TELNF - Telenor ASA (TELNF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript
2024-02-07 20:45:02 ET
Telenor ASA (TELNF)
Q4 2023 Earnings Conference Call
February 7, 2024 3:00 am ET
Company Participants
Frank Maao - Head of Investor Relations and SVP of Capital Markets
Sigve Brekke - President and CEO
Tone Hegland Bachke - EVP and CFO
Conference Call Participants
Andrew Lee - Goldman Sachs
Christopher Bjornsen - DNB
Ondrej Cabejsek - UBS
Maurice Patrick - Barclays
Nick Lyall - Societe Generale
Siyi He - Citi
Titus Krahn - Bank of America
Jakob Bluestone - Exane BNP Paribas
Ajay Soni - JPMorgan
Adam Fox-Rumley - HSBC
Presentation
Frank Maao
Hi, everyone and welcome to Telenor's Fourth Quarter Results Call. I'm Frank Maao, Head of Investor Relations. And with me here today is Sigve Brekke and our CFO, Tone Hegland Bachke. In the interest of good housekeeping, I would like to note that within today's presentation references to growth rates will be organic, like-for-like currency basis. And please also note that both report and the presentation have been published on our website.
As for today's agenda, Sigve will provide an overview of our strategic and operational progress for the quarter, and Tone will present more details on our financial results. She will also give an update on our new guidance for 2024 and how we are tracking towards our mid-term outlook. After that, we'll open up the floor for questions.
Without further ado, I'll turn it over to Sigve.
Sigve Brekke
Thank you, Frank and a very good morning to everyone. This was another strong quarter for the Telenor Group, and I'm pleased to say that we continued to execute in line with our plan not only for 2023, but also now going into 2024. One of the highlights this year is the growth in Nordic mobile service revenues, where we have since the fourth quarter in 2022, posted five consecutive quarters with 5% underlying growth. The main driver of this has been our more for more price adjustments and the services, especially security services that we have put on top of connectivity across the Nordic region.
Then to the other highlight, which is the quite comprehensive list of strategic M&A transactions we have executed in the last year. The focus has been to simplify the group, mitigate risk and to drive our value creation. We have completed the largest telecom merger ever in Southeast Asia in Thailand when we closed the merger there. We have announced the sale of Telenor Pakistan. We have monetized a minority stake of our Norwegian fiber network, and we have exited Working Group Two and Telenor Satellite, two of the companies in our Amp portfolio. These transactions have demanded strong efforts and significant work in many teams across Telenor. I would like to extend a big thank you to all our employees that have been a part of delivering this impressive M&A agenda.
And as you see on the slide, we exceeded our cashflow ambitions with NOK 15 billion in total cashflow for the year. Two-third of the NOK 15 billion cashflow comes from the organic growth and one-third comes from deal activities I just mentioned. And having a look back at the numbers, I see that it is actually the best fourth quarter in 10 years when it comes to the overall combination of revenue growth, EBITDA growth and the free cash flow.
This overview here brings us back to the Capital Markets Day we had in September 2022, and it illustrates where we now are in our execution of the strategy we laid out at the CMD. Overall, we believe we are well on track with the two years left of the targeted period. In the Nordics, we show sound profitable growth in line with the outlook we provided for 2023. Still, we know we have room for further improvements and we are well underway in setting ourselves up for transformation and delivering on cross regional synergy areas....
Telenor ASA (TELNF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript