Enersis Américas S.A. (NYSE:ENI) Q1 2020 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Q1 2020 Enel Americas Results Conference Call. AT this time all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speakers presentation there will be a question and answer session.[Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Rafael de la Haza, Head of Investor Relations. Thank you. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Jigi. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. [Foreign Speech] and welcome to our first quarter 2020 results presentation. I am Rafael de la Haza, Head of Investor Relations. Here with me is Aurelio Bustilho, CFO of the company. First of all, we hope you all and your families are safe and well during this time. Let me remind you that this presentation will follow the slides that have been already uploaded into the company's website. Following the presentation, we will have the usual Q&A session that in this opportunity, the questions will be only received through the chat of the webcast. Now, let me hand over the call to Aurelio, our CFO, who will start by outlining the main highlights of the period in Slide number 2. Please, Aurelio?

Thank you, Rafael. Hello everybody. [Foreign Speech] As you all know, the world is going through difficult times at this moment due to the COVID-19 virus. Our company is completely focused on developing the best possible measures to face the situation, and we are rapidly reacted in order to protect our people and help our community. In the coming slides, we'll see more detail about this topic.

Going to our operational highlights, Enel Americas EBITDA for this period reached $848 million, a decrease of 7% compared to the same period of last year. This is mainly explained by a negative currency devaluation impact, which reduced our results by $147 million. Without this negative effect, EBITDA would have increased by 9%. Group net income increased by 2%, reached $208 million. This is explained by lower financial expenses due to the payment of Enel Brazil's debt on August last year that we were able to do with the proceeds of the capital increase.

Regarding the potential impact coming from COVID-19 situation, our company is well prepared to face any working capital needs that we may have during this period. We have more than $2.5 billion of available liquidity and our net debt to EBITDA ratio is below one time at this moment and rating agencies has confirmed our ratings. Finally, in terms of ESG, we were recognized with Bronze Class for being part of the ranking of top performing companies of SAM's annual Corporate Sustainability Assessment that was published in the beginning of 2020. On the following slides, we will see a summary of how we are facing COVID-19 situation.

We have taken timely preventive measures to make sure our employees are safe during the COVID-19 emergency.

Around 50% of the total