Liberty Latin America Ltd - Earnings Call - Q2 2021

Transcript

Speaker 0

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Michael Coakley, VP, Head of Communications of Liberty Latin America.

Speaker 1

Good morning, and welcome to Liberty Latin America's Second Quarter twenty twenty one Investor Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. Today's formal presentation materials can be found under the Investors section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. Following today's formal presentation, instructions will be given for a question and answer session. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available under the Investors section of our website.

Today's remarks may include forward looking statements, including the company's expectations with respect to its outlook and future growth prospects and other information and statements that are not historical fact. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied by these statements. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in Liberty Latin America's most recently filed annual report on Form 10 ks and the most recent Form eight ks filed with the SEC along with the associated press release. Liberty Latin America disclaims any obligation to update any forward looking statements or information to reflect any change in its expectations or in the conditions on which any such statement or information is based. In addition, on this call, we will refer to certain non GAAP financial measures, which are reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measures, which can be found in the appendices to this presentation, which is accessible under the Investors section of our website.

I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Mr. Balan Nair.

Speaker 2

Thank you, Mike, and welcome everybody to Liberty Latin America's results presentations for the second quarter and first half of twenty twenty one. I'll begin by taking you through our group highlights and operating results before handing over to Chris Noyes, our CFO, who will follow with a review of the company's financial performance. After that, we will get straight to your questions. As always, I'm joined by my executive team from across the region and I'll get them involved as needed during the Q and A following our prepared remarks. As a point of housekeeping, we will both be working from slides, which you can find on our website at www.lla.com.

Starting on Slide four and our highlights, we delivered a strong set of results in the second quarter as our markets continue to recover from the impacts of COVID-nineteen. RGU adds of 73,000 represented continued momentum following a record quarter one performance. Cable and Wireless Caribbean and Networks and Puerto Rico once again drove the group with strong commercial execution. In Mobile, we had our best ever quarter adding 118,000 new subscribers. This was done by Panama, which nearly replicated our record Q1 performance and in Jamaica where ads were 55,000, which was 45,000 higher than the first quarter.

Our continued operational recovery, which drove 8% fee based revenue growth together with a disciplined focus on cost controls resulted in a robust rebased adjusted OIBDA growth of 10% in Q2. Liberty Puerto Rico had another strong quarter, up 21% on a rebased basis, while C and W Caribbean and Networks and C and W Panama also delivered double digit rebased growth compared to Q2 twenty twenty, which was our quarter that was most impacted by COVID-nineteen. We also grew sequentially from Q1, which shows our resiliency and focus. New build and upgrade plans are a core element of our growth strategy and following our most active first half ever with approximately 360,000 new homes passed or upgraded, I'm pleased to announce that we are increasing our 2021 target to now deliver over 700,000 new or upgraded homes, more than 95% of which are fiber to the home. Finally, we announced earlier this week that we have received the required authorizations to complete the acquisition of Telefonica's Costa Rican operations.

We expect this transaction to close very shortly. Moving to Slide five and highlights for our key markets. Note that we've provided relative revenue contributions for each market through the percentages shown. Starting with Puerto Rico, our largest single market, which contributed nearly a third of the group's 1,200,000,000 in revenue in the second quarter, all of which is U. S.

Dollar revenue. We continue to see strong growth in our Puerto Rico operations as broadband penetration increases and and we continue to deliver healthy ads. In terms of the integration of Liberty Mobile, this is progressing well and remains an exciting driver of future free cash flow growth as we look to generate significant synergies from the in market combination. Moving to Chile, which represents 18% of LLA revenue in Q2, we are progressing here by stabilizing the subscriber base and now look to build on this platform by selling to our growing high speed footprint. Given the challenging competitive environment, we are also very focused on managing costs and are seeing some savings from actions we have taken.

And we are matching our competitors' pricing. We would rather give consumers the savings than to conceive any subscribers to our competitors. Lastly, while we are seeing some easing of mobility restrictions, curfews and international travel restrictions still remain. Next to Costa Rica where as I mentioned, we will close our acquisition of Telefonica's business very shortly. This will create an innovative converged scale player in the market and drive good synergies through in market consolidation.

As with many of our markets, some degree of mobility restrictions is still in place. However, Cable Tica has consistently performed well through the past eighteen months driven by growing in home broadband demand. Turning to the bottom row and Panama, which contributed 11% of Group's revenue in Q2. Here we saw our mobile momentum continue in Q2 with subscribers additions driven by the Todo Todito plan. Panama is one of the most severely impacted markets by COVID-nineteen.

However, mobility restrictions have eased and the ability of vaccines is expected to increase. Next to Jamaica, which is the largest C and W Caribbean and networks market and represented 9% of LLL revenue in the second quarter. Here we have seen some very good operating and financial results despite relatively low vaccination rates. In the last twelve months, Jamaica has added 95,000 RGUs and 111,000 mobile subscribers, which is a testament to the hard work of our team and the consumer acceptance of the new propositions we have launched. Moving to networks, which contributed 7% of LLA's Q2 revenue.

As we've mentioned in recent quarters, this is a high margin and mainly U. S. Dollar business that has also benefited from increased bandwidth demand across broadband and video applications in the region. Lastly, what we've categorized as other markets, representing the rest of C And W Caribbean and networks and contributing just under a quarter of Q2 revenues for LLA. Growth for these markets is expected through higher data penetration and usage in both our fixed and mobile products.

In terms of the broader backdrop, tourism is an important economic driver for these markets and an increased number of visitors is anticipated in the second half of the year, further helping recovery. Of the markets in this grouping and LLA overall, Trinidad is currently the most negatively impacted by COVID-nineteen restrictions. Turning to Slide six and our operating performance, starting with fixed subscriber additions where the group had another strong quarter, bringing first half net adds to just under 150,000 RGUs or nearly double the prior year period. Taking each reporting segment in turn, C and W Caribbean networks shown in the upper left reported higher net adds year over year in the second quarter with the largest contribution coming from Jamaica where we added 26,000 RGUs. The Bahamas and Barbados represented the majority of the remaining adds.

In Panama, we added 9,000 RGUs in the quarter with footprint expansion and product improvements set to drive further growth through the year. ARPU was impacted by retention activities such as the use of lifeline plans, discounts and moving customers to lower cost plans. Liberty Puerto Rico in the upper center continued to increase broadband penetration and grew its subscriber base by 22,000 in the quarter. The prior year benefited from higher demand as customers adapted to working and learning from home. In Chile, we are stabilizing our subscriber base following RGU losses in the second half of twenty twenty.

The market remains very competitive and we continue to focus on customer retention as mentioned on the previous slide. Our last segment Costa Rica shown in the upper right had another good quarter with net adds of 11,000 and robust ARPU ARPU development. As a group, we delivered strong Q2 adds of 73,000 RGUs with year over year improvements driven by C and W Panama and C and W Caribbean networks. Our group ARPU per customer at $50 was up 3% year over year on an FX neutral basis. Moving to Slide seven and a record mobile performance.

Starting again with C and W Caribbean networks in the upper left where we added 58,000 subscribers in the quarter, a swing of 234,000 subscribers as compared to Q2 twenty twenty. Jamaica added most of the segment subscribers in the quarter up by 55,000. Turning to Panama, which again generated the most ads in the quarter growing its space by 60,000 net subs. As mentioned, this was driven by our unlimited data Todos Todito plan. Liberty Mobile grew its subscriber base modestly in the quarter.

Of note, we saw improved growth in postpaid where we added 11,000 subscribers. Finally, VTR lost 7,000 mobile subscribers in the quarter. We operate as an MVNO in Chile, predominantly providing postpaid services to existing fixed service subscribers and are a small player in the market. In aggregate, as a group, we added a record 118,000 mobile subscribers in the quarter with a blended ARPU of $19 The increase of 68% year over year is driven by the inclusion of Liberty Mobile in Q2 twenty twenty one. Next to Slide eight and our B2B operations.

Starting with a total group performance on the left side, we delivered robust fee based growth of 5% in the quarter as markets continue to recover steadily from the impacts of COVID-nineteen. In the center, we break out the performance of both C and W Caribbean and Networks and C and W Panama. These segments include the majority of our B2B operations, representing approximately 80% of total B2B revenue. The upper graph shows stable year over year performance across our subsea business and LatAm B2B markets where we have a tackler competitive positions. Our incumbent Caribbean and Panamanian B2B operations have faced greater challenges over the past year, primarily due to reduced tourism and the associated impacts on local economies where we operate.

Due to the revenue reduction, there has been more scope to cover in these operations. However, we are yet to reach pre COVID levels. On the right of the slide, we wanted to provide a brief update on our B2B customer segments. First, our enterprise segments, which represents approximately 40% of our B2B revenue is recovering well, driven by improved economic visibility and business confidence in our markets. This segment benefits from the shift to remote working and associated solutions.

Second, wholesale which is mainly comprised of networks in CNW and represents about a quarter of B2B revenue overall. As bandwidth demands grow, this drives our wholesale business. Third, small and medium businesses or SMB contributed about 15% to B2B overall. Digital innovation during pandemic has provided a growth driver for this segment. Fourth, government projects and services, which also represented approximately 15% of B2B revenue.

This is particularly significant customer segment in Panama, where several new projects have come to the market associated with the drive to digitalize processes, record keeping and other related infrastructure. And lastly, hospitality, which represents less than 5% of B2B revenue. This has been the most directly impacted customer group by reduced tourist arrivals. It will also be the most positively levered to any increase in visitors. However, it's worth noting that it represents a small amount of B2B overall.

Next to Slide nine and an overview of our infrastructure assets. Starting with our new build and upgrade activity on the left side. Here you can see the significant ramp in build year over year and the technology evolution where virtually all our new bill and upgrade activity is now via fiber to the home. This provides both fast speeds and greater operating efficiency with lower energy costs required to run the network. In the center of the slide, we thought it would be helpful to provide a snapshot of homes passed by technology and mobile networks across our markets.

The key takeaway from a fixed network perspective are that just under 90% of our footprint is either HSE or FTTH. And the FTTH element is growing up four percentage points as a proportion of our overall networks year to date. In mobile, we have a minimum of LTE across all our largest markets and Telefonica's operations in Costa Rica are also LTE. Puerto Rico is our first five gs market and our experience there will stand us in good stead when the time comes across all of our other markets. Finally, on the right side of this slide, we wanted to highlight our subsea business footprint and some of its key attributes.

Firstly, we have a unique mesh network with four trunk submarine cable systems. This extensive network differentiates our ability to provide more resilient solutions and improve our economics. Secondly, we have significant room to grow with relatively low capital investment as we currently utilize only approximately 10% of potential capacity across our networks. And lastly, at over 50,000 kilometers of cable, our network is the most extensive in the region with over 90% of our traffic going from The Caribbean and Central America to The U. S.

Growth in demand for this connectivity is expected to continue. Finally, to Slide 10 and a strategic update within the framework that we initially presented in February. Starting with the first pillar of recovery and growth. As covered earlier, effective operational execution led to strong subscriber growth in the first half. Combined with a disciplined focus on cost management, this operational improvement has driven key financial metrics and most importantly of all adjusted free cash flow growth.

Looking ahead, we committed to maintaining this momentum and to build on the operational stabilization achieved at VTR. Second, to our commercial pillar. As I've covered, operational execution overall has been strong in the first half of the year with consumer propositions resonating well. This is an ongoing challenge and there are always areas where we can improve, but results and momentum are positive. Digital has also been a key focus of ours, both looking further ahead as we navigate the pandemic.

As we look forward, our converged offerings are gaining traction as we introduce innovative bundles that are unique to our quad play network. But we're still in the early innings here, so we have more scope to grow, particularly as we combine fixed and mobile operations in Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. We are also looking to increase self installs across our markets and this makes for a much better customer experience as well as reduce capital spending. Third, our network. In addition to our exciting new build and upgrade activity, I also wanted to highlight application for FCC funding via Uniendo in Puerto Rico.

We were granted $71,500,000 to deploy and upgrade networks covering more than 900,000 locations in 43 out of 78 municipalities across Puerto Rico. This represents the majority of funds that were available through this fund. We plan to continue investing in our networks and as mentioned have raised our fixed target to over 700,000 new upgraded homes in 2021. Cost focus is our fourth pillar. Our Panama operations center is now fully established.

This is enabling savings to our existing group and will help drive synergies as we acquire businesses in the future and streamline our internal operations. Disciplined management of our costs has helped OIBDA margins improve, notably in C and W, Caribbean and Networks. This pillar will be an area of ongoing focus and opportunity as we drive towards a more centralized operations. There may be some near term volatility related to acquisition related integration costs, but this will be accompanied by significant synergy benefits from such combinations. Lastly, to capital allocation.

This is a key competency of our group and a driver for additional shareholder returns. In market consolidation opportunities at fair value such as that of Liberty Mobile and soon to close acquisition of Telefonica's Costa Rican operations are good examples of the potential we see in the region. If we see an accretive opportunity in our own public market valuation, that is also something we will look to take advantage of. And in the last quarter, we resumed our buyback activity. Going forward, we are excited about the synergies we can drive from announced transactions and the potential for similarly accretive deals in the region.

Our approach to capital allocation will remain consistent and disciplined. With that, I'll pass you over to Chris Noyes, our Chief Financial Officer, who will talk you through our financial performance before we take your questions. Chris?

Speaker 3

Thanks, Balan. Starting on Slide 12, we reported revenue of $1,170,000,000 in Q2 or 8% rebased growth over the prior year. In terms of products, we achieved rebased growth across the board with our largest gains in mobile and B2B, both of which were the most severely impacted by COVID-nineteen in the prior year quarter. Taking our revenue performance combined with our focus on cost control, we were able to post adjusted OIBDA of $464,000,000 or 10% rebased growth. P and E additions stepped up from last year's levels to $215,000,000 in Q2 or 18% of revenue, partly reflecting the addition of Liberty Mobile as well as higher CPE spend.

Our year to date CapEx was 16% of revenue. We expect our spend to increase in H2 as we look to further our Liberty Mobile integration and pursue our aggressive network expansion, upgrade and capacity plans. In terms of FCF, we reported $35,000,000 of adjusted free cash flow for Q2, bringing our year to date total to $93,000,000 or 15% higher than H1 twenty twenty. Relative to last year's Q2, the decrease was primarily due to much higher cash CapEx of about $75,000,000 in the quarter. We remain well on track to deliver our full year target of approximately $200,000,000 in adjusted free cash flow and we would expect substantially all the remaining FCF in H2 to be generated in our seasonally strong fourth quarter.

Turning to the next slide, I will dive into our Q2 segment performance and for reference, we have included the adjusted OIBDA comparison to last year and to Q1 in the bottom half of the slide. Starting on the left with C and W, Caribbean and Networks. We delivered $434,000,000 of revenue and $188,000,000 of adjusted OIBDA, reflecting rebased growth of 814% respectively. Notably, our financial results also expanded from Q1. Our rebased revenue performance in Q2 was driven by growth across all our products.

As Balan previously noted, we have seen strong RGU growth, particularly in Jamaica, and this has been a driver of fixed revenue progression. In mobile, revenue has grown through higher ARPU as mobility restrictions have become less severe and usage has increased. And in B2B, we are benefiting from the positive effects of modestly improving economic activity. Managing our cost base was crucial to robust cash generation in a challenging 2020 and we have been focused on being thoughtful around spend as revenue recovers. This has helped to drive significant OIBDA margin improvement as Q2 margin reached 43%.

P and E additions expanded to $73,000,000 or 17% of revenue as we supported our quarterly subscriber growth and invested in a combination of projects including those related to capacity new build and products. Turning to Cable and Wireless Panama. CWP's Q2 revenue of $128,000,000 and adjusted OIBDA of $46,000,000 were 1524% higher on a rebased basis respectively, our strongest result of any segment in the quarter. Compared to the prior year, revenue growth was driven by strong B2B performance, including the return of government related projects that have been put on hold and higher mobile usage from improved economic activity. Our residential mobile business also reported double digit rebased growth as our subscriber base increased by over 200,000 in the past twelve months.

The momentum underlying our business can be seen sequentially to Q1 as revenue and adjusted OIBDA increased by $6,000,000 and $2,000,000 respectively. Capital spending grew in the quarter to $20,000,000 or 16% of revenue. Our construction crews delivered 39,000 homes, bringing our year to date total to 60,000 new and or upgraded homes. Liberty Puerto Rico is highlighted in the middle of the slide. Growth continues with the business generating top line rebased growth of 11% and adjusted OIBDA rebased growth of 21%, bringing revenue and adjusted OIBDA to $360,000,000 and $161,000,000 respectively.

Rebased revenue growth was driven by double digit growth in our legacy fixed operations, which resulted primarily from the 124,000 RGUs we have added over the last twelve months. Additionally, recently acquired Liberty Mobile business delivered rebased revenue growth of approximately 7%. On the cost side, we are in the early days of integrating and synergizing the Liberty Mobile asset. Notably, Q2 integration OpEx was only $2,000,000 P and E additions were $51,000,000 or 14% of revenue and we expect capital spend to accelerate in H2 with integration and ramping new build activity in part related to the Uniendo funding that Balan highlighted. Switching to VTR, our year over year rebased declines remain elevated as we have discussed on prior calls.

Q2 revenue of $2.00 $9,000,000 and adjusted OIBDA of $69,000,000 reflect rebased declines of 618% respectively. These declining growth rates are modestly improved as compared to Q1. Our challenged revenue performance is directly attributable to subscriber losses, particularly broadband RGUs over the last twelve months. On a year over year basis, adjusted OIBDA declined faster than revenue due in part to higher content and network costs. P and E additions were $56,000,000 or 27% of revenue as we further expanded our new build activity to over 130,000 homes as compared to 77,000 in Q1.

Finishing with Cabletica in Costa Rica. This business posted rebased revenue growth of 13% to $36,000,000 and rebased adjusted OIBDA growth of 3% to $13,000,000 while P and E additions were 20% of revenue. Our top line continues to be driven by strong broadband volume and ARPU growth. Post completion of the Telefonica acquisition, our Costa Rican operations will more than double in size and we would expect to begin integrating the new business with our legacy operations during Q3. Moving to Slide 14.

The charts show the last six quarters including the drop in our results last Q2, the positive impact of the Liberty Mobile acquisition beginning in Q4 and improving quarterly sequential results. With the addition of Liberty Mobile and improved financial performance, LLA delivered over $900,000,000 of adjusted OIBDA in H1, which is a step up from where we were last year. As we think about rebased growth rates for the next two quarters, we would expect our rebased growth rates to be much lower than our Q2 levels. This is a function of more difficult comps in H2 as Q2 twenty twenty was the financial low point for us from COVID. And with respect to adjusted OIBDA, we expect to incur most of the 2021 integration OpEx for Liberty Mobile in the second half.

Notwithstanding this phasing of integration expense, we have lowered our conservative target for 2021 from 35,000,000 to $40,000,000 down to roughly $20,000,000 of which $3,000,000 was incurred in H1. Turning to Slide 15. Q2 was quiet in terms of capital structure activity. At June 30, we reported $8,900,000,000 of total debt, 1,300,000,000.0 of cash and $1,200,000,000 availability under our revolving credit lines. During Q3, we expect to draw approximately $290,000,000 of bank loans to fund our acquisition in Costa Rica.

The remainder of the $500,000,000 purchase will be funded by LLA's corporate cash and by our 20% local partner. In terms of leverage at quarter end, we had gross leverage of five times and net leverage of 4.2 times. Our weighted average cost of debt in the fully swap basis is running around 6% and the average tenure of our debt is 6.3, which the debt maturity schedule on the bottom right clearly depicts. One change which Balan touched upon is that we recommenced our share buyback activity and repurchased $10,000,000 of equity during the quarter. It has been a year since we last bought back stock and based on the recovery we are seeing in our business, the confidence we have in our cash flows and what we think is a highly attractive return, we thought it was smart capital allocation and good time to recommence the program.

Moving to our final slide. For LLA, we posted strong financial growth as we continue to recover from the pandemic. Similar to Q1, our results were ahead of our own expectations for the quarter. No doubt the macroeconomic rebound in Latin America will take a considerable amount of time to take hold. And as such, we remain laser focused on cost control.

Our recent performance combined with our discipline around costs will position us to gain incremental operating leverage as the regional environment improves and inflex. A key recurring theme for us going forward will be network infrastructure investment. As we have highlighted today, we are upsizing our fiber expansion, but importantly staying within our CapEx and free cash flow envelope. Our inorganic strategy has not only enabled LLA to drive scale efficiencies and synergies, but has been critical in enabling us to better serve our customers' needs with fixed and mobile connectivity in markets like Puerto Rico, Curacao and soon to be Costa Rica in Q3. Specifically in a market like Puerto Rico, we've been able to create a U.

S.-like FFC business that generated over $300,000,000 in adjusted OIBDA in just the first six months of 2021. To close out our prepared remarks, we remain confident on delivering our LLA consolidated targets and are setting the stage for continued growth in 2022. We were also pleased to publish our inaugural ESG report last month and look forward to sharing more information through future disclosures as we further develop our program. With that, operator, we are ready to take questions.

Speaker 0

The question and answer session will be conducted electronically. Followed by the digit one on your touch tone telephone. In order to accommodate everyone, we request that you ask only one question with one follow-up if needed. If you are using speaker equipment,

Speaker 4

Guys. Thanks very much. Two or three quick questions, if I could, please. Just on the buyback, first of all, that's come through a little bit quicker than I was maybe expecting. Could you give any thoughts on the program looking forward?

I think you've got maybe is it €90,000,000 or so authorization to envisage kind of being in the market just on a regular basis? Or is it more, kind of subject to perhaps where the share price is? So some kind of sense on your thinking there would be great, please. And secondly, just on the integration costs, it sounds like you've kind of net net saved some, money or saved some potential money there. Be interested in a little bit more as to where that's come from.

And looking into 2022, do you think there might be room to reduce those costs further? And then a final quick one, if that's okay. Just detail around the numbers for Liberty Mobile in Puerto Rico, it looks like it's kind of generating about a 42% EBITDA margin, if I'm looking at that correctly, in terms of the revenue and EBITDA you called out there. It seems to be kind of super profitable. Is that the right way to look at it?

Is it on a kind of new trajectory? Any color there would be really helpful. Thanks.

Speaker 5

Hello, Sumit. Thanks for your questions. Let me just clip through them. The first one on the buyback. We've always been very careful in our capital allocation.

I think if you look at where our equity is trading right now, it just makes sense. And as Chris pointed out in his comments, we are clearly quite bullish about the future here. And what we had from a Board authorization was $100,000,000 So we're clipping through that. And on how we do it, as you would imagine, we have a grid. And so we'll execute to our grid.

And but we feel really good about it. On the integration costs, integration costs, it went down this year. I think it's partly also we've been quite conservative in our integration costs. And there's some expenses around licensing and etcetera on with our vendors that we were able to avoid and that contributed to it. I suspect next year, we'll have we recently will have integration costs, but I don't see it going up.

Nor do I see it some of the cost cutting that we put into our integration this year being repeated next year either. So it'll be kind of steady state, but according to our plan, and we feel really good about it. And then on the Liberty Mobile, we'll get back to you on the specific margins on the mobile side. But clearly, the margins are all over the map. If you look at the equipment, the margins are pretty close to zero.

You look at our postpaid, the margins are pretty good. Our prepaid is actually even better. And if you look at our roaming, then it's the best, right? Everything just drops. So but clearly, in Puerto Rico, it's if you look at our fixed business, the margins there have really improved as well.

And if you look at a lot of our growth, it came from the fixed part of our business there. Maybe I'll ask Chris or Najee if you want to opine on the margins.

Speaker 6

I would say, obviously, margin side, the lion's share of the OpEx integration will kind of start flowing through here in the second half. So that will be a that will put some pressure on the margin as well from what you saw in the first half of the year.

Speaker 5

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Sumit.

Speaker 4

Thank you. Cheers, guys.

Speaker 0

We'll now move to a question from Kevin Rowe with Rowe Equity Research.

Speaker 6

Thank you. Good morning. Balan, could you update us on the strategic direction for the Subsea Cable business and work to potentially separate that business? And secondly, the Delta variant, it's in the news every day in The U. S.

It's causing some changes in corporate behavior. We've seen, mask mandates from some companies. Some companies are paying employees to get vaccinated. Some are mandating vaccinations. Are you taking any different approaches this time around with Delta to keep your employees working in your stores open?

Speaker 5

Sure. Hi, Kevin. On the strategic side, I'll tackle that first. Clearly, we've kind of started showing a bit more clarity look through onto a subsea asset. And we've done some work on what it would take to separate it out and accounting wise, legal wise, tax wise, the whole thing.

And it's a really good business and it's strategic to us. And we have not made a final decision on the approach to that asset. I suspect between our Board and us sometime in the fourth quarter, we'll probably sit back and say, okay, do we want to test the value of that asset? We clearly feel that it's from an SOTP standpoint, this asset is undervalued in our whole infrastructure. And so we may look for ways to bring more clarity to that stand alone value.

On the Delta variant, we're not treating it any different than what we went through last year. If you recall last year was I mean, this time last year was quite bleak. And we've learned a lot through it on how to react and how not to overreact as well. And if you look at our region, clearly, the vaccination rates are much lower than how we experience it here in The United States. That is a cause of concern for us.

And because the Delta variant spreads across primarily with the non vaccinated. On our employee base, we are leaning towards any of our employees that interact with customers. If you work in our retail stores, if you go into our customer homes, we would want you vaccinated. Now clearly, this applies in some parts of our business where vaccination rates are high. In some parts of our business, if you look at Jamaica, where vaccination rates like ten percent, having such a rule is kind of meaningless, because you just can't get access to vaccines.

But we certainly will when vaccination is very high in all of our regions, we will want to be a network provider that our customers feel safe having our technicians in their home.

Speaker 2

Thank you.

Speaker 5

Thanks Kevin.

Speaker 0

We'll now take a question from Matthew Harrigan, Benchmark. Congratulations

Speaker 7

on the results. I was just curious, you've got a lot of touch points with very sophisticated businesses, even enterprise customers in the Caribbean area on account of your subsea network. What do you perceive as the UCaaS opportunity there? I mean, clearly, the region lags The U. S.

To a certain extent, but it feels like you're pretty well positioned coming out of the blocks. I know that's more of a conceptual than an immediate blocking tackling question. There's a lot going on, but I was just curious given your positioning. Thank you.

Speaker 5

Hey, Matt. On the enterprise side, I'll say from our subsea businesses, it's still two stories. The carriers, the wholesale guys are just seeing ever increasing demand for bandwidth. And we've been putting in capacity for a lot of our customers. From an enterprise standpoint, I think it's one that we've been kind of looking at strategically on trying to convince a lot of the hyperscalers that latency matters and having a bigger and better presence in our region is important for them.

So as an example, a lot of them on their edge data centers actually do not have them located in our region. And so there is you know, it's driven by two things. One, you know, the volume of people and two, the lack of focus. And we've been having some conversations with some of the hyperscalers around you do need to have presence in our region, into Costa Rica, come into Panama, come into The Caribbean. And you would be surprised with the connectivity that's available, the POPs that's available, the data centers that we have as well.

So that's a simulation part to that business.

Speaker 7

Great. Thanks, Paul.

Speaker 0

With no additional questions, that will conclude today's question and answer session. I'd like to hand the call back over to Balanair for any additional or closing remarks. Thank

Speaker 5

you, operator. And thanks everybody on the call. I am actually very happy with our progress. Clearly, we're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel getting brighter and brighter. We will continue to work very hard for you.

My team is committed to that. The management team, the whole company is committed on that for you and for our customers. So thank you for your support and encouragement. Have a great day.

Speaker 0

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes Liberty Latin America's second quarter twenty twenty one investor call. As a reminder, a replay of the call will be available in the Investor Relations section of Liberty Latin America's website at www.lla.com. There you can also find a copy of today's presentation materials.