Hi, good evening, everybody. Thank you for joining StarHub's 3Q 2022 business performance 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, Dennis Chia, our CFO, Johan Buse, Chief of Consumer, as well as Tan Kit Yong, our Head of Enterprise Business Group. We'll start off with some opening remarks and an overview of our performance by Nikhil, followed by Dennis on financials, and then Johan and Kit on business highlights. We'll then open the floor to Q&A thereafter. Nikhil, over to you.
Okay. Well, thank you everyone for joining us on a Wednesday evening to hear about our Q3 and our nine months year-to-date. I'll start by going through some financial highlights. Now, as you can see, we, this quarter, grew across every segment year-over-year and almost across all segments quarter-over-quarter. This was inevitably despite sustained hyper competition that has escalated in particular in mobile but also to a certain degree in broadband. Overall, as you can see, our service revenue grew about 6.2% quarter-over-quarter and about 15% year-over-year. Now, we, as you know, acquired both MyRepublic and JOS Singapore and Malaysia in Q1.
If you extract the contributions of these businesses, our service revenue grew about 7.9% quarter-over-quarter and 5% year-over-year. Now, with this revenue growth, our EBITDA margin compressed a bit, and our EBITDA also compressed. This was due to a number of things. As you recall, when we posted our full-year guidance in February, we had taken our EBITDA margin guidance down. As you know, we closed 2021 with a 30% EBITDA margin, service EBITDA margin, and we posted EBITDA margin guidance of 20%. Therefore, a little of those themes continue.
The EBITDA margin and dollar EBITDA is reflective of the transformation costs for DARE+ that we had outlined at the time, albeit with some delays into next year. You know, the macro, of course, with the rising cost structure that implies across utilities, cost and other things. Market competition coupled with certain products like BNPL , which are early in their life cycle. Now, excluding some of these one-offs, net profit would have actually increased quarter-over-quarter by about 3.4%. Now, not on this page, but free cash flow remained positive at about SGD 150 million for the first nine months of 2022.
Our net debt to EBITDA remains at very healthy levels of about 1.39 x, versus what we consider to be the regional telco average of about 2.8 x. With all of this, we will be moving up our fiscal 2022 service revenue guidance and improving our CapEx guidance in our elaborate form. As mentioned, in terms of our segmental revenue, we recorded growth across all segments year-over-year and across almost all segments quarter-over-quarter, except for a slight bit in broadband quarter-over-quarter. Mobile continued to grow quite well year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, lifted by roaming recovery as well as value-added services and excess usage.
Broadband dipped due to increased promotions in the market, which is increasingly competitive. Those promotions are amortized over the contract term for broadband, 24 months. As you know, we now have broadband leadership with the acquisition of MyRepublic and both the StarHub broadband business as well as MyRepublic continue to grow and grow together, working together to leverage our joint position of leadership to drive, you know, product revenue and cost enhancements. Entertainment, we are the market leader and we continue to register, again, solid growth, solid and accelerating growth year-over-year as well as quarter-over-quarter, lifted by Premier League, of course, which started this season, as well as continued growth in our other content offerings.
On the enterprise side, we sustained double-digit growth year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter. Now, notably, our network solutions within enterprise grew 6.6% year-over-year, 7.6% quarter-over-quarter, driven by good growth in ICT and managed services. Cybersecurity grew about 15% quarter-over-quarter and was flat year-over-year due to the inherent nature of the business, which is lumpy. This continues to be a strong business with high growth implications. Regional ICT has increased in scale due mainly to JOS consolidation and is up about 120% year-over-year and is now operating profit breakeven .
Looking at our guidance and comparing where we are to the guidance we provided at the beginning of the year. We had guided on service revenue to achieve revenue growth for the full year of at least 10%. We are currently running for the first nine months at 13%, and we are revising our guidance for the full year up to 12%-15%. Now on service EBITDA margin, we had guided to 20%. We are running at 23%, but we are not revising our service EBITDA margin guidance.
Of course, as you would reflect and imply with the higher revenue guidance, we expect to achieve higher levels of absolute service EBITDA than we expected at the beginning of the year. With our CapEx commitment, we had guided to 7%-9% at the beginning of the year for BAU, including investments of up to 15%. Again, we are running ahead of guidance due to some delays in CapEx as well as optimization, and are running at about 6.3% and are therefore revising our full year guidance and improving it for BAU to 5%-7% and including investments to 9%-12%.
With that revision of guidance, we would also like to establish that, in line with DARE+, where we are focused on new growth initiatives, new platforms, we are also writing off some of our legacy assets, which we intend to do in Q2 2022. As well as writing off Strateq U.S. healthcare business. As mentioned, those are things that we will execute on in Q4 2022 ahead of next year. With that, I will pass on to Dennis Chia for slide 7.
Thanks, Nikhil. Good evening to everyone. As a recap, our quarter three service revenue was SGD 482 million for the nine months at SGD 1.353 billion. Our EBITDA for the third quarter is about SGD 110 million , and for the nine months was SGD 339 million. This translates into a 23.2% service gross margin, as Nikhil highlighted. Our net profit attributable to shareholders for the nine months is at SGD 88 million, translating to SGD 0.051 on the EPS basis. Our free cash flow for the nine months is SGD 116 million, translating to SGD 0.067 on the FCF per share basis.
We ended the third quarter with SGD 496 million of cash on the balance sheet, bearing in mind that we have used about SGD 220 million of cash to redeem our bonds, which matured in September 2022. Our net debt to EBITDA leverage ratio remains very healthy at 1.39 x. With those highlights, I pass the floor to Johan for consumer highlights.
Thanks, Dennis, and a very good evening, everyone. I'll zoom in on some of the things which were not mentioned before. I think if you look at the ARPU for postpaid healthy trending upwards, mainly driven by roaming, as mentioned earlier, and value-added services. Solid growth in terms of customer base over the quarter, 26,000, both driven by the StarHub brand as well as by the giga! brand. We have been managing churn very tightly. We're at 0.8% on mobile, which in this competitive market is a good achievement. The prepaid ARPU is flattish. However, the prepaid revenue quarter-over-quarter has been increasing on the back of more tourist SIMs coming being sold through incoming tourists in the market, which is promising, and we expect the trend to continue.
That resulted in a 6.5% revenue growth on both pre and postpaid. Noteworthy is quarter-over-quarter actually both postpaid and prepaid grew. If you look on an annual basis, prepaid is a negative and postpaid is positive. Data usage continues to increase. We've got 14.3 in Q3, and you can see in this slide the corresponding numbers to the previous quarters. If we then move forward to broadband. Broadband, a steady quarter there. SGD 34 ARPU, flat. Base increased both on the StarHub side as well as on the MyRepublic side, which is a very good achievement. Churn is very promising, very low at 0.6%. The marginal decrease in revenue Q2 to Q3 is mainly driven by competitive developments and promotions which are amortized.
If you look at year-over-year, we have very solid 28.5% growth in terms of revenue. Again, revenue growth is being reported on both sides, being MyRepublic and StarHub. We did see a very strong uptake in the last quarter of customers moving, trading up to the 2 Gbps tariff plan. That leaves us with entertainment. If we move to entertainment, you'll see that entertainment had a very strong quarter. First and foremost, the ARPU increased to SGD 35. That is not only driven by the Premier League subscription which we introduced, but it's also the effect of more customers taking more content passes from StarHub. On the back of that, we did see an increase as well in terms of the number of entertainment subs we welcomed.
We are close to 500,000 entertainment subs, and we've managed churn rate to continue to be low at 1.1%. Now, if you look at the segment revenue, almost 18% year-over-year and just on the quarter, over 12%. That is, as mentioned earlier, driven by a larger customer base, but also more customers buying more content from us. On that note, I'm going to hand over to Kit Yong, who will take you through the enterprise performance for the quarter. Thank you.
Great. Thank you, Johan. Coming to the enterprise business, we grew 16.7% year-over-year. If we break it down, network solutions grew 6.6%, right? It's contributed by higher managed services and the IT services that we provide, and also partly from MyRepublic broadband. When it comes to cybersecurity services, revenue is flat. For regional ICT itself, because of the consolidation, that's why we see a higher year-over-year growth, right? The next part for us is actually to consolidate and drive synergies to the consolidated entities of regionalized services. Right. With that, I'm going back to Nikhil. Yes.
In closing, I would like to flag for all of you and invite you to our investor day to be held on 7th December, where we intend to run through our progress on DARE+ in terms of product, in terms of milestones on platforms, as well as in terms of where we are tracking our DARE+ financial outcomes, and also give you some demos and outline some of the cool new product that we have launched and will be launching. With that, I guess I'll hand it back to Amelia.
Thanks, Nikhil. We'll now open the floor to questions. To join the question queue, either click on the Raise Hand button or indicate your name and organization in the chat box. I'll call upon your name when it's your turn to speak, and then you can unmute yourself and converse directly with management. Okay, first up we have Foong.
Good evening.
Foong, you're breaking up a little bit.
Give me a second. Is this better?
Yes, much better.
Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for this conference call. Couple of questions from me. I wanted to start off with the mobile business. The ARPU for postpaid rose pretty nicely on a Q-on-Q basis. Can you tell us how much of that was due to roaming recovery and how much of that was due to VAS, if you could break that down? Where are we now in terms of the roaming ARPU versus pre-COVID levels? That's question number one. Secondly, for the entertainment business, how many entertainment subs you know that we managed to grow during the quarter, right, was through the sign-up via the EPL content?
How effective was the bundling strategy, right, in pulling through more mobile and fiber broadband subscribers? Also on the Premier League contribution, can I just clarify whether the revenue has been fully included on a full quarter basis for the third quarter, or are we only expecting a full quarter contribution in the fourth quarter? My third question is on your debt. What percent of your debt is floating rate? On your CapEx, you've guided for lower CapEx even for business as usual. What is the reason for that? And do you think that 5%-7% is a sustainable level for the long run? Yeah. Those are my four questions. Thank you.
Thank you.
Very-
Johan?
All right. Thank you very much, Foong, for the questions. I'll take at least in my category here, question four to one , and then I'll hand over to Dennis for the two questions related to CapEx and debt. In terms of the EPL contribution for the quarter, it's not a full quarter. It's basically August for this quarter plus September, so it's part of the quarter. That was an easy question, so hopefully I clarified that for you. In terms of the subscriber acquisition structure, obviously you will understand that quite a lot of that is related to confidentiality commercially. I will try to give you nevertheless a bit of a flavor in terms of how things are moving.
As you know, this is the first time that we're offering Premier League in Singapore on an OTT basis. Consumers have a choice to either bundle or take a standalone. We saw on the both tracks a very encouraging, very promising uptake. We also saw a very strong uptake actually on the enterprise side, something we rarely talk about. We see that as a very encouraging upside. Now, the interesting side effect of that is that we saw more customers than we expected taking additional content passes, and that has been very accretive to the ARPU, to the earlier question you had, as well as to the of course, total revenue because of the subscriber increase. That is something I hope you find of use answering that question. To move to the mobile.
Roaming levels for consumer and business are a little bit different. If we look at consumer, it has been trending very well. In terms of the exact percentage compared to pre-COVID, I could say we are crossing nicely in the right direction. Obviously, some key countries, as you realize, are still closed, so it's that is missing, and I think that's corresponding to that. The ARPU uplift, the majority of it came from roaming. Some of the offsets you saw that in the vertical teams as well are on the data excess usage. As you will understand in this market, the very generous data bundles that continues to trend down. The ARPU uplift was majority came from roaming. Hopefully that gives you a bit of a context.
To the two questions on debt and CapEx, I'll hand over to Dennis.
Thank you, Foong. Actually before we do that, perhaps we can comment on the enterprise roaming.
Sure. For the enterprise roaming itself, we are seeing growth. However, it's not a high growth yet since travel are not that pervasive yet. We're also seeing the change of patterns of usage of roaming as well, more going from voice to data. These are the new ways of using roaming for the enterprise user, which we are closely tracking, monitoring the usage pattern changes over time. Right. With that, I hand over back to Dennis.
Hi, Foong. On your question on the debt, as you may know, we have a couple of tranches of ten-year bonds and the perpetual. Those are all fixed coupon rates. All of them are south of 4%, in terms of the coupon. All those are already hedged and fixed. If you look at that proportion and you consider all of that debt as a total of our gross debt, slightly above 50%.
Of our debt is actually on fixed rates, if you use that definition. The rest of them are on revolvers. The spread have been fixed with, obviously, and negotiated with the various, lending institutions. We are fairly well-placed, in light of the current interest rate environment.
Dennis, one more question on the CapEx BAU guidance?
If you look at the CapEx or the BAU run rate CapEx on a steady-state basis, we continue to explore ways of how to optimize that spending level, particularly on our legacy systems, both on our 4G networks as well as our IT system. That on a steady-state basis now achieved nine months at 6.3%, and we believe that at the 6%-7% level would be where we would be managing the business on a steady-state basis. Of course, we have ongoing transformation investments including 5G investments and IT transformation investments, as well as network transformation investments, which we expect will yield us the outcomes in a couple of years.
Those investments will obviously be on top of the BAU CapEx. When we reach steady state, it should be well within 7%.
Okay. I hope that answers your questions, Foong.
Yes. Yes, it does. If I can just have a quick follow-up, right? For the debt plus investment, as you mentioned, there are some delays in CapEx into next year. Generally, would it be right to say that this year it's 9%-12%, including investment, and next year, based on that delay, it should be around 12%-15%? Is that the right way to look at it?
Foong, as part of our normal practice and usual practice, we will be providing guidance for FY 2023 when we release our full year results for FY 2022 in February of next year. We will provide that exact guidance at that point in time because we will, as an ongoing initiative, continue to rationalize the level of investments that we would need to make, both on a steady-state basis as well as our DARE+ investments. At that point in time, we will be in a much better position.
Questions
Sorry?
I think that.
Yep. Okay. Understood. Thank you so much.
Yeah. We'll provide the guidance.
Yeah
You know, in exact response to your question, Foong, you are right to say that some of the investments will flow into 2023, which represents a slight delay from 2022. You know, in terms of magnitude, we'll provide that guidance next year.
Okay. Understood. Thank you so much, Dennis and everyone else.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thanks, Foong. Next up we have Sachin.
Hi, Sachin.
Hi. Thank you for the opportunity.
Sachin, you're a little bit soft.
Sorry. Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity. I should speak a bit louder now. Is it okay?
Still a little bit soft, but we'll try to catch you.
Okay, let me speak a bit louder. My question is, how much out of the SGD 270 million investment have we done? It seems very little based on 3Q results. Very little has been done. What is the delay? What is the cause of this delay? That's question number one. Question number two is that earlier we are expecting majority of SGD 270 million investments to be frontloaded in FY 2022. Question is there a change to that SGD 270 million number, or is there a change to, you know, investments that frontloading? Does it mean the bulk of the investment will fall into FY 2023 now? Lastly, does the EPL change EPL costs?
Does it change the equation or, my guess is it was not part of the SGD 270 million investment. Could you clarify if that has changed the equation for you in terms of frontloading or not frontloading? Thank you.
Dennis?
Okay. Hi, Sachin. I'll answer your question of in regards to the SGD 270 million. Yeah, you're right in saying that a bunch of the contemplated investments for the SGD 270 million, which were approximately about 50% of that number, which was intended for 2022, a portion of it has been delayed and into 2023. This represents two prongs of that investment. One is in relation to IT investments. As part of our transformation projects, the capitalized portion of the initiative, there are various deliveries attached to milestones of that transformation program. They've experienced a slight delay in terms of one quarter of delays, that flows into 2023.
That portion of the investment will be delayed into 2023, but not a massive delay. The second one is in relation to the timing of certain rollouts of 5G network. That's also something that we have actually achieved full compliance, but we are also looking to increase coverage going to 2023 and early part 2023. Those will catch up with us in terms of the investments in early 2023. The exact and direct answer to your question is a bulk of that SGD 270 million will therefore be incurred in 2023. Some part of it, the residual amount in 2024, in terms of the early part 2024.
In terms of your second question on the Premier League, you know, we had contemplated a whole bunch of outcomes as part of our SGD 500 million outcomes for DARE+. As a recap, we guided the market in November of last year that we would be achieving outcomes in terms of margin accretion from adjacent and new businesses of SGD 220 million and cost savings of SGD 280 million. That was the guidance we gave at that point in time. The Premier League content costs and the margin contributions from that is adjusted against the cost savings target that we had provided to the market.
We are maintaining that guidance at this point in time in terms of the overall SGD 500 million of outcomes that we will be achieving as part of DARE+. That is part of what we would be providing an update on our Investor Day on December seventh. The short answer is that we are holding true to the DARE+ outcomes in the total sum of SGD 500 million.
We hope that answers your question, Sachin.
Yes, that's very well. Thank you. Thank you for that.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you. As a reminder, you know, to join the question queue, you can click on the Raise Hand button.
I think Arthur has his hand raised.
Yeah, he put it down. Arthur, we are happy to answer any questions that you might have.
No, my question has been asked. That's why I put my hand up.
Okay.
I'm not.
Sachin, you have more questions?
Yeah, just in case, since I got a few, if I get a chance, I'd like to ask this question. Because you haven't changed your EBITDA margins guidance of, you know, 20% has been kept intact despite 23% achieved in 2023 in nine months. Just to understand, I mean, that if you just do the math, that forecasts a very low service EBITDA margin in 4Q. You know, is that a right way of thinking about it? Or you are being extra conservative, you know, and want to surprise the market on the upside?
Dennis, this question is for you.
Thank you, Amelia, and thank you, Sachin, for the question. If you look at Q4 and historically, if you look at our performance for Q4, we typically incur relatively higher costs in Q4 compared to the rest of the quarters. That is historically our operating trends. Case in point, we would typically incur a whole bunch of marketing promotion costs as we exit the year and prepare for product and service launches into 2023. This is the same that we're contemplating for this year. There is World Cup that we're launching in Q4 of this year, the impacts of which have been taken to Q4. The full quarter of the Premier League impacts are also contemplated in Q4.
There's a whole ambit of transformation costs in relation to the IT OpEx in relation to IT licenses that we expect to incur in Q4 and which are significantly relatively higher than the rest of the quarters. All of those considerations have been taken into Q4 as part of this guidance. We are, of course, you know, as always, looking at all our cost line items and seeing how we can manage that. There's no intention to surprise on the upside intentionally, but you know, the management's efforts to manage what we can incur discretionarily is something that we'll continue to do as part of our normal operations.
Yeah. Perhaps I can add, and this goes to one of your prior questions, Sachin, which is why are we delayed on some of these transformation milestones, right? On the transformation spend. It's not our intent. We're not delayed that much. We're delayed kind of 3+ months on some of these transformation milestones. That's not a big delay in the context of transformation. They do cross over into next year as a result. One of the things we're kind of manically focused on, away from just, you know, percentages and numbers, is actually executing on these milestones as fast as we can. To the extent that we can bring things forward into Q4, we absolutely will. Yeah, that's another dimension on top of it.
Got it. Very clear, Nikhil. Very, very clear.
Thanks, Sachin. Anybody else has a question for us? Hussaini?
Yeah. Hi. Good evening, everyone. Basically, my questions are mostly housekeeping in nature. Just basically wanted to understand why the Premier League expenses booked into third quarter is mentioned or, you know, is called one-off. So just a clarity on that side will help. The second is on the network solutions revenues, which has increased at a very good pace on a quarter-over-quarter basis. Just wanted to understand what drove that, and how should we see it going forward. Thank you.
Okay. Maybe, Dennis, you take the first question on the Premier League, one-off expenses, and then maybe, Kit, you can take the second one on network solutions.
Hussaini, on your question on the one-off Premier League, obviously there are recurring costs on the Premier League, namely relating to content. However, there are relatively higher expenses incurred in respect of the launch of Premier League, which is at the inception of the season, which is in Q3. Those are therefore considered one-off. That's why we reflect that down as one-off, and because they are relatively higher, and we don't expect to incur them on a recurring basis.
Okay.
All right. For network solution itself, you see the year-over-year growth is effect of a strong demand from our clients in managed services and in IT, right? We are seeing a better order booking as well, right? We can see that it's sustainable, right? On the back of, chip shortage, clients are actually ordering in advance but take a longer time delivering, so we are able to see a better, sustainable, in terms of revenue coming ahead for us.
Hussaini, we hope we answered your questions.
Yeah. This is very clear. Thank you very much.
Thank you. Arthur, you finally have a question for us.
Yeah. Just to clarify on Hussaini's question on the EPL one-off cost. Basically these have been booked into the third quarter. We should see a reduction of that into the fourth quarter, whereas you're recognizing the revenue bookings from the EPL subscriptions. Should that then be a positive margin impact becoming more visible into the fourth quarter? Is that how we should look at this?
Arthur, you know, if you look at the one-off costs in relation to the launch of the Premier League, yes, those ones will not recur in Q4. We have two months of impacts from the PL starting from August. There's a two-month recording of the revenues as well as the content cost in relation to PL in the third quarter and a full quarter of the revenues and the costs in relation to PL recorded in the fourth quarter. Obviously for confidentiality reasons, we do not provide the breakdown of revenues and costs in relation to specific content. We look at it as an overall bundle in our entertainment proposition.
As Johan has highlighted earlier, the entire entertainment proposition and what we deliver as value to our customers is delivered on a profitable basis. That's something that we would like to emphasize.
Understood. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Foong?
Yeah. If I can just ask one further question, right? With regards to the DARE+ business review that you mentioned during the presentation. Can you give us an idea as to, you know, maybe is there a range of in terms of monetary value, right, the write-offs for these legacy assets that you will be booking in the fourth quarter? In terms of the implications of that, right, would it have any implications for dividends this year or next year? You know, perhaps does it affect? Is it so big that it might affect your retained earnings and therefore, you know, may also affect your ability to pay out dividends?
Dennis.
Okay. In terms of the magnitude of the write-offs, you know, it will not erode our net profit for the entire year, you know, in totality. I'll leave it as that for now. In terms of these write-offs, we've flagged those as one-offs. Very clearly in our dividend policy, we have committed to pay at least 80% of the net profit after tax, excluding one-off and non-recurring items. All of these write-offs that we're contemplating to flush through in the fourth quarter and as part of our full year results will not impact the dividend that we are looking to pay for the full year of FY 2022.
In terms of our retained earnings, there's more than enough capacity to pay dividends in terms of the retained earnings that sits in our balance sheet. The contemplated write-offs will not impact this adversely and our dividend paying capacity.
The exact dividend policy is 80% of net income excluding write-offs or SGD 0.05, whichever is higher. We remain committed to that dividend policy, and these write-offs will not have any impact on that dividend.
Okay. Understood. Thanks. Thanks, Nikhil and Dennis.
Thank you. Okay, I'll give it a few more minutes for our next question.
Mm.
Last call for questions.
Calm down.
5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay.
Yeah. Thanks, all, for being very efficient with the questions for us. Actually, there were a lot of questions but very high quality questions. Thank you for bearing with us. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you everybody for spending your evening with us. As usual, you know, feel free to reach out to me if you have further questions. Until next quarter, please take care. Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Thank you. Bye-bye.