América Móvil Consolidated Results
Throughout the fourth quarter, concerns about the rise in inflation rates across the board kept financial markets
alert about the policy implications, with U.S. 10-year Treasury yields moving around in a relatively wide band35 basis pointsbut ending the quarter very much where they had started, at 1.51%.
Notwithstanding the volatility in interest rates, equity markets continued to advance, with the S&P 500 delivering a 10.7% increase in the quarter. In our region of operation the Mexican peso, the Colombian peso and the Chilean peso all
experienced bouts of volatility in the second half of November, with the former recovering fully by the end of the year and the other ones depreciating further.
Fourth quarter revenue totaled 227.3 billion pesos, a 7.7% year-on-year increase, with service revenue expanding 5.4% to 180 billion pesos. The consolidated figures mentioned aboveand those that will be referenced belowexclude TracFone as it has been
deemed to be a discontinued operation; they also exclude Argentina, which is presented under inflationary accounting. At constant exchange rates service revenue growth came in at 4.4%, a similar rate to the one posted the prior quarter: 4.8%. In the
quarter, the Mexican peso appreciated vs. most other currencies in our region of operation on an annual basis, and depreciated slightly, 1.1%, vs. the U.S. dollar.
The pace of growth of mobile service revenue stayed roughly constant in the quarter, at 6.9%, with postpaid
revenue expanding 5.9%practically at the same pace as in the previous quarterand prepaid revenue growth accelerating to 8.7% from 8.1% in the precedent quarter. Several operations including Peru, Puerto Rico, Eastern Europe, Dominican
Republic, Mexico and Brazil experienced brisk mobile service revenue growthbetween 8% and 12.4%, with Austria posting a 7.0% increase.
On the fixed-line platform service revenue expanded 0.5%, with revenue growth from corporate networks accelerating
to 6.8% and that from broadband services decelerating to 4.0%. Both continued the trends followed throughout the year. Fixed-line voice revenue growth continued to decline, although at a slower pace than seen previously, whereas PayTV revenue kept
on declining roughly at the same rhythm as it had in prior quarters.
Our Eastern European operations
and Peru observed the fastest revenue growth in fixed-line services, with 13.1% and 11.8%, respectively. They were followed by Colombia and the Dominican Republic, with 7.1% and 6.2%.
Most of our operationsand four of the top five by revenuepresented service revenue increases in both
the mobile and the fixed-line platforms, helping us leverage fixed costs.
EBITDA came in at
89.8 billion pesos in the fourth quarter. This figure reflects one-off items including the impact of the sale of towers by Telmex in the quarter and the release of certain collection reserves a year
before that also took place in Mexico. Our adjusted EBITDA, correcting for these factors, totaled 82.9 billion pesos, representing an 8.9% increase from the year-earlier quarter. At constant exchange rates, adjusted EBITDA was up 7.7% year-on-year, slightly more than the 7.2% increase observed in the third quarter. The adjusted EBITDA margin rose to 37.6% from 36.0% in the year-earlier quarter.
The Dominican Republic, Central America and our European operations exhibited the fastest pace of EBITDA growth,
at 12.4%, 11.1% and 9.7%, respectively.
Our operating profit jumped 36.7% to 47.8 billion pesos.
Adjusted for the aforementioned extraordinary items, our adjusted operating profit reached 40.9 billion pesos and was up 20.1% in Mexican peso terms and 15.6% at constant exchange rates. It helped generateafter accounting for
19.7 billion pesos in comprehensive financing costsa net profit from continuing operations of 22.9 billion pesos.
The net profit obtained through both the operation of TracFone until its sale on November 23rd and the sale itself
is booked under the line item of Net Income from Discontinued Operations. It totaled 112.7 billion pesos. Together with the net income of our continuing operations it resulted in a net profit of 135.6 billion pesos in the fourth quarter,
which was equivalent to 2.1 peso cents per share and 2.0 dollar cents per ADR. For the full year 2021 our net income stood at 196.0 billion pesos, more than four times larger than the one observed the prior year.
In 2021 our operating cash flow allowed us to fund 170 billion pesos of capital expenditures, 65 billion
pesos in shareholder distributions and to reduce our net debt by 128 billion pesos in flow terms. Excluding leases, our net debt ended the year at 400.7 billion pesos, a 137.2 billion pesos reduction from the level outstanding at the
end of 2020. Net debt excluding leases was equivalent to 1.23x EBITDAaL at the close of 2021.