Bumble - Earnings Call - Q2 2021

Transcript

Speaker 0

Okay, I think we'll keep going. We've got BCE up now. I think everybody knows Mirko. Mirko, thanks for coming.

Speaker 1

Thanks, John.

Speaker 0

It has been quite a year at BCE since you were here 12 months ago. Everyone in the room is aware of it, and I'm sure we'll get into it. I thought we'd set the table. Maybe you've talked about four pillars of growth. For some who are listening in or in the room, maybe just set the table with that, and then we'll go from there.

Speaker 1

Okay, yeah, thanks for that. Good morning, everyone. Just building on the premise of your question, it has been, you know, it is a lot different than 12 months ago. I'd say we are a significantly different company today than we were then, and in a very, very good way, with a lot of energy. We've got the four tightly linked pillars of growth, all backed by a much stronger balance sheet, given some of the things we've done over the past 12 months. On the pillars of growth, very quickly, number one is putting customers first, and it's about embedding a customer-first culture across the board at Bell, because ultimately you are here to serve our customers, and delivering the very best customer experiences is just good to drive outsized financial outcomes. You can see in some of the execution that we're delivering, and I'll give you one example.

I could go on, but the big improvements in churn would be an example of the work we've done on customer-first bearing fruit. The second pillar is delivering the best fiber and wireless services, and we have transformed ourselves to become a fundamentally fiber-first company with a large footprint in Canada, the bulk of which was done in the last five years. Now we've got a high-growth platform in the US, which is significantly different than what we had a year ago. On the wireless side, it is interesting because, as an investment thesis or an investment theme, generally speaking, Canada was always viewed as a great wireless market to invest in, given the relative stability and market structure. I think we're getting back to, we're seeing stability start to take hold in the Canadian marketplace, which makes that an interesting proposition.

I think at BCE or Bell Mobility, we have some outsized execution upside that we're starting to deliver on. That's the second pillar. The third pillar is leading an enterprise with AI-powered solutions. The enterprise segment at Bell was never discussed, not talked about, and frankly, it's underappreciated. The massive potential we have there is certainly not reflected in our share price. We've done some interesting things to stand apart from others in Canada and frankly globally on how we're going to drive growth there. Then building a digital media and content powerhouse, which is essentially our media business. We saw that business needed to be transformed dramatically back in late 2019, early 2020. It's no accident that we're one of the few formerly traditional broadcasters who's able to generate revenue and EBITDA growth because of the steps we've been taking for the last five years.

I'll stop there and go back to the very beginning. Four core strategic pillars. What's important here is, for the most part, they work in harmony and they're tightly linked to our core business, which is another differentiator at Bell compared to our peers. The fact that what we're doing is tightly linked to our core business and it's not quite focused, and we've got a stronger balance sheet, which is obviously very important.

Speaker 0

Okay, let's start with enterprise. As you talked about, it's never been discussed, but you've been pretty vocal recently. One of the things that you've talked about, which is so topical for any investor, is your AI initiatives. Maybe just walk us through that, and then we can get into some of the verticals that you've also talked about.

Speaker 1

Yeah, again, if you go back to, like, from a macro investment theme perspective, you've got, you know, AI is going to bring forward massive transformation. It's as transformative, probably will end up being more transformative than the internet decades ago. Very interesting space. You've got that geopolitical dimension, the instability across the globe. You've got national security concerns, and you've got kind of sovereignty being paramount in everyone's thinking. That is an opportunity there as well. You kind of take those two things, and you know, what have we been doing at Bell for 145 years? We've been connecting people to each other. We've been connecting companies to their customers, and we've been connecting everyone to the latest technology, AI being one of them. How are we playing there? Where, how can we play in AI where we have a right to win?

We're doing it, you know, if you think of full-stack AI, the suite of full-stack AI services, it starts with, you know, land, building, cooling, power, and network. That's kind of the first layer, and that's where we're leaning in with our purpose-built AI data center ecosystem. We're doing it in a capital-light way. On top of that, there's the compute layer. Again, we are not investing hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to buy the compute and make it available in our data centers and hope that there's demand. We are partnering with companies who are bringing their compute to our facilities. That's a very, very important thing to know. On top of that, there's a software layer. Think large language models. Again, we're partnering. We're not going to go build large language models.

It's not what we do, but we can partner with those who do, like Cohere. The last layer, the way I look at it on top of that, is all the AI and technology advisory services that you can bring to bear to your clients as they kind of lean into AI and decide where, you know, where they're going to host their data and how they're going to use the software. That's where Ateco comes in, our technology services and advisory business. We're playing in the stack where we have a right to win, and we're doing it in a capital-light model. Back to the enterprise business writ large and why I think it's such an underappreciated asset. There are four key growth pillars for Bell Business Markets.

There's the core business, what you would typically think of Bell as providing, and now it's fiber and wireless to enterprise customers. We've done a better job than most large mega-cap telco peers in managing the structural decline in that business. We've stabilized it and we're looking towards kind of getting to neutral in growth, which in and of itself is kind of hugely positive. We have three growth verticals closely tied to our core business, core enterprise business, each in their own right, are going to drive net new revenue growth. That's Ateco, which I've already talked about, the technology services advisory business, Bell AI Fabric, which I just talked about, and then Bell Cyber. Today I'm wearing my Bell Cyber pin because I was just, before I came here, I gave a keynote at our inaugural Bell Cybersecurity Summit in Toronto.

It's today that we announced the launch of our new cybersecurity brand, Bell Cyber. We can talk about that too.

Speaker 0

Why don't we talk about that?

Speaker 1

All right. What we've done is last year we acquired an expert cybersecurity provider out of Mississauga called Stratagem. Today we announced we brought the best of Bell with the best of Stratagem to create Bell Cyber. It's essentially bringing Bell's internal security platform, which, you know, you think of Bell, you think of trust, you think of course you're going to secure the network. The very best of Bell's internal security platform, our resiliency DNA, you know, we have 145 years, like we've had to build resilient networks and our telco-grade infrastructure. That's the best of Bell with Stratagem's AI-powered automated threat detection and response and automated security operations center as a service business. You bring those two together. We keep it simple and we can manage a customer's cybersecurity needs seven days, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

We can detect, contain, and remediate attacks in five minutes. It's a significant value prop to our enterprise customers. Ateco, Bell Cyber, and Bell AI Fabric, each in their own right, net new revenue growth that we would expect to grow in double digits. That's how you got, and again, all tightly tied to our core business, which is fiber and 5G.

Speaker 0

Can you talk a little bit about Ateco? I think it is the one vertical where you've actually put some goalposts around in terms of financial contribution. Maybe flesh out a little bit what is Ateco and how your assessment of its financial upset.

Speaker 1

Yeah, before I get to Ateco, a good point, we have put some markers down on Ateco in terms of what we're trying to generate in terms of revenue. What I will say is, I come up here and I say to all of you, Bell Business Markets is an underappreciated asset that's not reflected in the share price. You kind of rightly say, you know, we need more information to start talking about it, which we're doing. On October 14th at our investor day, we're going to be unpacking a lot more in terms of what we're going to do in the core business to create stabilization and some growth. You know, what we plan to do in the three verticals.

Back to Ateco, we have said, or I have said in the past, it's a $250 million revenue business around there that we plan to grow to $1 billion plus by 2030. Essentially what Ateco does, it's a systems integration managed services partner to our enterprise clients. What we do is we automize, we digitize enterprise workflows. Most enterprise customers are using Salesforce, they're using ServiceNow, they're partnered, or they have significant cloud commitments with the three large global hyperscalers. What we do is we advise these companies how to maximize the value that they should be getting from those platforms because all these enterprises who use Salesforce, ServiceNow, and hyperscalers are paying for those licenses and don't really, in all cases, know how to maximize that potential. Ateco does. Before we bought Ateco, which used to be FXI, that's what FXI specialized in. We brought FXI in-house.

We had a couple of other smaller acquisitions. That Ateco business does this work for Bell itself. It had expertise. It has even more expertise because it has a lighthouse customer that's large and complex like Bell. We offer that expertise to our other enterprise clients. There is strong growth at Ateco.

Speaker 0

Okay. The other asset that is new in providing growth is obviously Ziply Fiber. You closed that deal earlier than expected, a month and a half ago. Maybe some first impressions of the first 50 days of owning it, so to speak. I'm sure you're going to talk a lot about it on October 14, but just refresh for the group the growth thesis there and why it's a good deal for Bell.

Speaker 1

That's great. Yeah, on October 14th in our agenda, Harold Zeitz, the CEO of Ziply Fiber, will be on the agenda and will speak. We've been providing more information about Ziply Fiber. We're at liberty to do once we close and we'll continue to do that. In fact, we're going to have a separate U.S. reporting segment to allow shareholders to track the performance of that business over time. Back to, let's start with the fact that Harold Zeitz, the CEO of Ziply Fiber, is going to present on October 14th. Harold is one of the co-founders of Ziply Fiber, which was created in 2020.

The reason I start there is I'm really pleased, proud, frankly, that Harold and that executive team have decided to stay with Bell, which is great because they're an outstanding management team and have built up basically a business from scratch that is a high-growth business. That also happens to be in a lane that we know really well. I remember months ago when we announced Ziply Fiber, some of the questions we were getting were, what do you know about the U.S.? I said, we certainly know a lot about fiber as much as anybody else. There's a management team there that's local that knows the market and the business. They're there and they want to work with us because they're excited about what we bring to the table. We're allowing them to accelerate what was their base case build plan.

With the PSP partnership, it allows them to expand their vision beyond what was their traditional ILEC territory. They're excited about the opportunity and have stayed. The performance that we've seen since we announced the transaction back in November is better than the business case that we underwrote. In fact, if you just take this past month, the month that just ended, August, they had their highest growth ads in their history and tied for the highest net ads in their history. The momentum continues to be there. It's a high-growth business with a lot of potential.

Speaker 0

Some of the metrics you've presented to the street, just for the benefit of some on the line, you've talked about a potential for 2 million homes in footprint and another 6 million out of footprint. Obviously, the PSP Investments partnership is going to be very important to that. Maybe just talk about the growth profile within the footprint and then how you can surface value with PSP Investments out of footprint and some of the factors that you'll consider and what investors should think about as those two kind of growth platforms.

Speaker 1

To clarify, I think the more we talk about it, most investors we talk to have a decent sense of how this is going to work. Rather than complicate it, the best way to look at it is there are about 3 million locations, give or take, that we want to get to within what were the four core states of Ziply Fiber, which are Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Think about it as 3 million-ish in those four states and 5 million outside those four states to get to 8 million. That's how I would look at it. Some of those will be on BCE's balance sheet because there are several hundred thousand copper lines in what was Ziply Fiber's ILEC territory that we want to upgrade to fiber. Most of the build will be done through the PSP Investments joint venture.

The other thing that needs to be clarified, and sometimes I get this question, is it's not like the lines we will build for BCE's own account with BCE CapEx and the lines that we will pass through PSP Investments. It's not sequential. It's not like we're going to get 3 million done in the four core states and then we'll start the PSP Investments work. We're working in tandem, sequentially, at the same time. We'll just identify the best locations to get to and just get at it. That work is underway.

Speaker 0

Presumably, you've got some pretty good line of sight on those copper lines. I mean, you've been doing that.

Speaker 1

Yeah, we know where they are.

Speaker 0

Yeah, you've been doing that for a long time. You've also talked a little bit about how there is a backbone that Ziply Fiber owns now that you can leverage and extend as you start looking at other geographies. Maybe unpack that a little bit for this.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so when we're looking at the 3 million in the four core states, they're easy to identify. It's like, oh, where are you going to go to get to the eight? One of the places you would start looking is, okay, Ziply Fiber has fiber backbone that extends beyond the ILEC territory that interconnects with others. You know, so do we. Actually, BCE has backbone that extends down into the U.S. The first place you'd look is, are there opportunities to punch out from that backbone and build last mile fiber? That's an obvious place that we're going to get started on. What we're looking to do is build where there is no fiber already. We always want to be first to fiber. If somebody else gets to a territory first or a neighborhood first, we'll go somewhere else.

We're going to go to areas that have an attractive cost per location passed. There are a lot of these locations in the United States. There's a lot less fiber availability in the U.S. today than there is in Canada.

Speaker 0

Beyond that, you want to be first to fiber. Is there any other factors that you'll consider in terms of what I'll call a new build strategy?

Speaker 1

No, it'll be essentially, you know, it's cost to build first to fiber.

Speaker 0

Okay. Maybe touch a little bit on media. The challenges to the traditional media ecosystem are not lost on anybody in this room. Bell, as the biggest legacy operator in Canada, still puts up some pretty decent numbers for media. What's happening there that you're able to offset some of the headwinds, which are just undeniable in the business?

Speaker 1

We went digital and went digital aggressively. That's it. We tackled the cost structure. Some of those decisions on tackling the cost structure and shedding some assets that we no longer felt were core to the media business came with some difficulties, but they were the right things to do. Now we're seeing that pay off. On going digital, if I just explain that a little bit, I mean, there's really two approaches to going hard at digital. One is providing advertisers, because we get two revenue streams essentially, right? Advertising revenue and subscription revenue. The advertising revenue base is quite significant. It's providing to advertisers digital tools that they can use to buy advertising across all the Bell Media assets and to optimize their campaigns and to track the performance of their campaigns. Just that customer experience from an advertising point of view is very important.

The other part of that is providing advertisers with the ability to buy targeted advertising capabilities from Bell, which means giving advertisers more digital assets from Bell that they can use to advertise rather than just the one-to-many traditional broadcasting services that we used to have. That's advertising and turning that into a more digitally focused business, both from the advertising platforms and the tools advertisers can use. On the subscription side, it was really going hard at digital. Now our flagship products are Crave, which is an all-digital platform, and converting TSN and RDS, our sports services. Of course, they've got big traditional specialty services, but making those available at scale digitally so you can subscribe to TSN or RDS digitally and bypass the traditional BDU system.

If you would have asked seven years ago, what are the flagship services of Bell Media, you would have said CTV and TSN, but TSN would have been viewed the traditional way. Now you say Crave and TSN app and the RDS app. The other thing on digital is we have become, and this is in less than three years, we have become the number one digital news publisher in Canada. Three years ago, we were nowhere. People want to consume news. They want to get their news immediately. We have pivoted. Unpacking that a little bit more, and I'll use Crave just as an example, just to save some time here. Better platform, better user experience, premium content, one, two, three. Better platform gives a better user experience, premium content, and this is key, expanding our distribution. You can buy Crave directly through Bell Media.

You can buy Crave, of course, through the traditional BDUs. You can do an in-app purchase on Apple, on Roku. Disney Plus is selling Crave. Bell Media will sell Crave and Disney Plus. We've got, we launched our Crave bundles through Bell Internet. Now Bell Internet is a distribution platform for Crave and for Crave TSN bundles and for Crave, Disney, and Netflix bundles. You can see by expanding the distribution outlets, we've significantly scaled the number of subscribers we have on Crave. We're up to 4.2 million, which has been tremendous growth in the last 18 months.

Speaker 0

Fantastic. Any questions on the floor? Okay, I would be remiss if I didn't offer you an opportunity to weigh in on pricing as we talk about the core networks businesses. What are you seeing in the wireless business, particularly in the context you said you've got some execution upside? Maybe talk about what you're seeing in the market and where you think Bell can over-index going forward.

Speaker 1

Yeah, so I said at the very beginning, when you, with your first question, I talked about, you know, the investment thesis. The wireless market's always been viewed as quite attractive, and we've gone through some disruption in the last couple of years. Prices are definitely significantly lower than they were several years ago, and it's good for consumers. What do we have to do as an industry? Certainly at Bell, get our cost structure in line with the revenue profile. What you're seeing now is we started to see, you see it in Q2, some stabilization in terms of the pricing and the level of promotional activity. I think back to school as kind of the most recent proof point.

Of course, it's back to school, so it's a heavy sales period, less heavy than it used to be because you have less students coming in from other countries, but it's still growing. You've seen prices go up $5 to $7, particularly at the low end compared to a year ago, so that's good. The level of discounting has been pretty much the same as last year, which is also good. In other words, it's not, you know, more promotionally heavy, but the level of discounting is stable to last year, but off of a higher kind of rack rate. I think you see that as positive. On Bell's execution upside, we have a product intensity upside, bundling internet, wireless, and our streaming services, which others do. We have our, you know, I talked about the bundles a few minutes ago. Others can do this, but others can't do.

They can't have owner economics on it. We have owner economics on most of the content we sell, so that's important. The churn upside, we've tackled that. If you're going to say putting customers first is your core priority, you got to put your kind of activity where your mouth is. We're really leaning into this, and you're seeing some significant churn reduction opportunity. I'd say our distribution strength is starting to really punch through. I'd say, I mean, those are elements of our execution upside that we're starting to deliver on. It's about capturing, look, it's about capturing our fair share of loadings and net ads, fair share of loadings and net ads, and doing it at, you know, driving in a financially accretive way.

That's why I've been talking since I became CEO about how the emphasis is on loading on the Bell brand, because that's where, you know, the most lifetime value is in terms of customer lifetime value.

Speaker 0

Yeah. We're flush at time, but maybe just one last question. A year ago at this event, you said in terms of potential asset sales, everything was on the table. That was a pretty loaded comment. It's certainly borne out. I guess same question. Anything you're thinking about in terms of balance sheet and, you know, in a capital-light operating model going forward that investors should think about?

Speaker 1

I'd say, I said that pretty general statement, but it ended up kind of, it was loaded, but general, and you can see what I meant as time has gone by. That was a year ago. In February of this year, I got a little bit sharper on that, saying, you know, here was our roadmap for investors. We're going to mine the balance sheet. We ultimately did in May, did a few things, right? We reset the dividend and we did the PSP Investments partnership, said we were going to invest in four key things, which is what I've been talking about here with you. Those were the two areas of priority. The third priority outlined in February was that we were going to focus first on divesting certain non-core assets. You've seen a couple of moves there.

Most recently, Bell Smart Home, we've got a couple, two more files that are active. I'll leave it at that. I said, once we get all that done, we could take a look at how we surface more value from some of our infrastructure. That's what I said in February, and that remains the case. What's happened from February to now, we're in September, is you've seen some proof points along the way as we deliver on what we said in February.

Speaker 0

Very directly, we've seen a tower deal in the market. What's your thinking about that potential opportunity?

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's right back to my list of things. We've got focused on right now, the primary focus is, you know, two processes we have for divestiture of non-core assets, and then get those done. We can take a look at other things like potentially the file you mentioned. We've taken note of what's happened in the marketplace recently, and we're studying that closely and seeing if it makes sense for us.

Speaker 0

That's great. We'll leave it there. Thanks so much, Mirko.

Speaker 1

Thank you. Thank you, Tim.