Zeinal Bava
Okay. Thank you very much Luis, and again thank you very to all of you for being on the call. As you know in Portugal, we are organized along business segments; Consumer, basically B2C, which is split between Residential and Personal but increasing we are looking as both together. And we had SMEs, SOHOs and large corporates. Let me start off by discussing first the trends of the B2C segment, starting with the Residential first. First and foremost, I would like to highlight that is on slide 16, is that MEO continues to enjoy one of the highest brand notorieties and brand recalls in Portugal. I have said it plenty of times before in previous calls, it’s not just about notoriety in the telecom sector, MEO today is a Portuguese retail brand and clearly top three retail brand in Portugal. And of course just from a consumer company such as ourselves, it’s absolutely critical. Why? Because as you know, proved sales are a lot cheaper than pushed sales. So, from that standpoint I think what we have been able to do with MEO in the last three years has been absolutely formidable. We launched our convergent offer M4O on the 11 of January of 2013. We indicated at the time of launch that there would be three to four weeks before we were able to stabilize all the processes but never imagined that within six months, we would be able to achieve one million revenue generating units. It is absolutely incredible that we have been able to achieve this one million RGUs, 40% of which are new RGUs. So the Portugal Telecom ecosystem in the domestic market today has an additional 400,000 services that we are billing to customers. We also discussed in the last conference call and in some of the road show meetings that I did, that we believe that convergent should be a standing package, and in fact as we look at the number of SIM cards that we are selling to customers, it just seems to confirm the view that convergent which is based around our fixed and mobile asset agnostic. Therefore from an asset standpoint and offers the advantage of to the family, it can be truly successful. So when you look at the number of SIM cards that we are selling on average, as you can see 47% of our customers have two SIM cards, 24% have three SIM cards, and importantly 29% customers have 4 SIM cards. If you compare it with slides, the one that we showed on the 27 May, and we announced our first quarter results you would see that we are penetrating more and more the families with additional SIM cards which means that Portugal Telecom is beginning to make keynotes in the 15 to 20 growth new segment as well as you know, we are not believing. Slide 18, this is I would say one of my favorite slides in the presentation. It gives you an overview as to how we are performing against the sector. If you think about just RGUs and net adds as you can see in terms of mobility, Portugal Telecom is doing incredibly well compared to the market, on the back of the convergent efforts that we had moved. We’ve indicated to you in the past, that we think network is not a commodity, and the fact that Portugal Telecom has fixed and mobile assets on one hand, ADSL 2+ on the other, 4G coverage which comes for 93% of the population and fiber in 1.6 million homes is a true comparative advantage, and we are now beginning to triangulate this advantage in substantial market share gains, not just in the Residential, segment but also in the Mobility segment. So if you look at the fixed RGUs net adds, once again second quarter we did significantly better than the sector. If you look at customer revenue performance, our revenues in the B2C segments were down 1.8%. Now that compares with the market excluding Portugal Telecom, which was down 7.6%. Even if you look at some of our peer group companies, one of the leading Portuguese cable companies, revenues were down 3.7%. Even if you take into account the fact that there will be consolidation in the Portuguese market and you bring to that, cable with mobile, it’s still much, much better. So as a result, I would like to say that convergent has truly become a significant competitive and comparative advantage for Portugal Telecom, and we will continue to underpin our future strategy in the Portuguese markets by selling more and more M4Os. In light of the demand that we are seeing from our customers, we have now in launch the M4O offer. We now offer M4O not just for IPTV, ADSL, fiber, but we now also offer that to satellite customers, so that we can give today in Portugal in these same convergence experience and advantages to customers whether they are IPTV, a copper and fiber or satellite. In order to also diversify our offer, we have exceptionally created M3O offers, which basically used our customer for those that do not have, if you like both end in some of the more real areas, we can offer them PT’s fixed phone and mobile. Of course, mobile here is DTH, fixed call and mobile, so with that, it becomes a Three-Play package. Looking that we now have a very comprehensive offer of convergence and the challenges that we have going forward is to continue to innovate on top of this with additional services, advantages and also with better back office performance. On that point, I would like to say that what Portugal Telecom has done in terms of back office and operation is absolutely impeccable. We can today install customers D plus 60 [ph]. Of course approach that is one particular area where we need to continue to reduce back office costs, but having said that, from a customer experience standpoint, we can install customers end-to-end with number portability within six days independent of whether you’re talking about M4O, IPTV, copper, fiber or whether you’re talking about M40 including satellite. Now going directly into Residential. We’ve had another good year in terms of Pay-TV and Triple-Play performance. Pay-TV customers were up 9.8%. If you look at Triple-Play, Triple-Play penetration was up 16.7%. So today, Portugal is the market which has about 78.9% Pay-TV penetration. As a result, it’s a pretty stable market. And for those that are MEO customers, all our customer service would simply indicate that people are generally extremely happy with the service that we are offering. And of course, the service that we are offering also includes significant amount of innovation that we have done, particularly in what has to do with interactivity. We continued to be leaders in interactivity in Portugal working very closely with a number of free-to-air TV companies. With home, we are developing special apps, so that people can actually take advantage of the interactive services that we are making available. With regard to market share in Triple-Play, slide 22, our market share was up again. We have 53.2%. We are leaders in Triple-Play and we are consolidating that leadership in the Portuguese market quarter-after-quarter. If you look at TV market share only, we’ve got about 40%, but as you know we are not sellers of 1P of TV. So 1P for TV represents a very, very small percentage of the total numbers of customers. And so I do prefer, our business model is underpinned by our services increasing with Triple-Play and Quadruple-Play. Notwithstanding stabilizing KPIs, penetration of TV, Pay-TVs reaching 80%, we continued to see growth in terms of revenues. The outlook in Portugal from a consumer standpoint as we know is challenging, notwithstanding our revenues were up 2.2% in the second quarter of this year. Moreover, I would like to highlight the fact that when you look at flat-fees, so if you’re thinking about predictability of our business going forward, flat-fees today represents 90.1% of our total revenues, which means that if you take into account that on average, we have loyalties of between 12 and 18 months on average, then this gives you the idea of how sustainable and predictable the revenues are. So it’s not just about growing the 2.2%, it’s also about the quality of the growth that we have posted. Turning now on to Mobile. Mobile remains a big challenge, across the board in Europe. As you know there is significant pricing pressure, regulatory pressure and it is a service that has been commoditized to some extent, if we were thinking about voice and SMS. And therefore it’s not easy to regain market share unless you do something materially different in the markets, which is what we have done with M4O, by bringing together the advantage of you having one supplier for your fixed line and for your mobile services is exactly what is leading us to grow substantially our market share in Portugal in mobility. So, between second quarter of 2012, second quarter of 2013, we have increased market share three percentage points, and we have done this by defending our profitability, so we have not done whilst by being irrational in terms of prices but by asking our customers that’s the valued for money. So those people that are buying convergence in Portugal from Portugal Telecom, they are getting convenience, they have the comfort of getting one customer and with one supplier and of course they are getting savings. And those savings are translated enough being for convergence services in the Portuguese market. In terms of our strategy, as you will have seen on page 26, number portability has doubled, between full-year 2012 and first half of 2013. Moreover, our market share in terms of active SIM cards has also increased. We believe that one of the phenomena of us having launched a service which is convergent, but at the same time offers customers unlimited SMS and voice to all, is also meaning that the number of total SIM cards in the Portuguese market is actually declining. So as a result, we are capturing with additional ARPU which the people who are splitting over two to three SIM cards and this is one of the reasons why we are underpinning our performance in terms of B2C. In terms of our predictability again, as you will have seen also on page 27, percentage of flat-fees in the mobile customers have increased 7.3 percentage points. 37.7% of our customers today in mobility are on flat-fees. Subscriber acquisition retention costs are also declining. They are declining because we are very cautious today on subsidies. We have significantly limited subsidies. We are declining subscriber acquisitions retention costs why, because our brands enjoy very high notorieties and as a result the full channels are selling more. And we are reducing subscriber acquisition retention costs because our digital strategy, whereby we are using our portal to sell more electronically to our customers is also beginning to enjoy significant amounts of success. In terms of customer revenue trends, we saw data revenues pick up, this has a lot to do with the factors, we have been pushing smartphone penetration and also mobile internet. Customer revenues are also showing better performance, and of course if one ignores the MTR, the performance would be even more impressive. In terms of Enterprises, in SMEs about a year ago, we decided that for us the key objectives would be for us to drive convergence in our customers and we are beginning to see the results come through. Our number of customers with convergence services meaning to have fixed and mobile from Portugal Telecom as a percentage of total customers has now grown to 61.7%. It’s also interesting to see that in the first and in the second quarter, our net adds were positive, whether we are talking about landlines, broadband, or Pay-TVs. So this, is in my view a significant achievement and again it has been done on the back of M4O. It’s actually we are thinking about SOHOs and small enterprises, with regards to SOHO as you may also recall, we’ve simplified our offers. To SOHO customers we are offering what we call Residential Plus or Connected Plug offers which essentially means it is the same as the Residential offer, but it has far more aggressive service level agreements in terms of deliveries of the quality of service. With regard to large enterprises, we shared with your last time that this is one particular area for our business which is the undergoing significant pressure, a pressure on the back of the pipeline, pipeline of projects that are being delayed by large corporates in Portugal because of the economic environment, but also because of the pricing pressure. As a result and against this backdrop we’ve taken a number of initiatives to reduce costs to restructure how we operate and we essentially change the equation under which we operate. So rather than working on a basis that it should be costs just margins to separate price we are now basically working on a day to day price minus margin to define the costs and with this, there are new drive within Portugal Telecom as well to continue to reduce costs also by looking at solutions which are simpler for our customers and also establishing broader range of supplier relationships. Now, B2B in Portugal remains under pressure. Revenues were down 11.9%. Obviously more pressure on the corporate segments for the reasons that I mentioned, but this has to be seen against the backdrop where unemployment rate has picked up, private consumption is down. Results come out today in terms of evolution of the Portuguese economy. The economy grew 1.1% in this greater. It would seem that and we would like to believe that the moment we get some tailwinds, the performance of this segment can be improved in the future. So in terms of Portugal, operationally speaking and looking across the three segments, we believe that we are delivering results notwithstanding these macro headwinds and notwithstanding significant pricing pressure, thinking about the quality of the revenues that we have 66% of the revenues of the Residential segment are today non-voice, 34.9% of the Personal segment is non-voice. Enterprises is 52.8%. So overall in Portugal 52.8% of our revenues are non-voice. But when you think about flat-fees, 90% in Residential, 37.7% in Personal. This just basically gives you is the sense of the predictability that we believe that our business has on the back of investments that we built in our network, the technological transformation we have done and also the intellectual transformation that we have now completed. When you look at revenues in Portugal, they were down 4.8% in the second quarter, but if you ignore the pressure from regulation, particularly mobile termination rates, those revenues would have been done only 2.6% which against the backdrop of the economic challenges we have, we believe it’s a very good performance. Obviously, with the outlook in Portugal as it is and of course with the pricing pressure our CFO, myself the CEO of the Portugal Telecom Group, we’re focused in ensuring that we continued to champion the course for being more and more efficient. We are obviously at this stage discussing a lot more aggressively capital allocation. Our CFO mentioned that we will work towards reducing CapEx in the future, partly because we have completed the modernization of the networks of Portugal Telecom. So that efficiency gain is actually meaning that OpEx is down 1.7%. Now of course OpEx would have been down as more if it hadn’t been fore set the launches that we’re doing namely convergence, but also the launch of our own Data Center, a new Data Center on the 23 of September, can we do better than 1.7, yes, I think we can. And of course the Group is continuing to work to see whether we can reduce costs whether it’s marketing and so on and so forth. So the cost discipline in Portugal Telecom would remain very high as it has been in the past. With regards to CapEx, as Luis rightly mentioned, we have completed the modernization of our network, we have completed the intellectual transformation of the company. We would be inaugurating our new Data Center on the 23 of September and therefore, we believe that the scope for us to reduce CapEx in the next few years. Worth also mentioning that one-third of our CapEx is client-related which means that it provides us with a natural hedge towards any decline of demand. Also worth mentioning as you know and we’ve discussed it in the past, that we do significant reconditioning of set-top boxes, so 70% of our set-top boxes are reconditioned. So as a result, we will continue to work bottom-up processes, so that we can continue to improve efficiency of the Portugal Telecom and mitigate any further pressure on the top line with better performance in costs. With regard to Brazil, allow me to start with the pitch on the market. One of the largest global economy, high employment growth, rising middle classes, rising buying power, and penetration of telecom services which is among the lowest in the world. If you look at broadband penetration very low, Pay-TV penetration very low, 3G penetration very low, smartphone penetration very low. And therefore, we continue to believe that Brazil offers scale and significant scope for us to continue to sell telecom services not only because of demographics are strong, there is redistribution of wealth, but also because the penetration of these services remains low. What differentiates Oi in this market is that we are diversified geographically and we are one the of the largest telcos fixed and mobile. Oi is present in 4,000 – in more than 4,800 municipalities and we believe that this gives us a footprint that we can continue to work in the future to drive penetration of broadband and the Pay-TV as well. In Portugal, we’ve done convergence and we’ve always distinguished convergence from bundles. Convergence gives our customers a unique and a seamless experience and it’s underpinned if you like by transformation and operations in IT. We are not at that level yet in the market, not just Oi in this market and therefore in this market clearly the big drive is bundled, bringing together fixed and mobile, bringing together fixed if you like to voice, video, and data. As you will have been in the presentation that we put out on Oi which has a lot more detailed information, we are driving double-play and triple-play. We have a long way to go, broadband penetration in our households is about 43%, Pay-TV penetration in Oi household customers is only 7%. Of course the work has been done already, (inaudible) if we’re talking about TV is beginning to deliver on results. So Residential revenues are up 4.5% and we believe that we can continue to deliver pretty good performance in the segment in the future, not just on the back of the work we’re doing in the Residential segment but also on the work that we’re doing on the mobility segment. When it comes to mobility, we’ve included slide 40 to highlight essentially that it’s not just about some numbers, it’s about recharges. If you think about voice and text clearly, this market is going to move from voice, text to data as we have seen happening in most of the markets in the world. With regard to recharges, July in Oi was one of the best months in the year, and we believe that on the back of the work that we have been doing around business intelligence. Work that we have been doing to do more analytics in terms of customer data, we are now being able to direct our promotions much more effectively to different regions and to different customer bases in order to drive the elasticity of demand and this is beginning to have an impact in terms of recharges which as you know is a lead indicator of how revenues will perform in the future. With regard to postpaid, we also did well. Having said that, in this current economic environment, we have been more cautious. It is also worth mentioning that the loyalty contracts in Brazil up 12 points only and with the requirement that we have to allocate capital more intelligently and more efficiently, we are obviously reducing subsidies and as a result, postpaid is something that we will consider to work towards as a promise offer in our future growth of data in terms of postpaid. So first thinking about data; data grew 60% during the second quarter albeit from a very small base. So we have a long way to go and of course the ability to continue to grow will depend on penetration of smartphones, therefore on the price of smartphones. It will also depend on the coverage that we are able to put in place of 3G. And the 3G coverage is something that we are working on. It’s something that we are committed to, and in the same way that with regard to 4G, we will continue to honor the obligations that we have and continue to work with team around band sharing in 3G, we believe that there is room for us to grow and here we will look to work with suppliers with different models so that we can achieve those objectives without necessarily increasing our CapEx. With regard to the corporate segment. The corporate segment also grew 4%. It’s worth highlighting there is the work that Portugal Telecom and Oi are doing jointly to promote solid offers and listing our inauguration of the Data Center on the 23 of September in Portugal. We also mean that as on 23 of September Oi will be able to sell VAS processing capacity and that’s for also to Brazilian customer and as a result not only broadening the scope of the service that it offers but also include if you like the relevance of those services that it offers whether we’re talking about SMEs or large corporates. So with regard to Brazil, 43, revenue growth across all segments. In terms of Personal, mobility revenues were up 4% overall revenues were up 2.4%. With regard to EBITDA, certainly you saw in the press release that PT put out and Oi has put out, there was some costs that impacted our EBITDA performance in the second quarter, so that I would focus on page 45 and come back to page 44 in a minute but on page 45 as you saw, our EBITDA performance was impacted by bad debt provisions is double. We were in bad debt provisions at about 4.5% of revenue which is very high. It’s clearly one of those cost items that we will have to work towards reducing significantly in the future, and you see ample scope to do that, because of the focus that we have put in churn, in customer lifetime value. Personnel costs are also up, partly because of wage benefits and inflation adjustment of salaries, and of course the cost of in-sourcing that we have done of our internal network maintenance. So in terms of field force. So bottom line, when it comes to EBITDA, it was mainly impacted by some of this one-off in terms of costs, marketing, and we sponsored the Confederation Cup and that’s a one-off cost as well. It’s about R$50 million to R$60 million. So going to page 44, we included the slide only to make it absolutely clear that one of the key objectives at Oi is for us to continue to work our operational excellence. So in a nutshell, our strategy is focused on three things. We would like to correct the cash flow profile of the company. We would like to define a business model and make it far more efficient. The business model if you’re thinking about Residential will be triple, quadruple-play and if you’re thinking about mobility it’ll be a lot of prepaid and there would postpaid of data. And the third area which is absolute critical for us is growth. We continue to believe this is an market where we can grow, but we would like to grow with quality, delivering results and cash flow to our shareholders. And this is why page 44 highlights some of the areas where we need to improve on costs. And clearly running the ratio of 75% of cost and expenses for net revenues is too high. We are clearly not in the business of 25% margins and therefore there is work to be done on IT platforms, networks, field force, customer care, sales, mentioned sales there for you. We would like to focus on lower churn. We need to align if you like, we need to pace the CapEx with sales and the quality of sales that we are doing. So that one initial criteria of correcting the cash flow profile of the company, this is going to be one of the main areas where we’re going to be focusing on. I could talk a lot about the cost initiatives, but here what I would ask you to do is to refer to the work that Portugal Telecom itself has done in some of these areas, not that you can replicate growing from one country to the other, it’s a very different story, different dynamics, also it’s a different input structure, but having said that in terms of concept, in terms of processes we are trying to achieve the same, and therefore we are clearly in this moment making our priorities towards a field force [ph]. Before I hand you over to Luis, I’ll just like to mention one point on CapEx. I mentioned the CapEx in Portugal will also will come down next year, likewise in Oi we expect CapEx to come down next year. This year our guidance is R$6 billion, we think next year it will be lower. And it doesn’t mean that we will invest less. I think we will invest the same but with less money. So what we are now looking to do is to become far more efficient in a way that we acquire our services, so if you think about network, clearly we are focusing increasing in total cost of ownership. We also are wanting to change the model under which we relay to our suppliers moving from a supplier relationship to a more partnerships relationship. There are areas, there are pockets of demand in this market that we can tap, but we can only do that if we can change the way that we have been working with our suppliers in the past. So therefore, the same points that I made with regards to CapEx in Portugal, I’ll make the same points with regards to Brazil. Let me now hand you over to Luis. Thank you.