Entravision Communications Corp

XMUN:EV9

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Entravision's Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. I am Roy Nir, Vice President of Financial Reporting and Investor Relations. Joining me today to discuss our results are Michael Christenson, our Chief Executive Officer and Chair of the Board; and Mark Boelke, our Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer.

Before we begin, I would like to inform you that this call will contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ. Please refer to Entravision's SEC filings for a list of risks and uncertainties that could impact actual results.

The press release is available on the company's Investor Relations page and was filed with the SEC on Form 8-K. Additional information may also be found on our quarterly report on Form 10-Q, which was also filed today. [Operator Instructions] We will try to answer any questions that relate to the topics contained in today's call.

I will now turn the call over to Michael Christenson.

Thank you for joining our call today. We appreciate your interest in Entravision. As you saw in our press release, on a consolidated basis, Entravision revenue increased 88% to $226 million in 3Q '26 compared to 3Q '25. Our operating income was $35 million in 3Q '26 compared to $6 million in 3Q '25. For our Advertising, Technology and Services segment, ATS, revenue increased 132% (sic) [ 133% ] to $177 million in 3Q '26 compared to 3Q '25.

We had more monthly active customers, and we had more revenue per monthly active customer. Operating profit for ATS was $35 million in 3Q '26 compared to $10 million in 3Q '25. ATS is the growth engine for Entravision, and we continue to invest to build our business. We focus on 3 areas for investment for ATS. First and most important, we invest to build more powerful AI capabilities into our platform. This requires substantial ongoing investments in product and engineering talent that are critical to delivering competitive performance for our customers.

Next, we invest in sales and customer operations capacity to acquire and serve customers. We focus on growing our customer count and revenue per customer to grow our business faster than the market overall. Third, we invest in our infrastructure capabilities and our ability to efficiently scale our business and build operating leverage into our business model. Again, our strategy is to invest in our ATS business to drive growth in revenue and operating income.

Now for our Media segment. Revenue in our Media segment increased 10% to $49 million in 3Q '26 compared to 3Q '25. Our Media segment produced a small operating profit in 3Q '26 compared to a $4 million operating loss in 3Q '25. Our Media segment revenue in 3Q '26 included $6 million of political advertising revenue. Political revenue for Entravision for all of 2026 will be approximately $25 million.

This compares to political revenue for Entravision in 2024, which included the presidential election of, $34 million and in 2022, the last midterm, of $32 million. We had an internal target range for political revenue for 2026. $25 million was in the range, but at the lower end. We had 9 critical races in 2026 that we expected would produce most of our political advertising revenue. The Texas U.S. Senate race, the gubernatorial races in California, Nevada and Texas and 5 critical House races in Texas and 1 in Florida.

Ad spend for us was good in the Texas House races, but most of the others were at the low end of our targets. The most disappointing race for Spanish language media was the Texas U.S. Senate race. Texas is a state where 32% of the registered voters are Hispanic. Importantly, 50% of Hispanic registered voters in Texas request their ballot in Spanish. James Talarico had a low double-digit allocation of media spend to Spanish language. Ken Paxton did not invest at all in Spanish language media. The lesson is clear. You will not win an election in Texas if you ignore the Hispanic voter.

Now I would like to provide an update on our Univision affiliation. We filed an 8-K on October 5 when we extended our affiliation agreement with Univision through March 31, 2027. The extension was to provide additional time for us to continue discussions with TelevisaUnivision. However, we have decided to explore strategic alternatives for our TV business without a Univision affiliation.

Now I'll ask Mark to share with you more details of our financial results for 3Q '26.

Thank you, Mike. I'll start by reviewing the performance of each of our 2 reporting segments, Media and Advertising Technology and Services. In our Media segment, third quarter revenue was $49.1 million, which was up 10% compared to the third quarter of 2025. This increase was primarily due to an increase in political advertising broadcast revenue. In the third quarter, Media segment's total operating expense increased $1.0 million compared to third quarter '25, an increase of 3%, primarily due to an increase in costs associated with the increase in advertising revenue.

Total operating expenses represent the sum of direct operating expenses and selling, general and administrative expenses as those 2 line items are reported in our segment results. The Media segment had an operating profit of $0.1 million in Q3 '26. This was compared to an operating loss of $3.5 million in Q3 '25. As Mike noted, we are evaluating strategic alternatives for our TV business. As part of this evaluation, we expect to reset our organizational structure and expenses for our Media segment in order to align expenses with revenue and generate a profit in 2027. In addition, we also announced today that we have entered into an agreement to sell our TV stations serving the Tampa, Florida market for $30 million.

Now I'll turn to our Advertising Technology and Services segment, or ATS. Third quarter revenue for the ATS segment was $177.2 million. This was an increase of 133% compared to third quarter '25. We had a higher number of monthly active accounts and higher revenue per monthly active account. We have had success executing our strategies in the ATS business, including strengthening the performance capabilities of our technology platform and strengthening and expanding the ATS sales team and geographic sales coverage. Sequentially, ATS revenue was down 3% from Q2 '26. As we've mentioned, one of our priorities is to win larger clients whose advertising spending on our platform can be variable for various reasons. This can have a meaningful impact on ATS results in any given quarter and can lead to some variability in ATS quarterly results.

Our goal is to build a solid foundation for growth over the long-term. ATS total operating expenses increased 72% in the third quarter '26 compared to third quarter '25, an increase of $14.4 million. Operating profit for the ATS segment was $35.2 million in Q3 '26. This was an increase of 261% versus Q3 '25. A significant amount of the increase in operating expenses was due to the expense of cloud computing services as a result of processing more client transactions and an increase in sales commissions and performance-related compensation as a result of the revenue increase and achievement of other performance metrics compared to the prior year.

Sequentially, ATS operating profit was down 12% from Q2 '26. The reduction in operating margin was due to 2 primary reasons. First, the ATS business invested in additional sales, engineering and ad operations staff in the first half of the year in order to drive future growth and expand into new geographic territories, and these hires were fully onboarded by Q3. In addition, the Smadex team implemented a multi-cloud migration strategy for certain components of the Smadex platform infrastructure.

We believe this strategy will allow us to have more efficient cloud spending in the future. However, this resulted in some temporary additional cloud expense for a period of time during Q3, which we do not expect to recur in future quarters. One of our goals for the ATS business is to generate positive operating leverage and the ATS revenue increase exceeded the increase in operating expenses in terms of percentage and absolute dollars. At the same time, our goals also include having consistent improvement in operating leverage over time.

On our last earnings call, we said that we expected Q4 to have significant year-over-year revenue growth of more than 100%. That expectation is still true. We believe that our ATS business is strong, and we continue to see overall growth in the number of active monthly accounts and revenue per account as we execute on our strategic and operational priorities in the ATS business. Again, our goals include to grow revenue, generate positive operating leverage and build the ATS business over the long-term.

Combining our 2 operating segments, on a consolidated basis, revenue for third quarter 2026 was $226.3 million, up 88% compared to third quarter 2025. The 2 segments together generated a consolidated segment operating profit of $35.2 million in Q3 '26 compared to $6.2 million in Q3 '25. The increase was primarily a result of operating profit in the ATS segment. We had a consolidated operating income of $28.3 million in Q3 '26 compared to an operating loss of $9.1 million in Q3 '25. Corporate expenses in third quarter '26 were $6.8 million, a 7% increase compared to third quarter '25 or about $0.4 million, primarily due to an increase in stock-based compensation. We have taken steps to significantly reduce corporate expenses over the past few years.

Entravision's balance sheet remains strong with $90 million in cash and marketable securities at the end of third quarter 2026. Our current strategy regarding allocation of cash is to first reduce debt and maintain low leverage and second, return capital to our shareholders. In third quarter '26, we made a debt repayment of $5 million, reducing our credit facility indebtedness to $153 million at the end of the quarter. We remain committed to reducing debt and maintaining a strong balance sheet.

In addition, we paid $4.6 million in dividends to stockholders in the third quarter or $0.05 per share. For the fourth quarter of 2026, our Board of Directors has approved a $0.05 dividend per share payable on December 31, 2026, to stockholders of record as of December 17, for a total payment of approximately $4.6 million.

We'd like to thank you all for joining our call today. And at this time, we'd like to open the call for questions from the investment community. Roy, I'll turn it back over to you.

Thank you, Mark. [Operator Instructions] I see several questions from investors on the topic of capital allocation. Given the growth in the ATS business and improvement in operating profit this year, are you considering any change to that strategy? Mark, do you want to address this question?

Sure, Roy. Thanks for the question. We intend to complete 2026 under our current strategy, which, as I mentioned, is to first reduce debt and maintain low leverage; and second, to return capital to shareholders, primarily through dividends. We've executed on both pieces of this strategy this year. Year-to-date, we've paid down $15 million of debt, bringing our credit facility balance to $153 million at the end of the third quarter.

And we paid approximately $14 million in dividends to stockholders and the Board approved an additional $0.05 dividend for the fourth quarter payable on December 31, 2026. That said, the business looks different today than it did when we first set those priorities, including due to the performance of our ATS business as well as the sale of assets such as our TV station in the Tampa market that I mentioned earlier on this call.

So it's appropriate for management and the Board to take a fresh look. We plan to review our capital allocation priorities in early 2027, and we expect to share our thoughts on that review with investors on our fourth quarter earnings call, which will be held in early 2027.

Thank you, Mark. We also received several questions from investors about the customer concentration in the ATS segment. Can you give an update on how you're thinking about large customers and concentration?

Sure. Thanks, Roy. I can address that question as well. As we said last quarter, we limit our disclosure on individual customers to what's required for SEC reporting. Beyond that, we keep customer details confidential for competitive and other business reasons. What I can say is that our strategy is what I discussed earlier on this call. Competing for and winning advertising budgets from large customers remains a priority for ATS and adding more large customers would allow us to reduce the concentration of any single customer.

That said, given the size of our business, variability in spending by our largest customers can have a meaningful impact on our results in any given quarter, and we're prepared to accept that variability as we manage the business to achieve long-term growth. At the same time, we're also focused on growing the customer base and number of customers overall, and we continue to see growth in the total number of monthly active customers.

Thank you, Mark. At this time, we do not have any additional questions, and we will conclude the Q&A session. We'd like to thank you for joining our call today. If you have any questions that we were not able to address, please reach out to us at [email protected]. We are committed to answering your questions, and we will follow up with you.

We also welcome our investors to connect with us through the Investor Relations page, investor.entravision.com, where you will have access to the transcript of this call, the press release containing our third quarter financial results and a copy of our quarterly report filed with the SEC on Form 10-Q. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report our fourth quarter and full year 2026 results. Thank you very much. You may now disconnect.