Helios Towers plc

Good morning everybody and thank you for making the time to join us for us to communicate our Q3 2021 trading update. I'm going to flick through the slides so hopefully you've got them in front of you. Joining me on slide two today is the usual trio. I've got Tom Greenwood who's our Chief Operating Officer and will be our CEO once I step down in April next year and move to a non-executive deputy chair role and also Manjit Dhillon who is our CFO that you've met before many times. If I go to slide three this outlines the agenda for our presentation today and as you'll note there will be plenty of time for Q&A at the end which will come through our conference coordinator Bethany. So let me go to the highlights, slide five. Well, look, we've had a strong quarter in terms of our financial metrics. We've delivered a 10% revenue growth, bringing Q3 revenue just a little over $114 million for the quarter. And that's driven by the onboarding of the free Senegal Tower portfolio acquisition, as well as steady organic growth in the quarter. Correspondingly, our EBITDA has grown by some 6% coming in Just slightly shy of $61 million for the quarter. Now, our margin has decreased by two percentage points year over year to 53%, but this is primarily driven by investment in SG&A that we've made consciously to support our M&A activity and the new markets that we're bringing on board over the next few months. In terms of our portfolio free cash flow, We've grown our portfolio free cash flow by 2%, again, just shy of $45 million for Q3. This reflects, of course, EBITDA growth, but slightly offset by increasing corporate income tax, as well as some lease payments, which is a norm for our business. Moving on to operational and strategic update and KPIs. Well, look, it's been a really solid, strong quarter. Actually, it's our strongest quarter on tenancy growth for six years. We delivered 683 tenancies in the quarter, bringing our year-to-date tenancy count to 853, which is in line with our full year expectation. of being in the range we've articulated every quarter this year, which is between 1,000 and 1,500 tenancies. And it reflects and underpins the well-invested portfolio we've nurtured over the last few years in making sure we're ready to bring customers on to our asset base when they give us the order. In terms of tenancy guidance, I've mentioned We're sticking to 1,000 to 1,500 tenancies for this year, and we're very excited about not only the strong year-to-date performance, but we have a robust pipeline, as we've communicated this morning, with a further investment in CapEx to support the growth we're seeing coming through next year. In terms of acquisitions and the progress we're making on M&As we've announced, well, look, our new markets team continue to progress Well, in closing and integrating the acquisitions we've announced, there's five new markets in Africa and Middle East that we're still yet to close and we're confident of closing a number of these by the year end. And in terms of CEO transition, As you know, mid-August, I announced my retirement and Tom Greenwood will be succeeding me as CEO from our AGM in April 22. That transition is going incredibly well. We're working towards our five-year strategy that we'll articulate in Q1 of next year. And I'm looking forward to my non-executive role post-April next year as Deputy Chair. So let me hand over now to Tom, who's going to take us through the next few slides.

Thanks very much, Cash, and hi, everyone. Great to talk to you today. So I'm on slide six, just looking at a few charts here for tenancies, EBITDA, and portfolio-free cash flow. As Cash mentioned, we continue to drive tenancies upwards, both with inorganic and organic. We've added over 2,100 Tenancies year to date close to 1,300 being from the acquisition in Senegal and 853 year to date on an organic basis and as Cash mentioned very much therefore expecting to end the year within our stated range of 1,500 probably directionally somewhere towards the middle of that range. EBITDA continues to move upwards as would be expected. We've seen 7% growth from our 2020 four-year EBITDA for our Q3 annualized being at 243 million. It's probably worth noting here that a lot of the tenancies in Q3 came on towards the end of the quarter. So you're not seeing a full quarter of revenue on EBITDA from them. But if they had all come on at the start of the quarter, i.e. July 1st, we would have seen that EBITDA probably about a $9 million increase from that $2.43 thing at about $2.52. So that just gives you a sort of feel of the timing of these tendencies and what you should expect going into Q4, but also more importantly into FY22 next year.

Again, Portfolio Free Cashless, as Cash mentioned, touched down slightly.