Mexico's America Movil quarterly profit dips as peso appreciates

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican telecommunications giant America Movil posted on Tuesday a 2.1% dip in first-quarter net profit from a year earlier, to 30.15 billion pesos ($1.7 billion), mainly due to smaller gains from foreign currency earnings as the peso strengthened.

The company, controlled by the family of Mexican tycoon Carlos Slim, said currency gains dropped about 40% to 13.7 billion pesos from 22.5 billion pesos in the year-ago period.

From January through March, the Mexican peso appreciated against several other currencies, the company said in a statement.

Revenue rose about 2% to nearly 209 billion pesos, above a Refinitiv forecast of 191.84 billion pesos.

Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), or core earnings, totaled 82.7 billion pesos in the three-month period, up 3.2% from a year ago.

America Movil added 1.9 million post-paid customers in the quarter, driven by Brazil, Austria and Colombia, while it lost 754,000 prepaid customers.

As of the end of March, net debt totaled 365.1 billion pesos excluding leases, down 16.4 billion pesos from the end of 2022.

Earnings per share fell far short of market expectations, averaging 0.48 pesos in the first quarter, below a Refinitiv forecast of 1.12 pesos.

Monex analysts called the earnings report neutral, citing low single-digit growth and "some resilience" on inflation.

"These figures validate a significant recovery in the consumption of the services and data segments, as well as efficient cost control, which has implied an operating margin close to 40.0%," the brokerage said in a research note.

($1 = 18.0201 pesos at end-March)

(Reporting by Carolina Pulice; Editing by Sarah Morland and Richard Chang)

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