Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Grameenphone's earnings disclosure for the third quarter of 2021. My name is Naureen Quayum, I'm the head of investor relations for Grameenphone, and thank you for joining us today. Our presentation, financial statements, and additional documents are available on investor relations website. You can also start posting your questions in the comment box. We will address them at the end of our presentation. In case you're unable to post your question, please feel to reach out to me via email or text. We will now start our presentation with our CEO, Mr. Yasir Azman. Thank you, Naureen. Good evening, everyone. My name is Yasir Azman, CEO of Grameenphone. Thank you for joining us for the third quarter results announcement. I would like to begin with some industry facts. As reported by our regulator, till August 2021, the telecommunication industry has gained almost 8.5 million subscribers, registering a 5% growth from end of 2020, ending with 178.61 million. GP's customer base end of August 2021 was 82.18 million, which is 46.5% of the total mobile subscribers in the country. In the same period, mobile data users have increased by over 13 million, reaching to 150.41 million, which is 12.7% increase from the end of 2020. If I may talk about the highlights of the quarter, we continued our top-line growth in the third quarter with a 1.8% growth in total revenue from last year, quarter three. With the addition of 2.4 million data customers this quarter, we see an increase of 9.7% data users from last year. We also retained the growth traction in 4G users, registering a 55% increase year-over-year. We started the third quarter with a stricter lockdown. I would say the strictest one what we have seen during this whole pandemic starting from March 2020. However, as the quarter commenced, those restrictions were eased significantly. Go to next slide. We have seen the ease of restriction and declining rates of COVID-19 infection rates and deaths number. If I briefly update on COVID-19 situation into the country, till date, more than 1.5 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported, with over 27,000 deaths while over 16 million people have received both doses of vaccine in the country. The first 33 days of the quarter, in this quarter three, was actually very strict in terms of lockdown, where restrictions on movement were far more severe than 2020. This was triggered by the sudden spike, as I mentioned, in COVID cases and deaths with the spread of Delta variant as can be seen in the graph in this slide. The infection rates started to decline from August and the restrictions were lifted. We exited the quarter in a near to normal situation. At this point of time, it's near to normal in terms of business and economic activity. In early September, Government also declared the educational sector to partly reopen, maintaining all health and safety protocols. This is a good development in the second half of the quarter. As of last week, children above age of 12 have been made eligible to receive their vaccines. Additionally, Bangladesh Government has recently opened a vaccination for any citizen above the age of 18 on the Surokkha app. Vaccination is continuing. We have seen significant number of less infection rate and deaths number. As I mentioned, that businesses are in the near to normal now in the country and traffic is back in the city. Going to the next slide, improving growth momentum after withdrawal of lockdown, what we have seen. After the withdrawal, we started see improving as we see the economic activities coming back, that has fueled the growth momentum. As an emergency service provider, our on-ground operations related to network rollout and spectrum deployment was also uninterrupted. Because of these rollout and network activities and also easing restrictions, we have been able to continue overall network rollout to enhance our customer experience, which is fueling the data usage growth, which was a critical element into the overall business mix, and we were basically mostly focusing on spectrum rollout and 4G whole country that we rolled out in Q1 and early Q2 to capitalize on that and give better customer experience to the customer during this period. We focused on acquisition and gross add by launching attractive offers for new users in our product portfolio, which has led to 7.7% growth in our subscriber base from last year. Customers' uptake on bundles pack continue to grow. This is also we have seen a recent uptake among the customers that they are more towards bundles than probably in isolation buying voice and data pack. This gives us opportunity to fuel ARPU growth. We continued our partnership with mobile financial services partners offering regular cashback, combo packs, increased validity, and leading to a growth of 24.9% in digital recharge from last year. This is an area where we see that we have progressed in this period. In addition, we continue to offer combo packs and cashback on MyGP, which is our flagship digital app, digital channel. We have included exclusive in-app product offers, and that has led us to get 11 million users at the end of Q3 in our MyGP app. Other than driving growth and fixing network experience, we have basically significantly focused on our modernization journey. We focus on building a future fit company through digitalization of our processes and modernization. Grameenphone has been undergoing a transformation journey. It's for several years, and that is to become a future fit company that can cater to the rapidly evolving needs of our customers. However, it's also not only what we have seen over the last few years. The COVID has also demanded on a new way of work and changed the customer's behavior significantly in terms of their usage pattern of different services and the way the data uptake has happened. Over the years, we have examined all processes facing our customers on a granular level, driving simplification and ease of interaction with our customers in mind. We have also, during this period, technology as a leader in the country, we position ourself how can we digitalize and modernize the way we use technology, the insights, to ensure that we understand the customer behavior better on time and fast-track the go to the market. As a result of all this digitalization, in terms of customer journeys and bringing in the new capabilities in the technology side, we have been able to digitize almost 100% of our customers. To be specific, 96% of our customer-facing interaction and the services, and bring them into our one app, which is self-service app, MyGP. In addition to product and service, we have also introduced several interactive and attractive features into this app. Some of which are infinity scrolling and live streaming of sports, which has led to over two million daily customer engagement into this app. However, a large portion of our customer base is still not a part of digital world, they're using the basic phone. Focusing on them, we have extended our flagship retail physical stores. We have brought in 30 new flagship stores to focus in the rural areas to serve our customers better. Now we have 194 Grameenphone centers, these stores cater to the needs of our customer, mostly in the deep rural areas. While doing so, we are also working towards acquiring products which will first deliver on demand of advanced mobile service at a high-quality network experience. As I mentioned, we are on a journey for building a network that will meet customer digital experience requirements by boosting the quality of service with the jointly built capabilities of bringing in future technologies. As such, in 5G, touch-free operation and fault management, customer complaint management. We have recently entered a partnership with global technology service provider, Wipro, which is also an opportunity for local talent to upskill and pursue global opportunities. We are also driving modernization within our organization with the transformation of operating models, implementation of robotics and automation, as well as continuously upskilling our talent with future fit capabilities. We believe the right mix of competency, capabilities, and tools will enable our growth ambition, reinforce our position as a connectivity partner, and help move Bangladesh forward. This has been a key focus areas, not only this year, so several years. As I mentioned this year, it's been digitalizing our customer journeys, focusing on building digital channels, driving volume there. At the same time, uplifting our technology capabilities internally to support this development, while we see the customer behavior changing. The entire organization driving modernization through automation and digitalization. That's how we see that we are preparing for the future when we see the change, digitalization, and data revolutions are happening. Moving on, the business environment, two topics. One, we see that 5G, the government of Bangladesh has been working towards the launch of 5G in the country. Having recently launched a consultation process with the telecom industry. We have duly submitted our feedback, and this consultation process will continue. There is no specific any date for auction, and we as a telco operator and the industry, we don't see that 5G discussion is only confined within the auction. Rather, it's the entire ecosystem build-up, and that's how the dialogue is going on. The towerco area, we have entered partnership with two towerco vendors, through whom we have already developed and deployed over 1,200 sites this year. We are counting on in the coming year as well, and we are continuing our discussion with other vendors as well as regulators into the new towerco regime. Moving on to our commitment towards the society. How do we empower our society? It's the basic thing, the fact that at the end of September 2021, Grameenphone is connecting a subscriber base of 83.6 million people. Of whom 46.1 million customers access the internet, and 27.6 million are empowered with power of 4G and growing. We have focused on COVID relief. The strict lockdown in the third quarter resulted in many subscribers being unable to recharge and stay connected to those who matter the most to them. In an effort to ensure that connectivity remain uninterrupted, we provided free minutes and data to more than 11 million subscriber at zero cost. At the same time, the previous quarter we joined hands with BRAC under the banner of Dakche Amar Desh, with the purpose of providing food assistance to the highly impacted population of our society. I'm pleased to report that we are able to provide support to over 83,000 families who were gravely affected by the pandemic. While we talk about our focus into the social impact, one is responding to the disaster, the other is responding towards COVID-19. As I mentioned through this Dakche Amar Desh program, 83,000 families were supported. The other area, which is relevant to COVID-19 or not relevant to COVID-19, we do focus on youth digital and education. On July 15th, we jointly celebrated World Youth Skills Day with UNDP to raise nationwide awareness and support the upskill of our youth. Multiple online dialogues with youth and policy makers were organized to bridge the gap, focusing on the strategic importance of equipping our youth with relevant skills. We launched a month-long master class series, which will connect our youth to industry leaders, and experts will guide them through relevant workforce capability developments. This will remain as a focus area, and we'll build on the work we have done in Q3. With this focus and the financials, I will welcome our CFO, Jens Becker, to take us through, and I shall come back at the later stage of the session. Jens? All right. Thank you, Azman, and good evening to everybody. Let me start with a short overview of the key KPIs. In Q3, Grameenphone has continued to deliver a solid financial performance with positive momentum in top line as well as in EBITDA, despite the challenges of a strict lockdown that we saw from the July 1st till August 10th. After this, the overall economy has gradually recovered from COVID-19, with average daily new cases declining to a level of around 1,000, with less than 5% infection rate by the end of September. Followed by the withdrawal of the lockdown, the economic activities gradually resumed while educational institutions have been reopening in limited scale from of September 12th, after actually 18 months of closure. However, Grameenphone remained active in the market throughout the quarter with strong subscriber acquisition, new spectrum site rollout, and customer-focused market activities. In summary, Grameenphone had a +1.9% year-on-year growth in subs and traffic revenue and a +1.3% growth in EBITDA in Q3 while maintaining an EBITDA margin of 63.3%. With the continued investment efforts backed by the newly acquired spectrum, GP's CapEx to sales ratio for the quarter stood at 10.4% on a four-quarter moving average, which was 5.3% on a standalone basis. EPS for the quarter stood at BDT 6.34, with a 3.8% degrowth from last year on a reported basis. The degrowth in EPS was contributed by one-off modernization cost in this quarter. Let me turn to more details on the subscriber base. We have continued our subscriber acquisition drive in the market, resulting into 1.6 million net adds in Q3, along with 2.4 million new data users. The sub base at the end of the quarter stood at 83.6 million, with a 7.7% growth from last year and 1.9% from previous quarter. According to BTRC published information as of August, GP subscription market share increased to 46.6% from last quarter, which was 46.5%. Our data users for the quarter stood at 46.1 million, including 27.6 million 4G data users in Q3. With our superior 4G network experience, Grameenphone's 4G data user increased by 3.8 million from last quarter. Coming to the revenue now. Despite having negative impact from the strict lockdown until August 10th, means nearly half of the quarter, Grameenphone continued to deliver growth in its top line. Total revenue grew by 1.8% year-on-year to BDT 36.2 billion in Q3, fueled by a 1.9% growth of daily subscriber and traffic revenue. The increase of the subscription and traffic revenue was mainly driven by a growth in voice data bundles and data-only packs. Turn to the next page. In addition to the focus on data and voice-only packs, Grameenphone continued, as I mentioned, to promote its bundled services in Q3 to provide better customer value along with enhanced experience. By launching attractive combo bundle packs along with the continued digital adoption efforts through both owned and third-party digital channels, bundle revenue grew by more than 10x compared to last year and 1.6x from last quarter. Excluding these bundles, data-only packs and pay-as-you-go revenue increased by 4.5% from last year. With this substantial growth in bundles, the overall subscription and traffic revenue grew by BDT 0.6 billion, as I mentioned, 1.9% year-on-year. Turning to the ARPU and usage. Grameenphone continued its value proposition through attractive market offers, supported by the superior network experience through a newly acquired spectrum on 4G network expansion. As a result, GP's average MB per user grew by 52.4% from last year and 9% from last quarter, standing at 3.9 GB per user now. The overall service ARPU decreased by 5.9% from last year, mainly due to lower contribution from our voice segment due to the lockdown impacts, partly offset by the bundles. Next page. OpEx for the quarter stood at BDT 11 billion, with a year-on-year +1.9% growth. This year-on-year growth in OpEx are mainly driven by higher regulatory and energy cost. In terms of EBITDA, GP posted a year-on-year +1.3% growth, with a stable margin of 63.3%. The growth in EBITDA was mainly driven by the higher revenue, though. On the next, turning to CapEx. GP have invested BDT 1.9 billion CapEx, excluding license and lease in Q3, focusing mainly on 4G network and coverage expansion. We rolled out more than 5,300 new sites and more than 1,500 new coverage sites in the last 12 months. At the end of Q3, the number of 4G sites reached 16,795. The 4G population coverage reached 96.8%, which in 0.5 percentage points increased from last quarter. Turning to profits. GP's net profit for the quarter stood at BDT 8.6 billion, with a 23.6% margin. On a reported basis, year-on-year net profit and EPS for the quarter decreased by 3.8%. The year-on-year decrease in net profits is driven by one-off modernization cost. However, excluding the one-off items in both the periods, net profit would have grown by 1%. Next page. In terms of operating cash flow, GP recorded a year-on-year BDT 1.6 billion growth, contributed by BDT 0.3 billion higher EBITDA and BDT 1.3 billion lower CapEx. Net debt stood at BDT 10 billion as of Q3, in combination of BDT 13.9 billion liability and BDT 3.9 billion cash balance, excluding the restricted cash. Next page. In terms of our contribution to the national exchequer, we stand at BDT 79.2 billion year-to-date, equaling around 74% of our revenues. With this, I would like to hand back to Azman for wrapping up. Thank you, Jens. To recap, in the third quarter, our top-line growth is being driven by the growth in users and usage, as we highlighted just a while back. Improving our customer experience as a result of network rollout and spectrum deployment will continue to remain key factors behind our growth momentum, and we will continue to pursue our journey in enabling our growth through modernization, evolving business models, and competency development, and as well as creating partnership that will help us to cater to the constantly evolving connectivity needs for our customers. With that, I'll hand back to Naureen for Q&A. Thank you, Azman. Thank you, Jens. Let's start with the first question. I believe, Jens, this is for you. What is the one-time modernization cost and what is the amount? Yeah. As you recall also from Azman's speech, modernization is one of our key pillars of our strategy, which we are pursuing since quite some time. You also have heard that we have, in terms of for this quarter, went into improving our network capabilities, moving into new partnerships here. This has been a key milestone for us, and this is what the modernization costs refer to. It's basically transition cost and restructuring costs that we have. I think in the overall level, I think there was a question, too. What I saw here is about BDT 1.3 billion in the quarter as the one-off that we have. As I mentioned, if you would take it out in both of the quarters, means also the previous year-on-year quarter, it would lead to a net profit increase of around 1% year-on-year. Moving on. What are the major trends in customer behavior you have observed in Q3 as Bangladesh approaches a near normal state amid the pandemic? Azman, maybe you can take this one. Yeah, I can take it. When we see that Bangladesh is approaching to a near normal, as I mentioned. We have seen that the voice minutes are coming back. It's increasing, with increased mobility, and the recovery in economy and partial opening of academic institutions. Obviously, the data usage continues to grow. Thank you, Azman. We have a related question to the question Jens just answered. There's one of modernization cost, and what is the amount? We've answered this. What productivity improvements do you expect from such expenditure? As we going forward, I think it's here about the capabilities that we have encountered with this new. I think Azman answered this already in the speech, getting in the details how we want to enhance customer experience, going into the digital age that is necessary here. This part is very much on the capabilities. Of course, there's also a productivity increase. For this, as you know, we're not allowed to give any forward-looking statements. Of course, we assume this as well. The key driver here is capabilities and getting into the digitalization and get the right capabilities on the customer experience end. Jens, I have another one for you. What's the year-on-year voice growth in Q3? Yeah. That's a bit of a tricky question. As you can see, all our growth is basically now into bundles. Bundles means here voice and data bundles. If you would look into voice standalone, that would be a 14% degrowth. As I said, it's a bit artificial on it because the growth is coming from the bundles where we don't actually separate it anymore. Another question that I got over WhatsApp. This is, in the quarter, despite lockdown, the subscriber net add trends for the quarter did not drop, but ARPU did. Does this just reflect the net additions came late in the quarter so that there will be a bit of a catch-up for revenue in quarter four? Yeah. I can take it. You just Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. The ARPU is independent from the subscriber number, right? It's per subscriber. The drop of ARPU that we have seen is basically driven by the voice drop that we see during the lockdown. Lockdown usually comes with lower minute usage. I see a question from IDLC, which is, what was the data price scenario last quarter? We consider this competitive information, and we would not like to share this. We will just wait. I see another question. Do you plan to launch any digital products like your competition, Toffee by Banglalink? Yasir Azman, would you like to answer? Yasir Azman, are you here? I didn't get the question. Is there any plan to launch any digital products like our competitors? We don't intend to bring in our own digital services. We have in long-term, we have a Bioscope, which is also like Toffee, as mentioned here. Our model is to do partnership, and bring in services for the customers, the best possible one in the market. Thank you both. Let's just wait a minute more. Okay, I have another question. Is there any regulatory update, especially on the BTRC audit? Yasir Azman. We have recently seen some movement on the audit part, and that's basically not in relation to Grameenphone, it's related to the operator Banglalink, which was in the media as well, that BTRC earlier did audit for Grameenphone and Robi. Now they started for Banglalink. We are also always in touch with BTRC, and currently we would like to find out whether there is a possibility that what we have earlier mentioned for an amicable mediation. However, as we understand, the matter is in court. Unless and until the court directs us for the mediation, out of court, it will not be possible and supported legally. Okay. Let's wait a few more minutes for any more questions.
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