Telecom Argentina S.A. (NYSE:TEO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript March 12, 2024

Telecom Argentina S.A. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Luis Rial Ubago: Good morning. On behalf of Telecom Argentina, I would like to thank everybody for participating on this conference call. The participants of today's conference call are Roberto Nobile, Chief Executive Officer; Gabriel Blasi, Chief Financial Officer, and myself, Luis Rial Ubago. The purpose of this call is to share with you the results of the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023 ended on December 31st of 2023. If you have not received a press release or presentation, you can call our investor relations office to request the documents or download them from the investor relations section of our website located at inversores.telecom.com.ar. I would like to go over some safe harbor information and other details of the quarter.

We would like to clarify that during the conference call and Q&A session, we could mention certain forward-looking statements about Telecom’s future performance, plans, strategies, and objectives. Such statements are subject to uncertainties that could cause Telecom's actual results and operations to differ materially. Such uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the effects of ongoing and economic regulations, possible changes in the demand for telecoms, products and services, the effects of potential changes in general market and economic conditions, and in legislation. Our press release announcing the company's results as of the end of fiscal year 2023, a copy of which was included in a Form 6-K and sent to the SEC, describes certain factors that may affect any forward-looking statements that could be mentioned during this call.

The company has reflected the effects of the inflation adjustment adopted by Resolution 777/18 of the Comision Nacional de Valores, or CNV, which establishes that the re-expression will be applied to the annual financial statements for intermediate and special periods ended as of and including December 31, 2018. Accordingly, the reported figures corresponding to the fiscal year 2023 included the effects of the adoption of inflationary accounting in accordance with IAS 29. In this presentation, we will also include figures in historical values which are easier to understand. Our press release is complemented by our next presentation. Please read the disclaimer contained in Slide 1 and Slide 2 of this presentation. Today, we will go over our business and financial highlights and end the call with a Q&A session.

Now, let me pass the call to Gabriel, CFO, who will start with the presentation.

Gabriel Blasi: Thank you, Luis. Good morning and welcome to everyone. Moving to Slide 3, it summarizes our highlights as of December 31 of 2023. Our main operational and financial achievements were our EBITDA margin during fiscal year ‘23 was 28.1%. We managed to improve the margin on a year-over-year basis due to effective cost management initiatives and an improvement in the pass-through of inflation to revenues. In 2023, our CapEx was approximately $598 million, equivalent to 23% of our revenues. We have successfully executed our CapEx plan despite having faced certain delays due to tighter import restrictions in Argentina. The current focus of our CapEx is on the expansion of our FTTH technology, as well as expanding our mobile network and developing 5G.

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