Good morning, everyone, and Welcome to Grupo Televisa's Third Quarter 2021 conference call. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the press release, which explains the use of forward-looking statements and applies to everything we discuss in today's call and in the earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Grupo Televisa. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you, Sarah. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Pepe Toño González, CEO of Cable, Alex Penna, CEO of Sky, and Carlos Phillips and Tonio Lara, Corporate Vice President of Finance and Administration, respectively. During the third quarter, we experienced an overall positive economic environment in Mexico, despite the third wave of COVID-19, relatively high inflation, and rising interest rates. The economic recovery continues to be led by demand of products manufactured in Mexico from the United States, while remittances sent by migrants north of the border keep hitting new monthly records and have helped domestic consumers. In Mexico, around 66 million people have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, accounting for 51% of the population, while about 48 million people have been fully vaccinated, representing 37% of the total. This has continued to a more benign outlook for mobility and a new normality going forward. Since the end of August, children returned to in-person classes for the 2021-2022 school year, while labor force is gradually oing back to the office. We're confident that the Mexican economy will experience a rebound of 6% in 2021, including growth of around 4% in the fourth quarter. Moreover, the economic recovery should set the ground for GDP growth of about 3% in 2022. Under this environment, our content business continues growing at a healthy pace. Advertising activity from the private sector continues to be robust. Cable and Sky continue to perform relatively well, but several factors have led to soft RGU net adds for both, such as an increase in out-of-home activities, price adjustments at Cable, and a still relatively high unemployment rate in Mexico. At the same time, some of these factors have translated into lower recharges at Sky's prepaid packages. Moving on to our financial results for the quarter, consolidated revenue reached MXN 26.1 billion, representing a year-on-year growth of 9.1%, while operating segment income reached MXN 11 billion, equivalent to a year-on-year increase of 4.2%. Bernardo and I are glad to see that most of our assets retained positive momentum in the third quarter. The strategy to turn around our Cable segment in 2021 has proven to be successful and will allow us to deliver year-on-year revenue and EBITDA growth for the full year. We are also excited about the opportunity that we have ahead of us to accelerate Cable RGU net adds more evidently in 2022, driven by the aggressive FTTH expansion plan implemented this year. Turning to the third quarter financial results in our content division, by 15.8% as the economic recovery is causing a surge in activity in most industry verticals, fueling an acceleration in advertising from the private sector. Most businesses are looking to reconnect their brands and products with consumers and Televisa's increased ratings during the third quarter, particularly on prime time, gave us a great advantage. Private sector advertising revenues were strong, more than 16% year-on-year. On the other hand, government advertising revenues remained relatively weak, driven by ongoing austerity. As we have repeatedly mentioned, government advertising has been shrinking over the last couple of years, so today, its share of total is already very low, particularly for Televisa. Royalties from Univision of $110.7 million were 20.2% year-on-year, supported by materially higher ratings and the strong economic recovery in the U.S. Univision's robust operating performance was also driven by several initiatives implemented by management, including a revamp of the sales team, the optimization of advertising inventory, and focus on profitability. Univision's solid revenue growth should continue in 2022, given the historically upfront with the highest volume and also highest prices. We are confident that Univision's traditional media business will continue to grow in the medium term, supported by the initiatives implemented by Wade and his team to revamp these operations. We are also convinced that the global streaming platform to be launched next year will be Univision's main growth engine. All in, during the quarter, content revenue increased by 13.4%, while operating segment income grew by 2.9%. Our content margin contracted to 37.2% due to a difficult comp associated with more production of content, including sporting events related to the Olympics and the Gold Cup. In 2020, the COVID-19 lockdowns led us to have less content production costs as we broadcasted several reruns and many sporting events were canceled. With advertising revenue up by 24% year-on-year during the first nine months of 2021, we are confident that our full year advertising revenue will be very close to pre-COVID levels. We believe this highlights that free-to-air platform to build and improve brand recognition and to sell products and services in Mexico. Moving on to the performance of our content. During the third quarter, of the top 20 programs on Mexico's broadcast television were produced and transmitted by Televisa. These included telenovelas, dramas, newscasts, and comedies. Televisa's top three programs during had audiences between 135% and 150% higher than the top-rated program of our closest competitor. Throughout the week, Televisa's audiences were 97% higher than those of the second-largest broadcaster, while audiences at our flagship network, Las Estrellas, were 175% higher than those of our closest competitor. This shows that the audience gap with our closest competitor continues to increase compared to 89% and 151% higher audiences, respectively, during the second quarter, given the solid result ratings of our program. During the third quarter, our main newscast had 61% than those of the other two free-to-air television broadcasters combined. Finally, the 10 soccer matches with the highest audiences in Mexico during the third quarter were transmitted by Televisa. In the U.S., Univision's ratings on linear television increased by 16% year-over-year during the third quarter, significantly exceeding ratings growth for all other media companies in the United States. We are very proud to report that the strength of Univision's ratings has been driven by Televisa content, 100% of Univision's primetime programming grid. These audience metrics in Mexico and the U.S. are evidence that Televisa's strategy to revamp our content production, implemented a couple of years ago, has been very successful. Now, let me turn the call over to Pepe Toño, CEO of Cable. Thank you, Alfonso. During the third quarter, our cable segment delivered year-over-year revenue growth of 5.8%, while operating segment income increased by 5.6%. Our residential segment revenue grew by 5.8%, while our enterprise segment, which accounts for around 15% of total cable revenue, increased by only 0.6%, mostly due to the timing of revenue recognition. Our cable business keeps growing with higher average revenue per user, ARPU, in new sales, and a strong improvement in the product mix. We added 52,000 revenue-generating units, reaching a total of 14.4 million RGUs at the end of the quarter. To put this into perspective, for the full year 2019, we added 800,000 RGUs, while the same number for 2020 was 1.4 million. This reflects that net adds in 2020 were an outlier, driven by an extraordinary surge in consumer demand for broadband. For 2021, as social distancing measures have eased and the demand cycle for our connectivity products returns to normal, net adds have slowed down from a hangover effect, so to speak. Broadband continues to be the highest margin service, so we will continue to enhance its product offerings. We added 25,000 broadband RGUs during the quarter for a total of 5.6 million. For the 12th consecutive month, we have been number one in the Netflix ISP Speed Index and competitive service. We continue to observe good results voice RGUs as we added 68,000 during the third quarter. We have been very successful at upselling this service to our customers. We have 59,000 net video disconnections during the quarter, largely due to customers prioritizing broadband services and looking to reduce their monthly bills. We keep strengthening our customer retention programs with particular focus on video. The fact that many customers [inaudible] in retaining video use in the future. Mobile customers continue to grow. At the end of the quarter, we had 139,000 RGUs, an increase of 18,000 from last quarter. Looking forward, as the economy keeps improving, we expect demand for our services to increase with potential opportunities in our small and medium-sized business segment. On the other hand, we don't foresee the extraordinary surge in demand we experienced in 2020 because of the pandemic. We are strengthening our sales promotion strategies and our customer retention programs to take over of these simultaneous effects. In September, we made price realignment in two of our flagship broadband products. It increased our sales by the end of the quarter. We expect this positive trend to continue. Before turning the call back to Alfonso, that is 2 million homes with fiber this year is on track. We ended the third quarter with 65% completion of our four-year goal, up from 25% at the end of the second quarter. This will help us to gradually accelerate RGU net adds from 2022 onwards. By the end of the third quarter, we had successfully launched fiber to the home services in the cities of Guadalajara, Toluca, and Durango. We are convinced that the expansion to selective location makes a lot of sense for izzi, considering that we have a nationally recognized brand, exclusive content, and high-quality service with competitive offers. Thank you, Pepe. let me turn the call over to Alex Penna. Thank you, Alfonso. At Sky, revenue declined by 2.5% year-over-year during the quarter, driven by lower recharges of prepaid packages as children are going back to school. Operating segment income fell by 7.2%, driven by the amortization of certain sporting events, such as the UEFA Euro 2020 and the CONMEBOL Copa América. Sky added 27,000 RGUs, despite having 2,000 video subs disconnections during the quarter. On the broadband side, we added 15,000 RGUs during the quarter, reaching a total of 722,000 broadband RGUs. In the aggregate, including our MVNO service, which added 13,000 RGUs during the quarter, with approximately 8.2 million RGUs. Thank you, Alex. Regarding CapEx, year to date, we have invested MXN 918 million, of which MXN 680 million in cable. As we discussed during the call for the first quarter, our CapEx target for 2021 includes MXN 850 million in cable, or MXN 200 million more than what we invested in 2020, given that we will pass 2 million homes with fiber, MXN 250 million in Sky and MXN 75 million in content and other businesses. I am happy to share with you that in September, Mexico's telco regulator, IFT, and the Antitrust Commission, COFECE, approved the merger of our content assets with Univision. The transaction is still pending some required regulatory approvals in the United States. In the meantime, we have been working closely to prepare the integration with Univision ahead of the closing, which will allow us to execute the digital transformation strategy and the launch of the global streaming platform as planned. On September 13th, we announced an agreement with Live Nation Entertainment to move forward with the sale of our unconsolidated 40% equity stake in OCESA for a total consideration of MXN 5.2 billion. Although this transaction had already been approved by regulators, the time for its closing has elapsed. Therefore, we are waiting for new regulatory approvals to close, which we expect could be received before year-end. To wrap up, with consolidated segment income growing by 7.4% and 9.2% year-on-year respectively during the first nine months of 2021, Bernardo and I feel confident that our operating performance for the full year will show strong recovery. In addition, the strategic initiatives implemented this year, including the merger of our content assets with Univision, the expansion of our FTTH network, and the monetization of non-core assets will materially strengthen our competitive position to achieve sustainable growth over the coming years. Now, we are ready to take your questions. Sarah, could you please provide instructions for the Q&A? As a reminder, please press star and one on your telephone if you wish to ask a question. To cancel your request, please press the hash key. Once again, please press star and one on your telephone to ask a question. We will now take our first question from the line of Fred Mendes at Bank of America. Please go ahead, your line is open. Hello. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for the call. I have two questions here on my side. The first one is, CapEx is increasing. Obviously, it does take some time between getting the homes passed and getting the net adds. Despite the strong increase in CapEx to reach your goal of 2 million homes passed, net adds is in a downward trend. How should we expect, how do you see these net adds as we move forward? This would be my first question. The second question on cable as well, if there is a major difference that you're already observing between the performance where you have FTTH and the performance where you have cable. If FTTH is basically having a stronger performance over cable or not really. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, Fred. You're absolutely right that, of course, the expansion of the FTTH network and the deployment of fiber takes time and takes aggressive investments. It takes time to install the network, to deploy the fiber and pick up the subscribers. What I can say conceptually is that the need for in-home connectivity in Mexico is still huge, and broadband penetration is still very low at around 60%. These factors, plus the additional 2 million homes that we're passing with FTTH, as you described, this year should allow us to accelerate RGU net adds, and that will, because of this lag, become more evident, in 2022. I'll ask Pepe Toño to expand on this. Yes. Thank you, Fred. One part as a bit of background. Let's remember that the net adds for 2020 were an outlier, and we're suffering from what we kind of call a hangover effect in 2021. Lots of people contracted broadband last year, and therefore, we're not having as many people contract or hire broadband this year. To put this in perspective, in 2019, we added 800,000 RGUs while the number in 2020 was close to 1.4 million. In 2021, we see two effects. On the one hand, the demand for connectivity has returned to pandemic levels, and on the other, the economy is bouncing back. We're trying to surf these two effects, strengthening our sales promotion and our customer retention programs. There's also a new issue that kind of explains your question, which is we made a small adjustment in one of our flagship broadband products in September. The September number is markedly different than the net add numbers for the previous four months. We expect that the twitch or the change in the price in the broadband flagship product and the building that we're doing should move us in the future towards more solid net adds in broadband. Perfect. Very clear, Alfonso and Anaya. Thank you. Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Alejandro Chavelas, Credit Suisse. Please go ahead line is open. Hello, Televisa team. Thanks for taking my question. Congratulations on the results. I just wanted to get a little bit more color on the RGU losses in pay TV. They seem to accelerate a little bit sequentially. I was wondering if it was related to a change in pricing of package or something. I think you have mentioned in the past that consumers don't really save a lot when they cut their pay TV subscription within a triple play, so a little bit more color on that would be helpful, and I have another question after. Yeah. Hi, Alejandro. I'll ask Pepe Toño to talk about the video RGU disconnections. Thank you, Alejandro. As we've mentioned before, the new video platforms present a challenge. Linear TV present a challenge not only in Mexico, but all over the world. In addition, the economic environment has been difficult. I have a few points to make on this. Most of our households continue to be our broadband customers. Our bundle is competitive, offering affordable pay TV services. We believe that once the economy improves, this will recover. We are seeing some incipient results that our triple play sales have remained robust in the last few months, so we're very encouraged by that. As a strategy, following the global tendency, we are continuing to push our strategy to become a content aggregator on top of our linear TV content, which is pretty popular. We're including several streaming services in our cable packages, such as Blim, Netflix, Disney, and Amazon Prime. That way, we're trying to set up some of those offerings. I think another issue that is very important is we are strengthening our video platform to improve the customer experience in navigating the different streaming services. I think that would be a key differentiator for us. If people can surf the different streaming services without having to leave our set-top box and then come back and change inputs, et cetera, that's going to make a big difference for us. I think, in all of this, we should be able to maintain our video customers in the future. Thank you, Alex. Great. Perhaps just a follow-up. This one is on the increasing content costs. Obviously, you had already mentioned that we will see a content cost rise significant in 2021, I was wondering how much of this is related perhaps to developing the new series for the global streaming platform? Well, as you might remember, we had a full plan to revamp our content production some years ago. Of course, we're investing more in content. We have a new series. We have what we have now called Serielas, which is a shorter version and a modernized version of the traditional telenovela stories. Those have a faster pace, those have less episodes, have a little less drama, and they have proven to be very successful. Univision's prime time, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, now is 100% based on Televisa content. Univision will rely less on acquiring content from third parties, and this content has proved to be very successful if you look at Univision's numbers during the third quarter. I think, of course, we'll continue to invest in producing content, and that content will be better. We have the tremendous advantage of having the best and most effective production of content in Spanish in the world, in Mexico City, and we'll use that very efficient tool to produce more content. I think streaming, of course, we will produce content ourselves for the streaming platform, and we will also produce through third parties. That will be key to the launching of the global streaming platform together with Univision. You'll be seeing very exciting products on the streaming platform. Of course, higher quality products. I think you'll be happy with the product, and we'll see a lot of subscriptions and a lot of sales. Thanks. We will now take our next question from the line of Matthew Harrigan from Benchmark. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Thank you. Congratulations on the results. A couple of days ago, Netflix reported fairly modest results for the Latin American region in terms of their additions, and I think there's a consensus their SVOD mature businesses maturing. Is there any read-through there to the potential of your business? I mean, clearly you're much more AVOD focused, and you have more content than Netflix does, particularly outside scripted programming. Can you talk a little bit more about the can down there? Do you have any comments on Peacock in the U.S. looking to do a lot more Spanish language programming? Thank you. Hi, Matthew. Yeah, what I can tell you is that we're very excited about the product. We're going to be 100% focused on the Spanish language, which as we have mentioned, the second most spoken language in the world, aside from Mandarin. We're focusing on this population, which has a GDP of more than $7 trillion. Of that half, $3.5 trillion is just the Mexican economy and the U.S. Hispanic market GDP. We're going to focus 100% on the production of Spanish content. We have moved a long way in these very few months. To launch this product, this global product next year, of course, we're already working on the production of original content. The new premium subscription tier of our global streaming platform will feature more than 6,000 hours of Spanish language content with more than 30 original productions throughout next year. We're going to feature globally recognized producers, creators, writers, including María Dueñas, Santiago Limón, even Mario Vargas Llosa, who was a Nobel Literature Award winner. We just closed a first-look deal with Eugenio Derbez, who's a top comedian in Latin America, who's Mexican. We're speaking to renowned actresses, actors, producers, writers, et cetera. We're going to focus 100% of our attention to the Spanish language, and we believe that having the huge library of Televisa, plus these new premium productions that are going to be streaming exclusively on our new platform, this will be a success throughout the region. That's great. Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Alejandro Gallostra from BBVA. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Hi. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking my questions. First, I would like to know if you can make further comments about the good performance of Univision, which royalties increased 20% this quarter? Second, if you could be more specific about the timing to launch the new streaming platform at Univision, and how you plan to proceed if you're planning to launch several platforms at once, AVOD and SVOD, or if you plan to do it gradually, or maybe you plan to launch it in the U.S. and Mexico simultaneously, and the rest of the world later on. Thirdly, I was wondering if your content margins will improve once you launch this streaming platform, since I understand that you're already spending in producing content for this new streaming platform that you will be launching next year, and you're still not generating earnings out of it. I was wondering if margins should improve once you launch this service. Thank you. [Non-English content], Alejandro. Yeah, what I can tell you is we're very excited about what's happening at Univision. In essence, Wade Davis has revamped the whole team, but more specifically the sales team. He brought in Donna Speciale from Warner, and she's doing a spectacular job in selling advertising and positioning this advertising. Of course, this is all based on the tremendous success of our content, of the ratings that the content is producing. The success also of the Mexican Soccer League games that Univision is transmitting. We are very excited about what's going on, both on the traditional business of selling advertising and also on what we're seeing in terms of the new streaming platform. What I can tell you, and you're absolutely right, we're delighted to see that the royalties from Univision amounted this quarter to $110 million. You're right to point out that they were 20% higher than last year. More importantly, because of the easy comp as a result of COVID-19, this was 10% higher than 2019 royalties for the third quarter. That only demonstrates that Univision is doing a tremendous job in the traditional business. We believe that this will continue next year because we saw the upfront results, and they look spectacular. We had the best upfront in the history of the company, both in terms of pricing and in terms of volume. We can compare this upfront to what happened in 2016, 2017. We're very enthusiastic also about next year and the advertising side of that business. Now, as to your second part of the question, which has to do with the launching of the streaming platform. It will be launched in early 2022. As an SVOD platform, in the second half of 2022. We will start with Mexico and the United States, and then expand throughout the region and other countries and territories. Of course, as I mentioned, of the Spanish-speaking GDP, that is our addressable market. Half of that MXN 3.5 trillion is just Mexico and so a question will begin there and then we'll expand to other places. Thank you very much. I was wondering if maybe you could comment on the potential margin improvement in the content division, since I understand that you're spending in producing content for this new platform, but you may still not generating revenues yet. Yeah, I think what I can tell you, Alejandro, we're not giving guidance as to our margin. However, what I can tell you is that emerge with Univision, the combined company will see an expansion. Okay. Great. Thank you very much. Thanks. Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Gordon Lee at BTG. Please go ahead. Your line is open. Yes. Good morning. Thank you very much for the call. Most of my questions were on the content side and they've been answered, but I was wondering if you could just give us, not precise guidance, but would it be fair to say thinking about CapEx going forward at the consolidated level, that we should be thinking about MXN 1 billion annually? That's sort of the new run rate given the outlook for the Cable business. Thank you. Hi, Gordon. Yeah, it will be around there. Perfect. Very clear. Fair enough. Thank you. We will now take our next question from the line of Gilberto Garcia at Barclays. Hi. Good morning. Thank you for the call. On the closing of the Univision transaction, can you provide any color on any potential extraordinary corporate expenses that you might have? What is the corporate expense going to look like once the transaction is completed? Also, on a press conference a couple of weeks ago, the president mentioned that the government is expecting around MXN 10 billion as a tax payment for the transaction. Can you confirm whether this number is final or if it's still in flux? Thank you. [Foreign language] Gilberto. Yeah. Of course, the corporate expenses will be reduced appropriately once we resize what we have called the RemainCo, or that is Grupo Televisa. You will see the effect next year. As to the payment of taxes, it will be around there or, I mean, Gilberto, are you still there? Yes. I'm sorry, I couldn't hear. You said it would be around there or a little, and then it got cut off. Yeah, it'll be around there or a little higher than that number. Around that figure. All right. Okay. Understood. Thank you very much. We have no further questions. Once again, it is star and one to ask a question. Thank you very much for participating in the call. Of course, as always, we're here to answer any other questions you might have. Thank you very much. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.
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