Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. Fiscal 2018 Fourth Quarter Year End Earnings Call Thursday, May 24, 2018, 5:00 PM Eastern CORPORATE PARTICIPANTS Jon Feltheimer - Chief Executive Officer Jimmy Barge - Chief Financial Officer Michael Burns - Vice Chairman Chris Albrecht - President, Chief Executive Officer, Starz Jeff Hirsch - Chief Operating Officer, Starz Brian Goldsmith - Chief Operating Officer, Lionsgate Joe Drake - Chairman, Motion Picture Group Kevin Beggs - Chairman, Television Group Laura Kennedy - Chief Operating Officer, TV Group Rick Prell - Chief Accounting Officer James Marsh - Senior Vice President, Head of Investor Relations 1 PRESENTATION Operator Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Lionsgate Fiscal 2018 Fourth Quarter Year End Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will be given at that time. If you should require assistance on today’s call, please press star then zero. And as a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Senior Vice President and Head of Investor Relations, James Marsh. Please go ahead. James Marsh Thanks, Noah. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for the Lionsgate’s fiscal 2018 fourth quarter call and year-end earnings conference call. We’ll begin with opening remarks from our CEO, Jon Feltheimer; followed by remarks from our CFO, Jimmy Barge. After their remarks, we’ll open the call up for questions. Also, joining us on the call today are Vice Chairman, Michael Burns, Starz’ President and CEO, Chris Albrecht, Starz’ Chief Operating Officer, Jeff Hirsch, Lionsgate’s Chief Operating Officer, Brian Goldsmith, Chairman of the Motion Picture Group, Joe Drake, Chairman of Television Group, Kevin Beggs, Chief Operating Officer of the TV Group, Laura Kennedy, and Chief Accounting Officer, Rick Prell. The matters discussed on this call today include forward-looking statements, including those regarding the performance of future fiscal years. Such statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially and adversely from those described in our forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, including the risk factors set out in our annual report and Form 10-K filed with the SEC on May 24. The company undertakes no obligation to publicly release the result with these revisions to these forward- looking statements that may be made to reflect any future events or circumstances. With that, I’ll turn it over to Jon. Jon… Jon Feltheimer Thank you, James, and thank you all for joining us today. Many of you've already read the exciting news that this morning we launched our Starz offering on Amazon Prime in the United Kingdom and Germany. This is another major step in rolling out Starz as a global consumer brand. I'll talk more about this international rollout in a moment. But first, I'd like to briefly recap a strong quarter and a successful year in which we exceeded our internal and consensus financial expectations. We achieved this performance with significant contributions across our film, television and Starz platforms, enabling us to grow adjusted OIBDA by 11% to a record $604 million last year. We also continued to generate the robust free cash flow we anticipated. Let me take you through the highlights of the year that contributed to our strong performance. At Starz, we signed new deals with Verizon, Amazon, Altice and Sprint. They reflect the compelling value proposition we offer to linear and digital platforms alike. We achieved record ratings from returning series Power and Outlander and renewed key properties like American Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. Thursday, May 24, 2018, 5:00 PM Eastern 2 Gods and Girlfriend Experience. Earlier this month, we launched new series, Vida, Sweetbitter and Howard's End, driving over the top subscriber ads to their highest level since last October. And year-over-year, we've more than doubled Starz over the top subscribers. With our new programming connecting with its core demos, we reduced subscriber churn to its lowest level ever, as data from our direct to consumer business continues to enhance our ability to target our audiences. In spite of disruption in the traditional MVPD universe, success of our Starz over the top offerings allowed us to grow overall media network segment revenue by 5% last year. And we anticipate growth again this year. Turning to our film group; we increased our calendar year domestic box office by 30% in a highly competitive environment with hits from all areas of our slate, Wonder, a targeted film that we transformed into $300 million worldwide box office success, Ryan Reynolds and Sam Jackson's The Hitman's Bodyguard, Pantelion's breakout film, How To Be a Latin Lover and together with our partners at Amazon Studios, The Big Sick, one of the biggest indie hits of the year. We are off to fast start again this year with a faith based I Can Only Imagine; The Commuter from our friends at StudioCanal and Pantelion and MGM's comedy hit Overboard. In fact, Overboard is on its way to becoming Pantelion's highest-grossing film ever, reaffirming our ability to deliver hit content to the Latinx community. And overall, thanks to a targeted diverse slate, and an efficient business model, we achieved ultimate profitability on over 90% of our fiscal 2018 theatrical releases. We are looking forward to another great slate this year. With a feel-good comedy Uncle Drew, Sundance sensation Blindspotting, The Spy Who Dumped Me starring Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon, A Simple Favor with Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, Robin Hood starring Taron Egerton and Jamie Foxx and the Seth Rogen/Charlize Theron comedy, Flarsky. Fiscal 2018 was also a year in which we prepared to launch new franchises like Chaos Walking and The Kingkiller Chronicles, expanded the universe of existing brands like John Wick and adapted our Step Up film series into a hit television show that has just been renewed for the second season on YouTube. Last week, at the Cannes Film Festival, our presentation of Kingkiller led by director Sam Raimi was a hit with international buyers as we move forward with a major event film, a premium origin series and mobile console and board games with three different partners all under the creative leadership of Lin-Manuel Miranda. In television, we not only readied a number of signature properties for our network partners, but most importantly assembled our first Lionsgate produced lineup of premium programming for Starz. The Rook, our co-production with Liberty Global, began shooting in London earlier this month with a terrific cast and the John Wick Spin-off The Continental is slated to begin production early next year. It was also a year in which we continued to form new relationships with top streaming platforms while expanding our existing partnerships, with six scripted and unscripted series for Netflix, a growing supply of premium shows for YouTube and our first original series for Facebook watch. Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. Thursday, May 24, 2018, 5:00 PM Eastern 3 And it was a year in which our interactive games, location-based entertainment and Lionsgate over-the-top initiatives continued to gain momentum. Just yesterday, our fast-growing Pantaya, Spanish-language streaming movie service launched on the Comcast X1 platform. With the continued success of Pantelion's later films, including the recent hit Overboard, the debut of Starz original series like Vida and the rollout of Pantaya, we continue to build our leadership in the very important Latinx vertical. In addition to what we achieved in our individual businesses, we had a very successful year integrating Lionsgate and Starz bringing our employees together, achieving greater than expected financial and operating synergies, working collaboratively to extract maximum value from Starz original series on the distribution front, while partnering creatively to add exciting new properties to the Starz pipeline. And as I mentioned at the start of my remarks, earlier today we launched Starzplay branded channels in the UK and Germany on the Amazon platform bringing Amazon Prime subscribers over 1,000 hours of premium Starz original series, Lionsgate shows like The Royals, Casual and Boss and blockbuster film franchises from Saw to The Hunger Games. The Amazon relationship is an important part of our plan to create significant market share worldwide by rolling out the Starz brand in 15 territories over the next three years. All of this activity comes on top of a successful Starz launch in Canada and the continued growth of our Starzplay venture in the Middle East and North Africa. In Canada, where we recently announced our partnership with Bell Media, Starz programming is already available to consumers with full over-the-top and linear rollout slated for early next year. And in the Middle East and North Africa, our Starzplay Arabia Venture became a market leader poised to cross the one million subscriber mark. Our strong growth momentum also continues on the domestic front starting with renewal of our domestic distribution deal with Amazon creating win-win incentives designed to accelerate subscriber growth on one of our most important over-the-top platforms. And today, we're pleased to report that Starz will launch on YouTube TV next month bringing our full array of programming to consumers via their smartphones, tablets, PCs and connected TVs. We follow that with another major digital platform launch on Hulu in October and we expect meaningful subscriber increases from all of these new deals. These steps are just the beginning as our programming investment continues to bear fruit, and as we roll out additional distribution partnerships domestically and internationally.
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