Q3 2024 AMC Networks Inc Earnings Call

Patrick O Connell

Thank you, Kristin. We remain consistent in our strategic and financial priorities. We continue to lean into our unique strengths as an independent, innovative and nimble premium programmer, allowing us to successfully execute our disciplined financial framework even as the overall industry continues to redefine itself. We’re quite proud of the significant strides we have made towards our key financial goals, including the optimization of our programming investments, the generation of robust free cash flow and the continued preservation of the strength of our balance sheet.
As Kristin mentioned, year-to-date, AMC Networks has generated $293 million of free cash flow. This puts us solidly on track to achieve our financial outlook of year-over-year free cash flow growth for 2024 and approximately $0.5 billion of cumulative free cash flow by the end of 2025.
As mentioned in our earnings release this morning, we closed the transaction with BBC Studios last Friday, where we acquired the remaining 50% of the BBC America joint venture that we didn’t already own for $42 million in cash, including cash that was distributed from the JV’s balance sheet. We now own 100% of this iconic channel with full operational control and look forward to what the future holds.
Of course, we still maintain a close commercial relationship with BBC Studios to ensure the brand and programming remain top tier. We will continue to fully consolidate BBC America as we did prior to the transaction.
Assuming this transaction closed on September 30, $133 million of redeemable noncontrolling interest related to the BBC America and reflected on our consolidated balance sheet would be eliminated. Going forward, we’ll keep 100% of the cash the business generates and will no longer be making any related cash distributions to noncontrolling interests.
Moving on to our third quarter consolidated results. Consolidated revenue for the third quarter was $600 million, representing a decrease of 3%, excluding 25/7 Media in the prior period. Adjusted operating income was $131 million, representing a 22% margin, and we generated $54 million of free cash flow in the quarter.
Now looking at segment level results. Domestic operations revenue decreased 2% to $530 million. Subscription revenue of $316 million decreased 5%, primarily due to linear subscriber declines, resulting in a 13% decline in affiliate revenue. This was partially offset by streaming revenue growth of 7%. Streaming growth was driven by both subscribers and rate, and we ended the third quarter with 11.8 million streaming subs.
We are pleased with the performance of all of our services, and we’re encouraged by the strong retention we have seen to date, particularly across our portfolio of targeted services where we saw year-over-year improvements in retention in the third quarter. As Kristin discussed in detail, our high-quality programming performs very well on both owned and third-party platforms. It remains highly sought after, and we continue to focus on optimizing the monetization of our AMC Studios’ owned IP across an array of different windows. This includes finding new fans and building new audiences through broadly penetrated distribution partners, providing us access to the widest possible audience and in turn, increasing the value of our IP.
The results are clearly visible in our strong third quarter licensing performance. Domestic ops content licensing revenue increased 31% to $81 million, driven by the timing and availability of deliveries, including deliveries related to the AMC collection on Netflix. Echoing what Kristin said earlier, we are thrilled with our performance here and the halo effects to date.
Advertising revenue of $133 million declined 10%, largely due to lower linear ratings, partially offset by continued digital growth. It is worth highlighting that this is the second quarter in a row where we saw sequential improvement regarding the year-over-year rate of change in ad revenue.
Domestic Operations AOI was $150 million for the quarter with a healthy margin of 28%. The year-over-year decrease in AOI was largely driven by linear revenue declines in the quarter.
Moving to our international segment. Third quarter international revenue was $74 million. Excluding 25/7 Media in the prior period, international revenue decreased 6%. International advertising revenue growth remained robust in the third quarter with growth of 16%, largely driven by the momentum of new AVOD offerings, namely ITVX in the UK, in addition to growth in Central and Northern Europe. International AOI was $14 million for the quarter with a margin of 18%.
Moving to the balance sheet. We ended the third quarter with net debt of approximately $1.6 billion and consolidated net leverage ratio of 3 times. As a reminder, we completed a series of meaningful financings this year and significantly extended our maturity profile. And as such, we now have no bond maturities until 2029.
We ended the quarter with approximately $1 billion in total liquidity, including $816 million of cash on the balance sheet and our undrawn $175 million revolver. We appreciate the flexibility and optionality of our meaningful cash balance. We believe our capital structure will continue to present attractive opportunities for us to deploy cash in an accretive manner, benefiting both the equity and the credit over time. In the third quarter, in addition to our regularly scheduled amortization payments, we paid down an incremental $35 million of our credit facility debt.
Our capital allocation philosophy remains prudent and opportunistic. First, we look to support the business by creating and acquiring compelling programming that resonates with our audiences, while maintaining healthy levels of profitability and cash flow generation. Second, we look to improve our balance sheet by reducing gross debt and optimizing our capital structure. Third, M&A and share repurchases or dividends remain further down our current priority list.
Moving on to our outlook. We are pleased with the progress we have made year-to-date, and we believe we are well positioned to achieve our outlook for the full year. Beginning with free cash flow, we continue to expect to grow free cash flow this year, year-over-year for the full year 2024. And by 2025, we expect to have generated cumulative free cash flow of approximately $0.5 billion.
In terms of revenue, we continue to expect total revenue of approximately $2.4 billion for the full year. On AOI, for 2024, we continue to expect consolidated AOI of $550 million to $575 million, with growth in streaming and digital advertising as well as prudent expense management remaining key focuses of ours despite ongoing linear revenue headwinds. We anticipate cash programming spend to be a little bit less than $1 billion this year and that programming amortization will be similar to 2023 levels.
I’ll close with what I’ve said in the past regarding our overarching financial philosophy. We continue to employ our back-to-basics approach that emphasizes broad distribution of our content and brands across platforms and prioritizes near-term monetization and at the same time, takes advantage of our unique position as a nimble and innovative premium programmer. We’ll continue to allocate our capital wisely to ensure we maintain a healthy balance sheet, remain extremely disciplined on expenses, and balance appropriate levels of programming investment against available monetization opportunities.
With that, operator, please open the line for questions.

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Thomas Yeh, Morgan Stanley.

Thomas Yeh

I’m hoping to get a bit of an update on the ad-supported tier for streaming, and how that may or may not have kind of evolved over time as a broader mix of your 11.8 million subscribers. I mean you have that and then you have the momentum on your FAST channels, just trying to collectively think about the inventory that you have to play with and whether or not you’re still agnostic to the ad tier versus non-ad tier in terms of adoption as you kind of drive your OTT growth.

Kristin Dolan

Thomas, it’s Kristin. There’s a lot to unpack here. I think I’m actually going to throw it to Kim to take you through the specifics on your questions.

Kim Kelleher

Sure. We’re very encouraged by early results of our ad-supported growth in streaming. Obviously, we just launched late last year, and we continue to see it play a pretty fast growth aspects of introducing new customers to AMC+ in all the right ways.
That said, it is still a very targeted approach. And as you point out, the way we go to market with that inventory is coupled with our digital inventory from other distributions, including FAST and AVOD.
Our priority has been to maintain a first sales position across all platform partnerships, which gives us that first sales right of bringing our inventory attached to our programming to market. So it’s a slightly different strategy than many of the others in the marketplace, but it’s serving us incredibly well and helping us to scale, so we’re seeing quarter-over-quarter growth consistently for our digital revenue.
And on top of that, we’re very, very aggressive with making our inventory more seamlessly transactable, more real time and more addressable, not only across the digital footprint, but also our linear footprint. Happy to expand on that more.

Kristin Dolan

And I would just say we’re comfortable with the split between — it wasn’t surprising to us at all. We can’t break it out, but the difference between premium and ad-supported on the streaming service for AMC+, we’re comfortable with how that’s coming in.
And what it’s also allowed us to do, while we keep our streaming services below $10 a month at this point, by bringing in the ad-supported tier, we took an increase on AMC+ prior increase, but now people have the opportunity to flex down and still keep the service. But important to remember that both the ad-supported and the premium are still below $10.

Thomas Yeh

So it sounds like it’s fair to say you’re willing to sacrifice maybe direct ARPU on an ad-supported subscriber for maybe some of the broader holistic things that it brings you from a —

Kristin Dolan

Yes, particularly, as Kim noted, because of the opportunity to truly sell cross-platform and to sell audiences versus just spots.

Thomas Yeh

And then, Kristin, you mentioned the original Walking Dead rights return to you in the next few years. Do you see that particular title as something that deserves a different approach? Or how are you thinking about redeploying that catalog? Or what flexibility does that open up to you relative to what’s actually happening now? Because I feel like you have some options.

Kristin Dolan

I mean it’s about 20% of our — the value of our inventory, or the value of our catalog is vested with The Walking Dead. And we know that with having all of it back in-house within two years, Dan has been doing a lot of thinking. I’ll flip it to him about how to best utilize that catalog and the associated IP to maximize the value. But it continues to be hugely popular around the world. So it is important that we’re getting all the rights back.

Dan McDermott

I’ll just throw in. I mean, obviously, these rights are very valuable to us. They come back to us, as Kristin noted, in roughly two years. And they’ll be possibly even more valuable to us as a part of a cohesive package that includes the entire full universe of Walking Dead shows. So we have a lot of different options, a lot of different ways we can drive monetization, and we’re going to be sure to be super strategic and do whatever drives the most value for the company and serves the fans. So we’re looking forward to that moment in time.

Operator

Steven Cahall, Wells Fargo.

Steven Cahall

So Kristin, it sounds like you’ve really seen the power of some of your marquee content on Netflix, and it was helpful to understand how that’s driving more subscribers to AMC+. How do you think about the value of those subscribers on AMC+ for those new seasons?
And then there’s kind of a studio inside of AMC that’s making all this. So how do you think about whether or not you want those new seasons on your own branded platform like AMC+ versus selling directly to Netflix with new original content, just given the size of their reach and what that reach has done with your own programming? So I would love to hear how you think about that trade-off between being a studio and being a distribution company.
And then, Patrick, thank you for the color on capital allocation. I feel like you’ve really deemphasized share repurchases or dividends for now. I know you’re not giving long-term guidance on AOI, but is that to — can we infer from that that you think that there could be some AOI growth pressure ahead that naturally pushes leverage a little higher. I think you’re prepaying some of your debt with your free cash flow. So trying to get at whether or not this is the last year of declines in AOI or if this implies there could be some decline still ahead.

Kristin Dolan

I’ll start. So your question about the new seasons, the way that we look at acquisition for AMC+ is we’ll look at the first stream that people watch when they come into the service, right? And so with the shows that are on Netflix, as you’re aware, it’s only prior seasons. So as I noted in my remarks, we see significant uptake on new customers coming in that are watching the new seasons of the show.
So it’s a roundabout way of answering your question, the value of those new seasons on AMC+ are really, really important. But that being said, we’re getting more and more sophisticated through our data and our analysis around viewership and what hunts and what doesn’t and what works in linear and what works in streaming, that Dan and team are getting much more sophisticated in really taking everything we have available to us and wind doing it in a very strategic way.
So I’ll let Dan comment on that to answer your second question.

Dan McDermott

Steve, I’d say, look, going back to what Kristin said at the top of this, making and curating great content is what drives the overall monetization opportunity in front of us, and it builds lasting asset value. And that’s, in particular, owning that value inside of our studio, whether we’re producing for AMC or producing for third-party platforms. So obviously, the beauty of having a studio and producing programming is that these rights rest with us. And we’re very interested and strategically working right now to create an opportunity with our studio to be able to sell to third-party platforms in a meaningful way.
As a reminder, we produced Silo for Apple, which has been a very successful show for them. Season 2 is, I think they’re going to — is dropping soon, and we’re soon to begin production on Season 3. And so we have a lot of plans for how to continue to build the library of assets in our studio and look forward to doing so over the next couple of years.

Kristin Dolan

The other thing I’d add to that is just Dan and his team are very good at creating content inexpensively, and we’ll do really high-quality shows like The Walking Dead or Mayfair Witches or Talamasca, which we’re filming now. But then we also produce really high-quality content very inexpensively for Acorn, for All Black. And so we can do anything from like $50,000 to $100,000 an episode all the way up to $6 million or $7 million an episode, and the quality is really good.
So Dan and team are very careful to select the right content, produce it incredibly well and efficiently, and then put it in the right places. And interestingly, we see some shows that may be what we would consider lower budgets to create that actually have great success even on platforms like Netflix.

Patrick O Connell

Steven, it’s Patrick. On your broader financial outlook question, I’d address it this way. The industry is still very much in the midst of a kind of generational change in the operating model here. We’re obviously subject to the same secular trends as others. We continue to evolve our business model in light of those changes. We’re mindful of the level of programming investments. We’re mindful of the level of expense that goes into this business. I think we’ve demonstrated an ability to be quite nimble and fishing where the fish are, whether it’s the kind of the pop-up on Max and then most recently, obviously, the content licensing deal with Netflix. And so we feel good about the hand that we have in terms of having really strong assets.
You mentioned yourself the value of the studio and the content that produces. We think that’s going to continue to accrue to the benefit of the company and the equity over time, near to intermediate term, it’s a little bit more opaque. As I’ve mentioned, we’ve taken steps to derisk the business from an operating perspective with the moves that we’ve made.
And then from a financial perspective, we still are very much focused on generating maximum amounts of free cash flow to maintain really good levels of financial flexibility and liquidity. And so as you’ve seen in this past quarter with the free cash flow generation, this puts us in a very good position to achieve our two-year guidance of $0.5 billion of free cash flow.
So net-net, we’re still in the middle innings here of the industry’s evolution. We’ve taken some meaningful steps, both on the operating side of the business and financially to take advantage of opportunities that exist, also derisk ourselves to the degree possible. So we feel good about that, and we’ll continue to play.

Operator

David Joyce, Seaport Research Partners.

David Joyce

A couple of questions on the impacts of the strategies that are coming to light. First, on the content licensing, a nice growth in that year-over-year, obviously, with the Netflix deal. I’m just wondering, given you’ve got a kind of a wide aperture for where you’re placing and selling your content, how should we think about this revenue stream? Is this kind of onetime for Netflix? Or is there something recurring there that we can look forward to each quarter? I know typically, it is a fairly lumpy revenue line. Just wanted your thoughts on that.
And then secondly, on the SG&A expenses, they were up a little bit year-over-year, but I’m just wondering — (technical difficulty) in the selling or if there are onetime items in this expense line? I’m just wondering how to think about that going forward as well. Thanks.

Kristin Dolan

It’s Kristin. On the content licensing, I just want to be clear, Netflix is not the primary driver of our content licensing increase this year. So just to be clear because I think that could be inferred from your question. We’re really focused on broad distribution of the content and generating the best possible return. But our owned IP and everything that we license is really windowed around the world in a variety of ways, either to we license to ourselves for our international areas and then in places where we don’t have carriage distribution, then we license to others.
But I’ll let Kim speak a little bit on the growth there because it has been a real bright spot for us, and I think we’ll continue to do so.

Kim Kelleher

Thanks, Kristin. I think just adding to what Kristin just shared, I’d say we opportunistically look around the world for opportunities in markets where we do not have an owned and operated footprint, and pursue making sure that our content is available everywhere viewers want to watch it, so that globally, a strategy that we’ve had long in place that continues to expand and grow.
Domestically, I would say we’re increasingly focused on nonexclusive deals that allow us to monetize our content multiple times on multiple platforms, whether ours or partners and oftentimes both, we’re really — but we do this very thoughtfully to ensure that we’re protecting the value of our content by retaining the premiers and the new seasons. So what we’re seeing is a premier is the first time someone watches something. So this gives us an opportunity to utilize the fragmentation in the marketplace to our benefit.

Kristin Dolan

And I’d add one other thing on that is just the way that we’ve reorganized the company in integrating all the majority of the brands, both on linear and streaming into one part of the organization. And so we’ve been able to utilize content across all platforms, across all services.
And interestingly, we don’t have a lot of overlap between our various brands as far as the viewership is concerned. even when you look at AMC+, AMC+ is arguably a catch-up service for the linear network. And when we went day and date so that everything is released on both at the same time instead of premiering things on the streaming service, we haven’t seen a decline in viewership.
Everybody is gravitating to watch the way that they want to watch. So the opportunity to move things around has not negatively impacted viewership on any of the brands and actually has allowed us to take content that might historically have been nestled under one brand and not been widely used across all the different verticals that we have. We’ve gotten much better at taking content, spreading it around and not cannibalizing ourselves while maximizing the value of particularly the things that we create ourselves.

Patrick O Connell

David, it’s Patrick. On the last question regarding the year-over-year trends on the SG&A line, that is largely due to an increase in marketing year-over-year. We’ve made a concerted effort to be quite tactical in our deployment of marketing dollars. And so this is mostly what we call performance marketing, bottom of funnel where we’ve got people in the ecosystem that have very high intent, whether this is search or other verticals where the CPAs are attractive. And so we’ve continued to be very tactical in the market that way and also across our various products. And so those are well spent dollars.
There’s kind of, I would call it, very near term, like inside 12 months or certainly within 12 to 18 months ROI on those dollars. So it’s mostly marketing on the SG&A line. Not seasonal so much is just tactical in terms of where and when we find subs at the right price.

Operator

Charles Wilber, Guggenheim Securities.

Charles Wilber

I was hoping, first off, on the Charter renewal that you called out, if you could share any color on how the revenue recognition might evolve between your affiliate revenues and your streaming revenues with the new deal? And then kind of when and how any subscribers to your streaming services might be recognized there?
And then secondly, on free cash flow. You guys have done really well through the first three quarters of the year. I know you highlighted the $42 million payment for BBC America, but wanted to see if there were any other kind of high-level items, puts and takes that you might call out for the fourth quarter, if there are any strike-related benefits in the prior year that you’re lapping or content production timing or anything like that?

Kristin Dolan

So first, yes, I was going to say for Charles, just on the Charter renewal. I’m sorry. We obviously don’t comment on specifics of any deal, but we sell as a bundle and we get paid as a bundle, and that’s really important for us because we are, I think, one of the first that has integrated our streaming products as well as our linear products on renewal and opportunistically with Charter, with Philo and with others in the space.
So I’ll throw it back to Patrick because I think the industry itself is still figuring out how we’re going to count these subs and how they’re going to report them. But as far as the terms of the deal, we fully integrate, and that’s the way it works.

Patrick O Connell

On the accounting, this is a deal that’s not going to be operationalized until kind of early 2025. So I would say watch this space. There’s more to come, and we’re not going to unpack the accounting right now. But obviously, as the revenue comes in the door, we’ll be very clear in terms of how that’s being recognized across the various revenue buckets, but nothing to say at this time right now.
Secondly, on your question regarding free cash flow, we continue to be very pleased with the amount of cash flow generation we’ve been able to squeeze out of the business. A big part of the reason we gave the two-year guide was twofold. One, to demonstrate our commitment to generating that amount of free cash flow, obviously, in service of supporting the balance sheet and liquidity in the business; but two, demonstrate our confidence in being able to deliver it.
An ancillary benefit there is that we’re not having to sort of necessarily manage it period-to-period or quarter-to-quarter. And so it does tend to be lumpy in terms of when content licensing deals get signed or when certain things are in production. I wouldn’t call out anything specific in terms of either one of those as far as this quarter goes, but you should expect lumpiness on a quarter-to-quarter basis, but that’s the beauty of your guide, which is you can rest assured that we’re laser-focused on achieving these numbers. And obviously, the performance to date kind of puts us in good stead to do that.

Kristin Dolan

I just finish the question, Charles, by also pointing out, it’s important just to remind people that we’re driving the profitability by refining and improving the organization, not by cuts. And so the Comcast Technology Solutions decision that will bear fruit when we complete that transition over the next period of time. It doesn’t happen overnight.
And reorganization, as I mentioned earlier, more efficient marketing, more strategic utilization of data, all of that is helping us bring the costs down without just aggressively making any cuts. It’s really about running the company more efficiently and utilizing a lot of the technology and the capabilities that we have at our fingertips here every day.

Operator

Thank you. This does conclude today’s question-and-answer session. And I would like to hand the conference back over to Nick Siebert for closing remarks.

Nicholas Seibert

Thanks for joining us today. Have a good day.

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.