Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of Tele Columbus AG. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing conference, please press star key followed by the zero on your telephone for an operator assistance. May I now hand over to Leonhard Bayer, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to welcome you in the name of Tele Columbus management team to our day's conference call following the release of our first quarter results for fiscal year 2021, which ended on March 31st, 2021. This call is limited to 60 minutes. In case of any follow-up questions, Manuel and myself are available to discuss. I'm here today with Daniel Ritz, Chief Executive Officer, and Eike Walters, Chief Financial Officer. Now, I would like to remind you that if any lenders or rating agencies are on the call right now, that this is a public conference call in which only publicly available information will be discussed. I would therefore ask you to refrain from questions containing information not belonging to the public domain. This conference call is intended for capital market participants only, and not for press representatives. If any journalists are on the line right now, we would highly appreciate if you were leaving the conference call now. Press representatives are welcome to call my colleague, Sebastian Jachymiak, to discuss any outstanding questions. Please be aware that there might be a delay between the slides and the webcasts and the voice transmission. Due to the current situation, we're partially in different locations and therefore need to coordinate ourselves in different manner when it comes to Q&A later on than normally. Having said that, it's now my pleasure to hand over to you, Daniel. The floor is yours. Thank you. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome also from my side for Q1 2021 call. As usual, I'll kick it off with key messages followed by operational update and KPIs. I will then hand over to Eike for financial performance. I will be briefly back with outlook and then we are ready for your questions. The headline for Q1 2021 would be or is, we had a solid sound start into the new year. On the operational side of things, we have seen improving internet and telephony net add performance with 8,000 and 5,000 net adds respectively in the quarter, which is sequentially and also year-over-year better than 2020. However, on the CATV side of things, challenges clearly remain. We have seen 14,000 in negative net adds in the quarter. This is better, actually less bad than Q1 2020. Still 14,000 net add is not something to be proud of course. Premium TV net adds have continued to grow at a relatively low pace of 3,000 in the quarter. As for customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, which we use to score our customer satisfaction, is now in the KPIs that we here report firmly in positive territory. There are some further improvements. Obviously it gets tougher as we get better. We will work hard to further improve that KPI, of course, in the quarters to come. On B2B revenue, we have seen a tremendous year-over-year increase in revenues of 27%. However, I have to caution you that this is largely due to year and phasing effects both in Q1 2020 and in 2021. We are comparing here a very full quarter in 2021 to a relatively light quarter in 2020 due to phasing effect in both years. The growth rate that we report here is definitely not sustainable going forward. As for financials, our Q1 core revenues excluding low margin construction revenues are up 3% year-over-year. Again, mind you, this is obviously also helped by the 27% increase in B2B that I just explained. Q1 reported EBITDA is down 16% year-over-year. This is largely due to transaction-related non-recs that we booked in Q1. Normalized EBITDA is actually up year-over-year. Q1 CapEx is up 8% year-over-year. This is largely on the back of RGU growth or customer-related CapEx, which accounts for the lion's share of net increase of CapEx year-over-year. On the strategic front, as you're well aware, we have successfully closed the takeover by Kublai in April. We have also executed successfully in May, the EUR 475 million capital increase. Now Kublai shareholding post capital raise stands at 94.4%. Tomorrow we have the AGM for the year 2020, which includes the appointment of the new supervisory board. I would also like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank our outgoing board of director members who have been with the company during a very intense and important period of time, and we greatly appreciate the collaboration we have with them during their tenure. Thank you. Now on to operational updates and KPIs. As already mentioned, on internet, we have seen a good quarter with 8,000 net adds for the quarter, which is sequentially better and also better year-over-year. I would also like to calibrate that. When you look at the competitors that have reported their net adds also for Q1, I'm not going to name them here, but you can do your own math. When you adjust actually our performance of 8,000 for the marketable footprint, in our case, a bit less than 2.4 million marketable homes, the number of net adds per one million marketable home actually stands quite well against that of our peers. That's something we are happy about. In terms of telephony RGU, we have seen a net change of 5,000 in the quarter. This is largely on the back of positive development in IP net adds. As you're well aware, the telephony access comes with the IP access, and we only charge for outbound telephony usage. Here we show the tier split for gross adds. As you can see, the demand for higher bandwidth remains resilient. We're particularly interested, of course, of the green portion of that stack bar because this is about speed tiers of 120 meg and above. As you can see, the green bits, including light and dark green, is now stabilizing north of 70%, at least for the moment. However, what is very encouraging is that now the light green portion, which denotes speeds above 250 megabits per second, is starting to increase its share in the total stack bar, and that's obviously a very good development. We continue to see also more than 80% of new customers opting for 24 months tariffs, which the higher bandwidth overcompensates the discount. We will do more marketing efforts in the months to come to increase the portion of the top speed tier in the process. To TV, where we have a fairly mixed picture. As I told you, we have seen 14,000 negative net adds in pay TV for the quarter. This is less than the shrink in the first quarter of 2020. Mind you that typically the first quarter is the worst of the year because this is typically where we get hit by housing association contracts which are discontinued, typically first quarter. We have seen a bit of phasing here, so let's see what Q2 brings, but I would not read too much in the 14,000 yet for the first quarter. We have to see what the second quarter brings. Premium TV, the third consecutive quarter of positive net add at 3,000. We all know that we will not see much better performance on TV until and unless we have fixed our TV value proposition, which I've explained on previous calls. On to ARPU. At the top of the chart, the blended internet and telephony ARPU per RGU, which is slightly down compared to the fourth quarter of 2020 and also slightly down compared to the first quarter of 2020. This is predominantly driven by lower telephony revenues. If you were to de-average this, of course, the internet ARPU is going the right direction and the telephony ARPU bit of the blended ARPU is shrinking due to lower chargeable telephony outbound usage. Overall, still pretty much stable. The same applies to TV ARPU, which stands at EUR 8.7 for the quarter. On to Net Promoter Score. As you see, we are now either for three or four or five quarters now in positive territory for the overall pure NPS and for the two touchpoint NPS that we report here on customer service and field service. As you can see, it's a bit stubborn there. It takes a lot of effort to make the green bit even bigger. We're working hard on that. Thinking easy. The low-hanging fruit are already harvested, now we have to work hard to further improve this, and it's obviously one of our top priorities because ultimately we are firmly convinced that NPS drives customer satisfaction and therefore also more gross add and less churn. Here, B2B, as already mentioned on the key messages, 27% up year-over-year. I've explained to you that this is not a sustainable run rate going forward. We see some headwinds for the remaining nine months of 2021 due to COVID-related project delays. These are not project cancellation, but delays. We're seeing clients of our B2B unit approaching them and saying, "This is still good enough for some time to come. Let's postpone some of the projects until we have further visibility in terms of our own economics." Keep that in mind. What is, however, positive to report is that the gross margin in percent of revenues is materially up by about 10 points compared to the first quarter of 2020, where we had a fairly low gross margin. That's a positive development. With that, I will hand over to Eike for financial performance. Thanks, Daniel, and hello and good morning also from my side. On the next page, we have the overview of the revenue development and the underlying trends per segment. As usual, the light blue bars describe the reported numbers, and the dark blue bars describe the development of our core revenues, which are the revenues excluding the construction business. What you can see that on the reported numbers, the revenues are more or less stable and increased slightly from EUR 118.5- EUR 119 million. The core revenues increased by 3% or almost EUR 4 million. What you also can see is that the recent trend continues. We reduced the decline in TV, but the overall trend remains quite challenging, and beyond that, approximately one-third of the decline is driven by bulk contracts and two-thirds by individual customers, and that indicates clearly the pressure by the new Telecommunications Act. When the legislation becomes effective in December 2024, roughly 50% of our today's revenue TV revenues are at risk and needs to be secured with strong B2C sales and a compelling TV offer and as well as IP services. This is quite challenging for us. The losses in Q1 were almost compensated by Broadband, but first and foremost, as said by Daniel, with a remarkable Q1 in B2B. Usually, the financial Q4 performance is very strong since the sales teams are in the year-end mode and try to get in as much as they can revenues. In the recently communicated Q4, it was a bit different and unusual since we had a decline in our B2B business by €1.1 million. In this case, projects were belated and a part of the revenues kicked in later than initially planned. What we have experienced now are two effects which drive the sharp increase. First one is the phasing of incoming revenues by one quarter from Q4 to Q1. We have a steeper increase. Secondly, the comparable base of Q1 in 2020 is due to the year-end release rather low. The 27%, as said by Daniel as well, are a result of two effects. Revenues are benefiting from excellent projects of the previous quarter and the comparable low base. As said by Daniel, looking further into 2021, we see a less active project business COVID-related for B2B, since some of our clients belong to the industries that were harmed by the pandemic, such as hotel chains or other, with certain uncertainties left for the remaining nine months. We're happy to see the ongoing positive momentum in the IP revenues. The increasing customer base is rising the revenues on a sustainable level, the underlying trend is mixed, also said by Daniel in the KPIs. While we drive internet revenues through a favorable bandwidth mix, even though we operate with attractive promotions for our customers in the last month, we are dealing with lower ARPU in the telephony business. Our attractive bundles and customers who optimize the tariff lead to stable telephony revenues despite the increasing RGU base. The decline of the other revenues is driven by less construction revenues, which are about EUR 3.4 million, these were also partly compensated by other revenues like feed-in fees from broadcasters and rental fees we get in. On the next page, we have the EBITDA comparison with Q1 2020. What you can see is that the reported EBITDA shrank by approximately 16% from EUR 55.5 million -EUR 46.5 million. This decrease only driven by the one-off cost for our strategic review. Without the cost of EUR 11.7 million, the EBITDA would have been grown by 5%. Despite the one-off, it was a rather stable quarter, which was more or less in line with Q1 2020. Of course, we have to keep in mind the outstanding B2B results, but the key factor to explain the deviation in the EBITDA average are the lower costs for construction business of EUR 3 million, which are part of the EUR 2.3 million cost saving, what we have shown here in other direct costs. This decrease of the signal delivery cost of EUR 1.4 million is due to the capitalization effects with regard to fees for the use of foreign grids, so network lease, in the context of new leasing contracts that were capitalized according to IFRS 16. This is an OPEX CapEx shift, and you might remember that we had this also in the last quarters, but not in Q1 2020. Lastly, the higher personnel expenses due to higher number of staff on board, roughly 5%. Drivers are commercially beneficial insourcing in departments of IT, finance, and field services, as well as necessary investments in the overhead to de-risk the business. On the next slide, we have the net income and, yeah, as said, as another quarter of negative income. What you can see is that the first quarter amounted to a negative of EUR 16.6 million, compared to Q1 2020, this is again a lower net income, this was clearly driven by the non-recurring items in Q1 related to the one-off. After the one-time impairment of the goodwill in the Q4 2020, this was an even better result compared to last quarter. Depreciation amortization are actually running against a lower comparable base. The decline of EUR 2.5 million actually compares with apples and oranges, say so, since the capitalization according to IFRS 16 were corrected only in the second half of 2020. As a result, the operational decline or adjusted number would be even lower. The financial result decreased year-on-year due to the annualization effect of terminal interest. This will partially reverse Q2 due to the repayment of both EUR 40 million and EUR 75 million facilities in May 2021. On the next slide, we have the Capex. No material changes or developments which are really worth to elaborate extensively. EUR 32.5 million in total. This is an 8% increase compared to Q1 2020. Maybe to pick out to one is increase in customer-related Capex from EUR 8.1 -EUR 9.3. This is due to more B2C-related Capex because of the customer acquisition costs, which were capitalized for more customer wins and higher B2B Capex in connection with the related projects and the high revenues aforementioned. For the full year, we are on track. We didn't put forward any investment in expectation of a successful transaction or the rights issue and work instead along the budget, and the amount of other CapEx has increased due to the capitalization of financial leases according to the IFRS 16 standard. This is something we had now a couple of times already today. On the next slide, the leverage and liquidity table. The debt structure by end of Q1 in the comparison to Q4 2020. This is all before the partial repayment of debt after the rights issue. What you can see is that by end of March, we had a cash position of EUR 74 million available, so EUR 64 million cash on hand and another EUR 10 million for the RCF. This is again a slight increase compared to the previous quarter. As Daniel said, the transaction as a capital increase was successful. As a result, the next leverage table we will present to you to members will be significantly different to how it looks like today. There's one last slide I would like to share with you. This is a pro forma debt structure. What you can see is that from the EUR 475 million proceeds of the rights issue, we used EUR 360 million to repay the two smaller term loans and one third of the bigger term loan. From mid of May onwards, we have a gross debt of EUR 1.1 billion with a long-term maturity, EUR 650 million of the bond running until May 2025, and the remaining EUR 462 million of the Term Loan B until October 2024, which is quite positive to the company. This indicatively brings us to a net debt below four times, in relation to EBITDA normalized. With that, I would like to hand over to Daniel again. Thank you, Eike. On page 20, we have reprinted the going concern full year 2021 guidance on revenue for the Capex. The important comment here is in the box at the bottom, that this current guidance, both for the full year 2021 and mid-term guidance, is to be updated in the second half of the year. The trigger for that will be once we have had the opportunity, working now to be elected supervisory board, to sit down and to agree what we're going to do for the remainder of 2021 and for the years to come. That will trigger then an update of the guidance, which will occur in the second half of this year. The last slide of our presentation actually is all grayed out, and that means we're done with the transaction. These were the milestones. We have completed, I think, three of them since we last spoke for full year 2020. The transaction is closed, the equity raise has been executed, and we have already used EUR 360 million of that, as explained by Eike Walters, to deleverage. We're now going to sit down, as I said, with the new incoming supervisory board, to plan what we're now going to do with the proceeds other than what we have used for deleveraging. That concludes our presentation. Thank you, and I'll hand back to the operator for Q&A. Thank you. We will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial zero and one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial zero and two to cancel your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment, please, for the first question. As a reminder, if you want to ask a question, please press zero and one. We have no questions for the moment, so I hand back to Mr. Bayer. Okay. Thank you very much, operator. Yeah, if there are any follow-up questions arising throughout the day, don't hesitate. Please reach out to me directly and maybe for some closing remarks. Over to you, Daniel. Thank you, Leo. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for joining our call this morning. I hope it was useful and what you expected. Thank you very much. We look forward to speaking again when we report Q2. Have a good day and stay healthy. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.
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