Grupo Televisa Q4 2025 Earnings Call - DTC profitability and FTTH push fund margins, FCF and debt paydown

Operator: Good morning, everyone, welcome to Grupo Televisa’s fourth quarter and full year 2025 conference call. Before we begin, I would like to draw your attention to the press release, which explains the use of forward-looking statements and applies to everything we discuss in today’s call and in the earnings release. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer of Grupo Televisa. Please go ahead, sir.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, and Carlos Phillips, CFO of Grupo Televisa. Last year was marked by several milestones, both at Grupo Televisa and TelevisaUnivision, which Bernardo and I are confident will allow us to keep creating value for our shareholders. At Grupo Televisa, let me touch on four major achievements. First, our strategy to focus on attracting and retaining value customers in cable allowed us to grow our internet subscriber base by around 47,000 in 2025. This marks a full year turning point after losing internet subscribers both in 2023 and 2024, mainly driven by a strategy decision not to retain low-value subscribers. Second, we keep executing on the implementation of OpEx efficiencies and the integration between Izzi and Sky to extract further synergies.

This contributed to expanding our 2025 consolidated operating segment income margin of 39.1% by 200 basis points, driven by a year-on-year OpEx reduction of 8.3%. Third, we kept a disciplined CapEx deployment approach to focus on free cash flow generation. In 2025, we invested MXN 12.2 billion in CapEx, which is equivalent to 20.7% of sales. This CapEx is intended to deliver higher returns over the investment and has allowed us not only to have close to 1.4 million gross adds during the year, but also to upgrade 4.5 million homes to FTTH technology. This basically means that we ended 2025 with around 9 million homes or approximately 45% of our total footprint passed with FTTH technology.

Valim will elaborate on our plan to keep upgrading our network later during the call. Fourth, in 2025, we generated around MXN 5.9 billion in free cash flow, allowing us to prepay a bank loan due in 2026, with a principal amount of around MXN 2.7 billion. This debt repayment comes on top of the $220 million principal amount of our senior notes already paid on March 18th. Additionally, at the end of 2025, Grupo Televisa’s leverage ratio of 2 times EBITDA, compared to 2.5 times at the end of last year, mainly driven by our free cash flow generation. At TelevisaUnivision, I will mention three key milestones.

First, 2025 was a breakthrough year for our direct-to-consumer business, as ViX delivered record revenue since it was launched, achieving profitability in every quarter and expanded operating margins throughout the year. For the full year, our DTC business represented nearly a quarter of the total company revenue, driven by robust advertising growth from our free tier and the continued expansion of our premium subscription offerings. Our DTC business is now a significant contributor to our adjusted EBITDA, accounting for approximately 20%, driven by its industry-leading margins. Second, the efficiency plan to reduce gross operating expenses at TelevisaUnivision by around $400 million in 2025 delivered outstanding results. During the year, our total operating expenses declined by around 8% year-over-year, for total operating expenses of around $3.2 billion. This shows a disciplined execution of our cost savings initiative.

These OpEx reductions have been fully realized in our 2025 results. Third, looking at TelevisaUnivision’s leverage and debt profile, the company ended the year at 5.6x EBITDA, an improvement from 5.9x at the end of 2024, driven by growth. In 2025, TelevisaUnivision successfully refinanced $2.3 billion of debt, which extended its credit facilities and eliminated all near-term maturities. Deleveraging remains a core strategic priority for TelevisaUnivision. Let me turn the call over to Valim, as he will discuss the operating and financial performance of our consolidated assets.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, Alfonso. Good morning, everyone. In 2025, consolidated revenue reached MXN 58.9 billion, representing a year-on-year decline of 5.5%, mainly driven by lower revenue at Sky. Operating segment income reached MXN 23 billion, equivalent to a slight decrease of only 0.6% year-on-year. Turning to our 4th quarter results, consolidated revenue reached MXN 14.5 billion, representing a year-on-year decrease of 4.5%, while operating segment income reached MXN 5.9 billion, equivalent to a year-on-year expansion of 6.1%, driven by the efficiency measures that we have been implementing since the integration of Sky. Let me walk you through the operating financial performance of our cable operations.

We ended December with a network of 20 million homes after passing around 59,000 new homes during the quarter, or over 118,000 new homes during the year. During the quarter, we continued to execute our strategy to focus on value customers rather than volume, while working on customer retention and satisfaction. This contributed to achieving a monthly churn rate below our historical averages of 2% for the third consecutive quarter. Our broadband gross adds remained solid, allowing us to deliver 25,000 net adds during the fourth quarter, compared to net adds of around 22,000 in the third quarter and 6,000 in the second quarter, and the disconnection of about 6,000 in the first quarter of 2025. In video, we also experienced stronger gross adds than in the first 3 quarters of the year and managed to reduce churn.

We lost about 31,000 video subscribers during the fourth quarter, compared to 43,000 disconnections in the third quarter and 53,000 cancellations in the second quarter, a loss of 73,000 video subscribers in the first quarter of 2025. We expect these improving trends to continue going forward, influenced by our multi-year partnership with Formula One to provide live coverage of all Grand Prix via Sky Sports channels available through Izzi and Sky, beginning in the fourth quarter of last year and through the 2028 season. Moving to mobile, our net adds of 95,000 subscribers during the quarter showed sustained momentum, as they were mostly in line with the 94,000 net adds in the third quarter.

Our innovative and general services are already making our bundles more competitive, allowing us to increase the share of wallet of our existing customers and helping us to reduce significantly the churn of our existing customers. During the quarter, net revenue from our residential operations of MXN 10.6 billion, which accounted for around 90% of total cable revenue, decreased by only 0.6% year-on-year. This marked the best quarter of the last two years at our residential operations from a revenue growth performance standpoint, compares well to a decline of 1.8% in 2025. On a sequential basis, net revenue from our residential operations remained stable, potentially signaling a gradual recovery.

During the quarter, net revenue from our enterprise operations of 1.2 billion MXN, which accounted for around 10% of our cable revenue, fell by 4.2% year-on-year, due to the timing of revenue recognition of an important contract signing in the fourth quarter of 2025, and because of tough comps. Moving on to Sky’s operating financial performance. During the fourth quarter, we lost 304,000 revenue-generating units, mostly coming from prepaid subscribers that had not been recharging their services. In addition, beginning the second quarter, we started to charge an installation fee of 1,250 MXN to all new satellite pay TV subscribers to increase the return on investments on the service. This translated into a slowdown of video gross additions for Sky that has been steady over the last three quarters.

Sky’s fourth quarter revenue of MXN 2.8 billion declined by 16.8% year-on-year, mainly driven by a lower subscriber base. To sum up, segment revenue of MXN 14.5 billion fell by 4.5% year-on-year, while operating segment income of MXN 5.9 billion increased by 6.1%, making it the best quarter of the year, driven by efficiency measures that we have been implementing and synergies from the ongoing integration between Izzi and Sky. Our operating segment income margin of 40.9% expanded by 410 basis points year-on-year. Regarding CapEx deployment, our total investment of MXN 4.6 billion accounted for 31.8% of sales in the fourth quarter.

During the year, our CapEx deployment of MXN 12 billion, equivalent to $645 million, or 20.7% of sales. The main reason behind having a higher total investment relative to our 2025 CapEx budget of around $600 million, was the strong than expected Mexican pesos, particularly during the second half of the year, and the fact that around 50% of our CapEx budget is in local currency. Finally, operating cash flow for Cable and Sky, which is equivalent to EBITDA minus CapEx, was MXN 1.3 billion in the fourth quarter, representing 9.1% of sales. For 2026, our CapEx to sales ratio should be close to 25%, as we plan to upgrade 6 million homes to fiber to the home technology, increase our subscriber base, and support growth.

This basically means that we expect to end 2026 with 75% of our total footprint passed with FTTH technology.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, Valim. You’re doing a great job! Let me walk you through TelevisaUnivision’s 2025 results, released on Tuesday morning. As expected, the company’s full year revenue fell by 5% year-on-year to $4.8 billion, while adjusted EBITDA of $1.6 billion increased by 2%. Excluding political advertising and FX volatility, adjusted EBITDA increased by a healthy 7% year-on-year, underscoring the scalability of a profitable DTC business and the sustained impact of the cost reduction initiatives launched at the end of 2024. Turning to the fourth quarter, revenues of $1.3 billion declined by 2% year-on-year, while adjusted EBITDA of $396 million fell by 12%. Excluding political advertising, total revenue grew by 1% year-on-year, while adjusted EBITDA decreased by 5%, despite continued DTC profitability and continued cost management.

Moving on to the details of our revenue performance. During the quarter, consolidated advertising revenue was flat year-on-year. In the U.S., advertising revenue was 11% lower, as continued growth in ViX and higher pricing were more than offset by declines in linear advertising due to secular softness and political spending relative to the prior year, due to the absence of U.S. presidential election cycle. Excluding political advertising revenue in the U.S. fell by 3%. In Mexico, advertising revenue increased by 15% year-on-year, driven by the strong ViX growth and our resilient linear business, including private sector advertising. In local currency, advertising revenue in Mexico grew by 6%. During the quarter, consolidated subscription and licensing revenue decreased by 4% year-on-year.

Continued growth in ViX across both the U.S. and Mexico, along with higher US linear subscription and licensing revenue, including benefits from our new Hulu agreement and higher content licensing, more than offset the loss of Fubo, the temporary YouTube TV carriage dispute, and ongoing net subscriber declines. These increases were more than offset by lower linear subscription revenue in Mexico due to the renewal cycle with Easy Sky and the cancellation of another distribution company, which we have already lapped. Moving on to the balance sheet, TelevisaUnivision ended 2025 with $440 million in cash, an increase of 33% compared to the previous year. Total CapEx investments were $119 million for the full year, or a year-on-year increase of 4%. We expect CapEx deployment to remain at similar levels in 2026.

Speaking about the 2026 World Cup, it represents a great opportunity both for Grupo Televisa and TelevisaUnivision, and we’re approaching it with a fully integrated strategy across broadcast, streaming, digital, and social. Our goal is to deliver comprehensive coverage with flawless execution, while maximizing the commercial impact across platforms. In Mexico, ViX will become the official home of the World Cup, making ViX the exclusive streaming destination for all 104 matches, available at a preferential price for customers of Izzi and Sky. ViX premium annual subscribers will get access included, while ViX’s monthly subscribers and the customers of Izzi and Sky will have the option to add on World Cup coverage. Finally, considering several opportunities in the telecom sector in Mexico that we’re currently exploring, our board of directors approved suspending the payment of our regular dividend in 2026.

This will be presented for approval at our annual shareholders meeting. To wrap up, Bernardo and I are confident that our focus on value customers, efficiencies, and ongoing integration between Izzi and Sky at Grupo Televisa, and further integration and operational optimization at TelevisaUnivision, now that our DTC business represents over 20% of consolidated revenue and adjusted EBITDA, will allow us to create greater value for our shareholders in 2026. We’re ready to take your questions. Elsa, could you please provide instructions for the Q&A?

Operator: We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then 1 on your touchtone phone. If you’re using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star then 2. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. The first question today comes from Marcelo Santos with J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have 2. The first is for Valim. Could you please walk us through the fiber plan? How many homes with fiber to the home do you have today? I mean, is this goal? What is the goal exactly, if you could repeat, and is it for the end of 2026? Just wanted to get a bit more color on this plan. The second question is about the competitive environment. How has been, like, the room to increase prices? How, could you make some comments on how the market is going? Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, Marcelo. Valim, please.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, Marcelo. I think that the fiber deployment we are already at 9 million homes with fiber today and planning to get to 15, 16 by the end of 2026. That would mean 75% of our existing network would be fiber-based. That is on plan and on target. Regarding the competitive environment in Mexico, I think it’s important to emphasize that we have been increasing ARPU consistently over the last several quarters. It’s not due to price increases, mostly it’s due to more products to our existing customers and better services. That’s the route we decide. We see that our alternative players, they’re flat or declining ARPU, as opposed to ours, which is increasing constantly.

That’s the route we are taking. Not so much on price increases, but enabled to sell more to existing clients. The competitive environment in Mexico has been very stable over the last two, three years, basically. What we have been doing also consistently, is focusing on high-value clients that will churn less and value our services, and be able to acquire more services from us. That’s the strategy moving forward.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Grupo Televisa: Yeah, pretty much a rational competitive environment.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Great. Just to follow up on the first answer. When you mentioned the 9 million today and the 15-16, this is really like fiber to home, where there’s no cable involved anymore, like, it’s fiber box in the home and or is it like more fiber to the curb, but there is still a cable?

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: No, Marcelo, fiber is still a cable. It’s just a different cable.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: I know.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Yeah.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: HFC. Sorry.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Yeah, no, I understand what you’re saying, and just, couldn’t avoid the joke. It’s just, yes, we’ll have fiber to the home on, 15, 16 million homes by the end of the year. Actually, nowadays, when the network is deployed, there are no deployments in HFC. We still have, a percentage of our deployments are in HFC because we are not with the full coverage. But as we, as we grow our subscriber, our fiber network, every new subscriber goes into fiber, and we migrate them, as conditions are needed into fiber. In, in, in a few years, all of our clients will not only be under a fiber network infrastructure, but also be connected to a fiber network.

Marcelo Santos, Analyst, J.P. Morgan: Okay. Very clear. Thank you very much.

Operator: The next question comes from Matthew Harrigan with Benchmark. Please go ahead.

Matthew Harrigan, Analyst, Benchmark: Thank you. You’re kind of almost uniquely exposed to AI positively on the telecom side, given all the repetitive processes and consumer-facing, you know, kind of customer journey experiences. On the media side with your JV, I know you’re obviously the largest volume producer of Spanish programming in the world, and I, you may even be number one overall. You had a lot of dislocation in the U.S. media names a few weeks ago on account of CDance 2.0.

I was just curious, what’s your broad perspective on how AI affects you, both on the blocking and tackling side on telecom, and then on the creative side on Televisa Universidad, both with respect to, you know, your in-house content creation being even faster and more short form, and then more competition you might face on people and companies that aren’t nearly as well funded as you. Thank you.

Alfonso de Angoitia, Co-Chief Executive Officer, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, Matthew. Matthew, very interesting question. I’ll answer the media side, and then Valim can take the telecom side. On the media side, we’re experimenting with AI and production through AI. It’s a very important tool, so in terms of script writing, in terms of production itself, it is very useful. We’re experimenting, especially, we launched last year our micro novellas on the short form. We produced, we started producing last year, this type of content. This year, we will produce more than 300 micro novellas. Some of them are produced 100% with AI.

We’re moving in that direction, moving, I mean, using AI, more and more, which will become a very efficient way of producing content.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: In telecom, AI is mostly useful in how we handle our customer and how we operate our network. As we speak, we are in very challenging and deep changes into the organization, making sure we have AI all over, meaning from the network usage to the client interface. In the next few months, we’ve seen significant impacts on how we interact with customers, focusing on basically 100% AI. 2026 will be the year we’ll flip from a typical call center, you know, kind of a thing to full AI, everything AI, in terms of customer relationships. This is the year that we’ll go from a typical telephone to an AI-based telephone operator.

Matthew Harrigan, Analyst, Benchmark: ... great. Thank you. You know, it feels like even with some pretty straightforward kind of enterprise AI applications, you’re in a great place without being too fanciful in the value of LLM models. Thank you.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Thank you. Sorry, just to complement on that, we are cooperating with the large guys, which is the typical Oracle, Salesforce, AWS kind of guys. We have a clear path in working with the right guys to be able to achieve it.

Matthew Harrigan, Analyst, Benchmark: Beautiful. Thank you.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Ernesto Gonzalez with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.

Ernesto Gonzalez, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Hi. Thank you for taking our question. It’s on the opportunities you’re exploring in Mexico Telecom. Just wanted to see if you can comment a little bit on whether these opportunities are on the fixed market or on the mobile market, or any additional color you can give. On the residential or the your operations in Mexico, your operating segment income was really strong in the fourth quarter. How sustainable is this margin level? Thank you.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Thank you, Ernesto. Well, yeah, we’re actively exploring opportunities in the telecommunication sector, but unfortunately, we cannot comment on specifics or at this point, share more information. Hopefully, we can get those to materialize. There’s no guarantee, of course, that they will. We’ll be in touch as those, as we make progress as to those. As to your second question by-

Matthew Harrigan, Analyst, Benchmark: Yeah.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: We keep on optimizing our operations like we were just discussing a few moments ago. Try to make sure our systems are more AI-oriented in order to make our processes more efficient, not only from a customer-facing perspective, in other words, the clients see and understand that we are closer to them and providing better service, but also the flip side to that discussion is that it would allow us to have a lower cost base, all in all, in the service of our clients. Yes, we keep on pursuing increasing operating cash flow.

Ernesto Gonzalez, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Really clear. Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Alejandra Azar with GBM. Please go ahead.

Alejandra Azar, Analyst, GBM: Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my question. The first one is on your comment, Valim, of the 25% CapEx to sales for 2026. Is that on the telecom service, or it’s telecom enterprise, or it’s the full, you know, telecom enterprise satellite? Should we think 25% of consolidated Televisa? My second question is also on relative to Sky. With the rate of disconnections that we have had in the last couple of years, and if this continue, it becomes really tough for Televisa at the consolidated level, at least on the EBITDA side, to show growth.

I’m just wondering if you guys can give us more color of how you see Sky going forward, if there is a level where you see disconnections or your total clients might normalize. Thank you.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Okay. That’s a great question. I think that the CapEx discussion is up to 25%, and it comprises everything, Izzi, Sky and Bestel, our B2B, our DTH, and our and our cable fiber business. That comprises it all. With regards to Sky, I think there is this misperception of what Sky really is. Sky used to be a great business. You know, all over the world, DTH represented a great business. In all markets, what has happened is, with the advancement of the networks, the thick networks, obviously the connections are better and a lot of the streaming are also competing with that.

You see internet plus streaming doesn’t allow much room for a DTH platform to keep on growing. Our plan is basically to make sure that we have the lowest possible cost at Sky, meaning it’s revenues minus variable costs, programming costs, minus the satellite and conditional access. Other than that, it’s a cash flow generator, generating business. We don’t expect it to stop or to normalize or level at any point. I don’t think that’s something that people have seen anywhere else, given the conditions that I have just described. As you segregate that segment, Sky, and its direct costs, which are the only costs that they basically have, everything else is our B2B and our B2C business.

I think that’s the way you should approach this market, as opposed to this is an overall thing and our revenue is declining. Oh, yes, our DTH revenue is declining as expected. And what we did is streamline the DTH business, so it keeps on generating cash, it will be generating cash for the foreseeable future, and we have a business that is long-lasting, which is our direct to consumer and B2B businesses.

Alejandra Azar, Analyst, GBM: Thank you, Valim. One more, if I may, and this is just, to remind us all, when do you have to pay the transaction of Sky? The one, you know, you bought?

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: It’s 2027 and 2028.

Alejandra Azar, Analyst, GBM: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Anguisha for any closing remarks.

Francisco Valim, CEO of Cable and Sky, Grupo Televisa: Thank you very much for participating. Give us a call if you have any additional questions. Have a great weekend.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.