and actually available for anyone in Singapore. That is important. Initial results are very promising. We've launched this late in the quarter, and we already see a 20% increase in terms of MAU because the navigation is much better and the experience is far superior compared to what we had before. We have very high App Store ratings as well, by the way. We also saw this translated into a significant increase in terms of transactions, both in sales, 14% increase in terms of online transactions purchased, but also importantly, care transactions. Majority of our care transactions are coming through the app handled by chatbot, and we managed to achieve 80% accuracy rate. Again, very important for customers in terms of satisfaction, also important for the company in terms of efficiency. We'll progressively release the coming releases throughout the next three quarters, and we aim to end this by end of this year so that we have revamped our business totally, and you can barely really call it Infinity Play for everyone. That's from my side, and on that note, I'll hand off to Tan Kit Yong to give you an update on the enterprise side. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you, Johan. Right, over Enterprise Business Group itself, Nikhil just earlier talked about double-digit growth. Let me break it down into the three segments. Network Solutions itself on second half 2020, right? The data internet revenue is higher due to buoyant public broadband, and also managed services revenue is higher because we complete more projects. Overall, right, we are being the setbacks due to the lower voice services revenue due to lower domestic and international traffic. When it comes to Cybersecurity Services, double-digit growth itself, and mainly driven by overseas markets that's contributing the growth. Also, they're also contributing operating profit of SGD 13.6 million. For Regional ICT Services, the consolidated JOS Singapore and Malaysia, right, is giving us higher revenue and also contributing an operating profit of SGD 3.1 million, right? Going to the next slide, right? As we evolve our Enterprise services, right, from a pure mobile services, now we're moving into mobility services to address the future of work for Enterprise clients, right? You can see that on the left, we have 6 new value propositions. On top of mobile plans, we offer green device leasing. What does that mean? We give our client 2 years leasing, and we take back the device, not recycling it, but we reuse it, right? You can see that there are other mobile device management, workflow automation, end-user computing, mobile security, and business application that we developed in-house to help our clients to evolve to be a more digital and hybrid workforce. Pleased to share with you some of the wins that we have in end-user computing and services for Enterprises, right? The team secured more than SGD 8 million, this is one of the fraction of the highlights of the overall enterprise business. We also have won 2 virtual desktop infrastructure, right, for health organizers here in Singapore. As we progress, we are integrating our connectivity, cloud, cybersecurity platforms that we have and we partner to deliver services and solutions for enterprise client. All right. With that, I hand over to Nikhil on outlook and guidance. Thank you. Yes, thank you very much. If you recall, when we released our, did our investor day in November 2021 and outlined what we wanted to do with DARE+, it was our DARE+ reveal, as you recall. We had talked about a spend of SGD 270 million on DARE+ against which we would achieve outcomes of SGD 500 million, broken up by SGD 280 million of expected savings and SGD 220 million of attributable gross profit from revenue increase as a result of what we are driving as part of DARE+. The other thing that we had talked about, if you recall, was that as a consequence of DARE+, and at the end of the transformation period, we were targeting generating an incremental SGD 80 million of incremental net profit on top of our 2021 runway, which if you recall, was about SGD 150 million. With that, where do we stand today? Number one, as we had talked about, not in our initial DARE+ investment day in 2021, but in our last investment day, investor day in 2022, we were increasing our DARE+ investments from SGD 270 million-SGD 310 million. That was as the result of incorporating Cloud Infinity, which is our network transformation, and putting our network on the cloud. We were incorporating the impact of Premier League within our outcomes as well as our spend. Now, we have started achieving some of these outcomes in 2022. We hope to achieve more outcomes in 2023. Really for a full year, start achieving material outcomes in 2024. Now when you look at our spend on DARE+ invested to date, which is something that you've asked us about, in cash terms, simplistically speaking, we've invested about 24% of the quantum anticipated. When you include the provisions that we've taken, and the various bring forwards, that number is actually about 35%, and that's the number that's actually baked into our end-of-year financial results. With that, we can perhaps move on to talk about our guidance for 2023. For 2022, we had achieved service revenue growth of 17% versus our initial guidance of 10% and 12%-15% revised. That was, of course, incorporating organic growth as well as the acquisitions that we've made. For 2023, which is organic growth, we are guiding to service revenue growth of 8%-10%. Now on service EBITDA margin, we had guided to 2022 of 20%, and we are extending that guidance for 2023. Therefore, coupled with the service revenue growth guidance, you should anticipate a continued increase in service EBITDA year-on-year between 2022 and 2023. On CapEx, we had achieved for fiscal 2022 7.3% including investments. We are extending our guidance to 13%-15%, including investments in fiscal 2023. Last but not least, we are reiterating our dividend guidance of SGD 0.05 per share or 80% of net profit, whichever is the higher. We remain well-positioned to do so with our earnings, our cash flow, and our leverage capacity. With that, I'll hand back to Amelia. Thanks, Nikhil. We will now open the floor to Q&A. To join the question queue, please press the raise hand button. I will then call upon your name, and then you can unmute yourself to pose your query. First up, we have Sachin. Good evening, management. Hi, Sachin. Hi. Just 2 simple questions. Firstly, on your service EBITDA margin guidance remains stable. Now, we know that this is despite the fact of more transformation OpEx going into 2023. I think it was SGD 30 million last year. Could you just give some estimate how much are we expecting in terms of transformation OpEx this year? It seems like there's a lot of cost-cutting benefits, that's why the margins can be stable despite a lot of transformation OpEx. That's question number 1. Number 2, on the CapEx, there's a significant increase in the CapEx. I can see this, you're talking about, you know, cloud and DARE+. Could you give us, like, more color or more, something more concrete to understand what are the things you're investing in and what is the end result of all those, you know? Are we saying, you're buying new licenses? What kind of investments are these, which actually, and how will they benefit you in a, in a more concrete manner here? Thank you. Thank you. You wanna start and I'll add? Hi, Sachin. On the OpEx in 2022, we had made provision of about SGD 30 million at the end of the year. To put things in perspective, that's not the only investments we've actually made in respect of the DARE+ transformation during the year. That's on top of the investments that we have made as well, which is partly recorded in CapEx, partly recorded in OpEx. If you add that SGD 30 million to the OpEx that had gone in in 2022, you're looking at about SGD 60 million of OpEx investments in respect to that, but for the total year FY 2022. You forward the outlook to 2023 and embedded in that is a number north of SGD 60 million. I will stop short of giving you that number for purposes of confidentiality and competitive positioning. I will tell you, I will guide that it is number north of SGD 60 million that's embedded in our guidance and taken into consideration in our guidance for FY 2023. Notwithstanding the increased OpEx that we are anticipating for 2023 for the investment, we are leaving our EBITDA margin, service EBITDA margin guidance stable at 20%. As you pointed out, that's on the back of ongoing cost optimization as well as some of the DARE+ outcomes that we expect to incur into or realize in 2023. I will pause there to see if you've got any other questions on the OpEx before I move on to the CapEx. No, that's fine. I think, Dennis, that's very helpful. Yeah. All right. On CapEx, if you look at the CapEx that we ended the year in 2023 and 2022. Again, just to emphasize, this is CapEx commitment. In other words, the CapEx that we are actually raising purchase orders against. We had anticipated that CapEx commitments to be higher than 7% in 2022, which is what we ended the year. This is a result of some timing or execution of certain initiatives around the IT transformation initiatives, as well as some of our network transformation initiatives. At the end of last year and the start of this year, we had guided the market to some cloudification of our network that we're undertaking. This is something that we'll execute during the year. Result of some timing incurrence of some of these capital expenditure, total capital guidance, including all these transformation CapEx that we are making, is relatively higher than what we anticipated. If you then aggregate the two years together, it does average down to about 11% or 12% a year, which is very much in line with what we've always said to the market. On a steady-state basis, our CapEx would be between 5%-7%, and our transformation CapEx would be an additional 4%-5% or thereabout. That's how you, we would look at the capital investment. The outcomes would be in the form of optimization of our IT system. You will have legacy systems that will be decommissioned. There's a fair amount of licensing costs that we'll save from that, as well as repair and maintenance costs that we typically incur to maintain those systems. There are multiple IT stacks that result from that. There's a network side of it where we have legacy infrastructure that we are also sunsetting. There will be a bunch of optimization opportunities around that, which translates into repair and maintenance savings as well. That, those are the outcomes that we're working towards executing. Nikhil. Yeah, if I could add to that and just picking out, you know, the one incremental piece such. It's obviously Cloud Infinity, which we updated you on in November 2021. That's a driver of the incremental CapEx. Now, what Cloud Infinity does is a couple of things, right? What we essentially do is we move our packet core, our cloud control plane, our cloud forwarding plane, to run off a combination of public and private cloud. When we do so, we will be, I believe, the 4th telco in the world to do so across the entire environment after, you know, Rakuten, Reliance Jio, Dish. What that allows us to do is to improve to a dramatically new level of hygiene, automation, and scalability in our network, which therefore enables us, as we've anticipated, to achieve efficiencies and reduce costs in the way we run our network, which will recover the capital and the OpEx incurred, but not in the first year, as you can imagine. Subsequently, it also achieves, in terms of outcomes, a whole new world of revenue opportunity in furtherance of some of the things that we're already doing, right? Whether it's multi-cloud networking, whether it's the future of work, whether it's cybersecurity, but done, you know, embedded in the network in a way that's sort of much faster, more powerful and agile. That's not something that we can, you know, really elaborate on in a lot of detail too for competitive reasons. It's something that we'll talk about, you know, in future forums. Recovery from, you know, hygiene, efficiency and automation, of the capital that we've incurred, but not in the first year, obviously, and then beyond that revenue opportunity. Just to follow up on that, Nikhil and Dennis. Because many of your legacy systems are reaching end of life probably earlier than expected. Have we done whatever provisions or impairment have to be done for those systems or no? Something we can expect in this current year? Yeah. I think, you know, Dennis can add, but I think we've been, I don't know whether it's aggressive or conservative, but we've, you know, we've taken sort of provisions for legacy systems that we're, you know, we're gonna be sunsetting. Those obviously release costs on an ongoing go-forward basis. There is also a degree of, you know, with things like Cloud Infinity and, you know, our cloudification of our IT, so network and IT, there's avoidance-Of spend in the future on legacy systems, which is something we'd rather not do, but unfortunately, a lot of telcos are kinda caught in that trap. Dennis, sorry. Sachin, if, just as a recap, at the end of 2021, we did take a bunch of impairments or accelerated depreciation on a couple of IT legacy systems. You did see that translate into a lower run rate of depreciation and amortization that's reported in our numbers in FY 2022 versus 2021. If you look at the impairments that we've taken at the end of 2022, this represents certain legacy assets that we have also identified that we'll be sunsetting. With these provisions or accelerated depreciation as well as impairments that were taken, there are no further impairments that we are anticipating in regards to legacy systems for 2023. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Thank you, Sachin. Next up we have Neil. Hi, Neil. Hi. Nikhil, Dennis, and team, I've got 3 questions. I think the revenue growth side is fairly straightforward enough, consolidation of acquisitions driving most of it, et cetera. I do have a couple of questions on the fourth quarter net profit and the full year net profit. Strateq impairment, this is a fairly new acquisition. What was driving this impairment? Especially, related to that, Dennis, did I hear you correctly, you said like excluding the one-offs, the profits would have been about SGD 150 million? No. Excluding the one-offs, the full year net profit would have been SGD 119, SGD 119 million. Oh, sorry. Yeah, SGD 119 versus SGD 150 in an environment which if you're stripping out the one-offs, in an environment which is in the fourth quarter, definitely a big improvement in business sentiment, et cetera. Yes, there were higher interest costs, weighing down on economies, et cetera. I'm kinda struggling to see how that is a good outcome, though. I mean, with the one-offs I can understand, but when you strip that out, if those are the numbers that you're saying, how is that? The second question is CapEx commitment. I remember the third quarter, Nikhil, Dennis, you, both of you mentioned that there was some sort of deferral of CapEx, and that's there in your slides, too. How much has moved to the right from your plans, on a timeline, so to speak, right? Whether it's 2023 and 2024, just a rough idea. I think we can sort of work out from your annual guidance, but it would be interesting to know how much has moved to the right and why so. Is it like supplier constraints? Is it any other reason? The third is just overall to do with profitability. This is like a long-term type question. Negative Jaws, right? DARE+ was announced well more than a year ago. How should we think? We were all aware, I think, about some level of cost front-loading to achieve that. How should we think about the organic EBITDA growth and reversion to positive Jaws? Is it another two quarters down the road, four quarters, two years? I mean, this is just like, I suppose, a ballpark estimate. There are so many market variables involved, but it would be interesting to get your thoughts on that. Thank you. Dennis, would you like to start? Yeah. You can add on. Hi, Neil. Good evening. Your first question on Strateq, right? Strateq has six separate lines of businesses, and it operates in different regions. Mainly in the region, like Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, for example. It also has, and at that point in time, a business in the U.S., that was part of the group that we took over. We did the acquisition back in July of 2020, it's now been two and a half years. Yeah. Over that 2.5-year period, we've been working with management to really identify lines of businesses, that have lined on site, in terms of delivering outcomes, and the market positioning that Strateq has. Mm-hmm. As also in consideration of the skill sets that it brings to the table. At that point in time, we looked at the U.S. business and the challenges with operating in the U.S. market and the dynamics of it. Of course, the last two years with the COVID situation was not terribly helpful. All things in perspective, without hiding behind that, the reality is that line of business we felt was going to be challenging to execute on. Therefore, in the spirit of rationalizing lines of businesses that we would continue to invest in and grow, which will yield us the meaningful returns on investment, we decided to discontinue that one single line of business in the U.S., and focus on the rest of the lines of businesses that Strateq still has, which are all very healthy and continues to deliver growth. This is part of any business and a portfolio of business that we would as management run. This is just part of the exercise that we did. A quick follow-up on that one, Dennis. Sure. the U.S. business in Strateq No more impediments. It's out of the way. It's out of the way. Absolutely, yes. Okay. Yes. Thank you. It's not a big revenue contributor. Yeah. Right. It's quite small. I think we're worried about costs. Yeah. Yeah. You know the reality of this is that, if we decided to continue on that business, it would have resulted in an ongoing cash burn. Ah. Yeah, in, you know, in the foreseeable future, in the, in the short to medium term. Again, you know, we would never say that we will never invest in business, businesses that yield returns in the medium term. We, we do take bets, and we do take educated and calculated risks, but this was one where we looked at it and said this was not a risk that we wanted to take on our own gross basis. There are other means of deploying capital in other things that we're doing, which we do see better returns in the short to medium term. This is a rebalancing of our portfolio in other words then. Thank you. Your second point on the net profit, right? If you look at the net profit for the full year of 2022, against 2021, for the full year, it's excluding these non-recurring items and impairments, it would have been SGD 119. If you then look at it on a year-on-year basis, yes, it was a decline. Look at it from the perspective that we were dealing with macro factors that primarily utilities costs when we started the year. That was something that came to pass as we went through the year and we're grappling to manage the volatility that came along with it, right? Along with that, you know, there were wage increases. It was a function of how the market was transpiring. Of course, the tech layoffs towards the end of the year was some, was an event towards the end of the year. Throughout the most part of 2022, there were labor inflationary increases that we're dealing with, along with the macro utilities increases. If you put these back into consideration, we actually delivered profitability, which is almost on par with 2021 level. On the back of an ongoing competitive market position in the industry, which is something that all of us are aware of, we continue to execute well on the acquisitions that we've made. Some of them delivered good growth. We looked at how to drive profitability in all of them and more importantly, to drive synergies both on the top line as we work together to drive that outcome, as well as cost synergies. Some of it trickled into 2022. I use the word trickle because it's very little, it sets the pace for 2023 and onward. That was what we're working on. As we look at it, I think from management's perspective, we back off the macro factors, which I guess is something we still are accountable for and responsible for, but we couldn't really control. It was a great year in terms of profitability, all things considered. Particularly given it's an investment year for them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well done. Um- Yeah, thanks. Any other points on that, Neil, that you want to clarify? Neil? I think he might be frozen. Yeah, his screen is frozen. Let's give him a second. Neil, are you there? Otherwise, maybe we can move on to the next question, then we'll come back. Okay. Yeah. Sure. We've got a question from Vivi, quick one. For FY 2023 outlook, the 20% service, sorry, service, 32 margin- The bottom line. ... would it be roughly equal, i.e., you know, first half and second half roughly about 20% or more? Or would it be unequal like this year in 2022, where first half is much higher and then second half is much lower? Okay. I will take that. Typically, if you look at our numbers that we report, the first half's profitability is relatively higher compared to the second half. This is quite typical because as we start the year, we look at, you know, various things that we need to spend on. Of course, if we don't need to spend on it, in terms of, you know, activities that we carry out, whether it is maintenance of our networks or marketing and promotion expenses, for example, those are things that we look at and managing at least at the start of the year. There's no reason for us to incur those if we don't see any need to do so. As we go into the second half of the year, we typically look at it and look at the competitive positioning and the market dynamic, then we invest in activities to allow us to exit the year on a stronger note. There typically would be higher activities that, or expenses in relation to the activities that are carried out in the second half. I would say that based on what we anticipate, it would not be as skewed as it was for 2022, but there will be relatively higher margins in the first half versus the second half. Okay. Thanks, Danny. Vivi, I hope we answered your question. Neil, are you back? Yeah, he's still frozen again. Okay. Maybe let's move on to Arthur. Hi, Arthur. Hi, good evening. Thanks for the presentation. Sorry, my video is freezing up, but that's fine. Okay. Sorry. Neil, we will come back to you. Arthur, please go ahead. Yeah, yeah, 2 questions please. First in the guidance revenue growth, you mentioned 8%-10%. Are you able to split this out across business lines for 2023? The second question I had is with regard to the investment which you put out on slide 17. You've mentioned around SGD 210 million related to DARE+ and Infinity. Am I correct to believe that based on the 24% guidance that you spent last year, so that's around SGD 75 million, and it seems like you're going to spend another SGD 200 million this year, based on the incremental 8% CapEx of sales on slide 18. That means by 2024 we should see a significant reduction in CapEx. Is that how we should look at this? Hi, Arthur. On your first question on the guidance of 8%-10% on the top line on service revenue growth, we will not provide the breakdown for each line of business as you probably will understand why, right? Otherwise, it literally reveals, you know, to the marketplace exactly what we are planning to execute on each line of business. However, I would say that the growth that we're anticipating is across all our lines of businesses, including all the recent acquisitions that we now have under our portfolio. I'll leave it at that for now. Let me just emphasize 1 or 2 things. Arthur, you know, first, as Dennis says, we grew, not just through acquisitions, but actually organically on all business lines, and our intent is to continue to grow on all business lines. We're a bit careful of talking about how, you know, our growth splits up because in certain segments, obviously like mobile, we're operating in segments that are highly competitive with traditional competitors. In other segments like, you know, ICT or cybersecurity, there are different range of competitors, and perhaps not as competitive. There are things in between like broadband and entertainment, you know, which aren't as competitive as mobile, but more than some of the others where we have market leadership. We're a little bit loath to break that up, if you don't mind. Understood. Okay, Arthur, on your second point on the investment, on the DARE+ investment, just as a recap, when we disclosed or unveiled our DARE+ plan in 2021 during our investor day, at that point in time was SGD 270 million of investment. As a recap, those 270 refer to both OpEx and CapEx investments, not just CapEx. That investment includes investments in build, you know, building staff strength or bench strength and tool sets within our ranks. Investment in key infrastructure, which is CapEx, but also investment in the IT license platform, which are treated as OpEx. There are a bunch of OpEx items and a bunch of CapEx items. For 2022, we've incurred 24% or, as you rightly pointed out, SGD 75 million. We also made provisions at the end of 2022 of totaling about SGD 31 million. If you actually aggregate the two, it would be about SGD 106 million or about 35% of the total of SGD 310 million that we would be envisaging to incur. The rest of the SGD 200 million of both OpEx and CapEx will be incurred in 2023 and in some in the early part of 2024. Not all of the remaining SGD 200 million will be incurred this year, but a good part of it will be incurred this year. Maybe if I could add to that and maybe tick off one of Neil's questions as well, so he doesn't have to re-ask it. I think Neil, you know, just tying the spend and the harvesting to where we see DARE+ going, not just, you know, kind of at, on an aggregated level, but perhaps year-on-year. As Dennis talks about 35% of the spend for DARE+ incurred, you know, in 2022, the bulk of the rest in 2023 and some leftover in early 2024. We had, as you recall, given sort of a soft outlook, when we launched DARE+ that we were looking to get back to the 2021 level of EBITDA, which was about SGD 500 million, by 2023. That would have implied a very, very compressed and rapid transformation period to sort of call it that, you know, kind of break even EBITDA level. In fact, one that was, you know, 2 years. Clearly the environment has shifted and macro costs have gone up, but it is still the intent to get back to that SGD 500 million as soon as possible. 2024 is certainly a fully a harvest year for us. And we hope and are closely monitoring and driving our quarterly EBITDA run rates. Our intent is to get back to that SGD 500 million, you know, a few quarters later than anticipated. Thank you, Nikhil. Arthur, did we answer your question? Sorry, I am just a little confused with regard to the CapEx. When I look at the next slide, right, on slide 18, you break down the CapEx on BAU as 5%-7% and including investments of around 13%-15%. The 8% differential versus sales would refer to DARE+ and IT transformation. If I just take that 8% CapEx of sales against your, whatever, SGD 2.5 billion target revenue, that implies additional CapEx of around SGD 200 million related to investments. Yes ... putting it together with the SGD 100+ million that you spent, it seems like you're pretty much done with DARE+. Yeah by this year. Is that how I should look at it? If you look at the that difference of 8% of the spread, we were anticipating to end the year about 11-12% or thereabout in 2022. We ended the year about 7.3%, so we're not, you know, some deferment of the capital expenditure into 2023. Yes, you're absolutely right that we are guiding to 13-15%. If you look at the upper range of that 15%, it does imply that remaining SGD 200 million or thereabouts would be incurred in 2023. That's the upper end of the range. We are anticipating some of it to go into 2024. Understood. Okay, thank you very much. Thanks, Arthur. Next up we have Sasono. Would you like to unmute yourself? Hi, can you hear me? I would like to ask a few question. Maybe I just ask one by one. I'd like to ask about the Temasek's buyback of the 20% stake in Ensign. That's gonna be by October this year, am I right? Yes. The assignment of rights and, you know, is exercisable in October of this year. Did you have a follow-up question? Yes. My question is basically, Does management expect that it would have a positive, a material impact on our PNL and balance sheet? Yeah. Let me just answer that in two ways. Number one, you know, we are focused on the cybersecurity business. It is core for us. We do cybersecurity within and outside of Ensign. We have good alignment with our co-shareholder, Temasek, on the direction of the business and what we wanna do with it. We would intend for that alignment to continue irrespective of what happens with the 20%. As far as the 20%, if they were to exercise their option to take 20% out of the 60%, leaving us with 40%, that would generate a substantial gain. You know, vis-a-vis the investment cost that we have applicable to us. Yeah. with this in view, Nikhil, why isn't management more confident about its guidance about its guidance for earnings and dividend payout for FY 2023? Well, I think, you know, we had anticipated a DARE+ investment period. The bulk of that investment period is 2 years. Those 2 years are 2022 and 2023, and as I've mentioned, we had targeted getting back to that SGD 500 million of break-even EBITDA, which was a 2021 number. You know, in that 2 years, with the macro factors, that's been delayed a little bit. Our target is to get back to that break-even EBITDA, you know, a few quarters later, looking at run rate EBITDA. We are in an investment period. The other thing I would say that vis-a-vis Ensign, again, you know, this is something that we have ongoing discussions with our co-shareholders on. You know, frankly, whether we continue as a consolidating shareholder or not, you know, both are good outcomes. Both are good outcomes. Yeah. More specifically, Nikhil, this buyback, right, as in, is not factoring in your guidance, in your EBITDA guidance as well as the dividend guidance. Do you factor this development, this potential development, into the guidance? Well, it certainly wouldn't factor into our EBITDA guidance because it would be a. If the 20% were sold, it would be a one-off gain for cash proceeds. As far as our dividend guidance, you know, we'll take that as it comes, I think. All right. I'm conscious about time. Sasono maybe you can follow up. Yeah, I'll speed up. Yeah. Also, would management be open to a special dividend with regards to this one-off? I don't think that's something we can comment on at this point in time, Sasono. We have to, you know, I think weigh this matter alongside with various other matters together with our operating performance and see where we get to. I understand. Regarding the slides, Nikhil, there's this non-operating income due to Strateq, right? I noticed that there's a non-operating income as well as a non-operating expense. Do you think maybe Dennis would be able to explain this line? There's one non-operating income for SGD 30.9 million. At the same time there's a non-operating expense for SGD 60.1 million. Yeah. How does that come about? Sasono, this can get quite technical. Maybe I can take this offline with you. Yeah, okay. Sure. Perhaps just one more from me, Amelia. In terms of the lumpiness, Dennis, what is shocking about the fourth quarter result is we took basically our Q4, we turned on a loss for Q4. My question is there going to be more lumpiness for FY 2023? I mean, you, it's stated as a non-recurring, but is it going to happen one or two more times that's going to impact the quarterly results like in Q4? Okay. Hi, Sasono. We commented on a response to an earlier question in regards to our FY 2023 guidance and whether or not, you know, this would be evenly spread on 20% throughout 2023. I, at that point in time, I had commented that we do expect, in line with our usual operating trend, that the first half of the year, the operating margins are typically higher. The second half, and that's in tandem with the way we manage expenses and what we need to incur and spend on. Then as we go into the second half of the year, there are typically relatively higher activities that we engage in to try and exit the year on a strong runner. There will be unevenness in the margins, but not to the extent that you see that in 2022. To your other question regards to the non-recurring items that we took at the end of 2022, a reason behind that, we looked at all our, you know, rebalancing our portfolio, impairments that we took in relation to that, and as well as discontinuation of certain lines of businesses and where to focus our attention on. Again, this was a response to an earlier question. We did take impairments on certain assets that we believe will not generate income going forward, and to discontinue certain line of business, and therefore an impairment in relation to that. Just to finish off on that, the non-operating income is in relation to what we call forward liabilities. There are different consideration elements as part of the acquisitions that we've made. As businesses, perform better or worse than, there's an income or expense that's recorded accordingly. As Amelia said, we'll take this offline with you. I'm happy to explain this, in greater detail, offline with yourself. Thank you. No problem. Thank you, Dennis. That's it for me. Cool. Thank you. Next up, Paul. Yeah, yeah, thanks. I was actually hoping for the 14th February to save some money on dinner, but it's okay. Let's keep it within ourselves. Yeah, let's keep it within ourselves. Yeah, yeah. Just two questions. Yeah, sorry. Yeah ...drag this on. Just to go back on the DARE+ spending. You spend supposed to be SGD 3 then. Far, if you assume SGD 35, SGD 100 has been spent, so there's SGD 200 left. The CapEx could take up maybe SGD 150, SGD 160, so the balance is SGD 40. A bulk of it, in conclusion, will be spent on FY 2023. My question is, when we go to FY 2024 and we look at your DARE+ slide on slide 17, is that the kind of savings that we should expect? I know that FY 2024 is a bit far, but I'm just wondering, is that what we should assume, that SGD 108 roughly of savings, or maybe a gap down in costs, when we look at your slide 17? Just wanted to understand that part. Yeah, thanks. Paul, I just want to again reiterate, right? If you look at the DARE+ investments, both in OpEx and CapEx, yes, based on the guidance that we've given, the implied CapEx investments for DARE+ would be north of SGD 100 million in FY 2023. A lot of these OpEx investments in the form of license costs, and investment in people and building of bench strength. Reality is that when these investments, when these transformation initiatives have been fully executed, the people that we brought in to, you know, bring on the skill sets and everything do not, will not disappear on that day, right? There will be ongoing, you know, staff costs in relation to the people that we bring onto, into our organization. Naturally, we continue to look at opportunities to see how we can reorganize ourselves, particularly in terms of driving business outcomes, right? You know, having the head count deploy outcomes that yield the business returns as opposed to keeping the business going so it's driving growth, right? It's about optimizing the people that we bring on stream. Some of these costs will continue because the reality is that we bring them on to deliver these outcomes and there's an ongoing obligation and objective to deliver these key results. On the IT licenses, again, when we bring them on and they are new platforms, these license obligations continue as well. There will be ongoing costs in relation to these things which will then become what we then classify as Business As Usual run rate expenses because at that point in time, these are part of our business operations at the point in time once we fully transform. What does this continue are the legacy expenses in relation to IT infrastructure, in relation to legacy network that we will sunset at that point in time. And, you know, in the case of the Strateq U.S. business, it's no longer an ongoing running cost in respect of that at all. There will be things that we will sunset and discontinue, and these then represent savings that we'll be offsetting against this, and this is part of the DARE+ outcome. Okay. Yeah, thanks. Just one last one for me. For the guidance for 2023, what is the, I wouldn't say assumption, but what's the thinking behind roaming like? Is it like, there's still a lot, just some thoughts on roaming as you put in this guidance? Yeah. Thanks again. We only have a question for you, Johan. Thank you for that question. No, in terms of roaming, it won't be a surprise to you that the year closed quite strong on roaming. We basically extrapolate that trend there is for us. Enough foundation to be able to expect a similar trend as we exited in 2022 going into 2023. It would be nice if China opens up as well. That's mainly for the inbounds, roaming beneficial. Roaming has been well, so we expect that trend to continue. Hopefully, that's answering your question. Okay. Yeah. Thanks again. Yeah, that's all for me. Thank you. Paul, I want to add. In the guidance, we've assumed roaming, as Johan pointed out, to continue to be robust. However, we've not assumed a huge uplift in roaming year-on-year against 2022. If that transpires, and as Johan pointed out, is when China reopens and roaming recovers at a more accelerated rate, these are upsides to our actual numbers than what we've guided the market. This could be like, you know, 30%, 40% below pre-pandemic or, I'm not sure how much you can detail and give, but I'm just wondering is that that kind of level. Yeah, we'll stop short of giving you the percentage, you know, against pre-pandemic there. Yeah ... levels at this point in time. Of course, the thesis and the verdicts out there as to whether or not it will ever revert to pre-pan-pandemic levels because the way people travel and roam has also changed, the patterns have changed. We're looking at it in totality. I think in broad themes, you know, China remains to open. We have not felt that impact yet. That's on the consumer side. On the enterprise side, I think we're well below pandemic levels. Yeah. Absolutely. That, as Dennis said, is partially baked in, but creates some upside. Okay. Thanks again. Thanks, Paul. We'll take our last set of questions from Piyush. Hi, Piyush. Piyush, please unmute yourself. Hi. Good evening. Can you hear me? Yeah. Hi. Good evening, management. Thanks a lot, Dennis, Nikhil and Amelia for organizing this. No worries. Couple of questions. Firstly, can you give us some update on the network deployment by Antina? What is the plan going forward? Any operational challenges which you have faced? You know, any learnings which you can share from running that JV, and what changes you have made to address those bottlenecks, and what should we expect more, right? From there. Secondly is, just housekeeping. What percentage of your subscribers have 5G handsets today? How much of your data is actually going through the 5G network? Thank you. Thank you. Nikhil, would you like to take the first question, and then Johan can come in. Yeah. Let me start on the first question, Dennis can add. I think Antina's worked out well for us. It's generated, you know, CapEx savings and cost savings. There is of course some element of CapEx to OpEx substitution, which shows up as wholesale cost. Overall, I think it's been a good experience for us that has been value accretive. You know, the rollout continues. We're in line with, you know, the commitments of coverage that we've made with IMDA, in fact, back to head. I don't think we've really come across any major operational challenges. You know, there's much we want to do with Antina, please stay tuned, I think is the only thing I'd say. Anything to add, Dennis? No, Antina is like 3 years in the making, right? Of course, like anything else, at the starting phase, you know, there were learnings in terms of how we would work with our joint venture partner and also how we can identify opportunities to get the best outcomes from Antina. 3 years into it, I think we've learned a lot in terms of how to optimize and put together our strengths in terms of negotiating our vendors as well. There are very positive outcomes as a result of the collaboration. That sets the stage for, you know, future collaboration and expanded collaboration that we can identify and we anticipate that we will do through Antina. Yeah. On the question 2 and 3 related to the number of subs on file or number of subs with a 5G-enabled phone/data usage, I have to be a bit cautious in terms of giving you exact numbers, but what I can tell you is that more than half of our subscriber base is actually enabled with a 5G phone at this point in time, that's continuing to grow obviously. If you talk about traffic, that's obviously significantly less still at this point simply because of the fact that 5G indoor penetration is still, I would say, growing. That's something which is important because quite a lot of usage is triggered from indoor. It's all healthy trending growth. Hopefully that gives you a bit of color. Piyush, I hope we've addressed your question. Yeah. Thanks a lot, everyone. Thank you. Thanks for the question. Okay. Thanks, Piyush. We come to the end of our call this evening. Thank you so much for your time. If we didn't get to your question, please feel free to reach me at ir@starhub.com. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you. Wishing you a happy Valentine's Day one week from now.