Helios Towers plc

Hello everyone and welcome to the Helios Towers full year 2022 results. My name is Nadia and I'll be coordinating the call today. If you would like to ask a question at the end of the presentation, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I will now hand over to your host, Tom Greenwood, CEO to begin. Tom, please go ahead.

Thank you very much, Nadia. So hello everyone and welcome to the Helios Towers FY22 performance and FY23 outlook call. It's great to have everyone on the call today. I hope you and your families are well, and thank you very much for your time today. First up on page two, we've got the usual lineup for you of myself, Tom Greenwood, the CEO, Manjit Dhillon, our CFO, and Chris Baker-Sams, our Head of Strategic Finance and Investor Relations. So moving now onto page five for our highlights. We were very pleased with our performance in 2022 for two main reasons. Firstly, our business demonstrated its resilience and strength with strong revenue growth and EBITDA growth of 25% and 18% respectively, supported by significant tenancy growth. And secondly, we completed the last two acquisitions in Malawi and Oman, meaning our recent inorganic growth plan over the past two years is complete. Moving into 2023. Over the last two years we've roughly doubled the platform going from five to nine markets and seven thousand to fourteen thousand sites and our platform is now well invested and primed for growth which is why our big focus for 2023 is organic rollout, lower capex and driving returns. Our EBITDA guidance for this year It's 350 to 365 million US dollars, representing at the midpoint 26% year-on-year growth, including 13% organic. And by the way, the inorganic part of this is just the full year of the Oman and Malawi deal, which we closed last year. So in fact, over half of our 2023 growth is already in the bag. And of course, this will be supported by 1600 to 2100 new organic penalties and 170 to 210 million capex which comes down from the largely M&A driven 765 million in 2022 and finally as we continue to move forward we've got a really strong earnings base of 4.7 billion contracted revenue which of course all contains CPI and power price escalators So now on phase six, a quick wrap-up of our recent expansion and diversification plan. As you may remember, a couple of years ago, we embarked on a strategy to expand and geographically diversify, strengthen the business and take our operational customer service excellence to more markets. I'm pleased to say that with Oman closing in December, this phase of our expansion is complete and we move forward into 2023 with an enlarged lease-up ready portfolio on which we're already seeing growth as you can see from the right hand side where EBITDA growth has been on average 24% in the one to two years since the first three deals were closed. So overall very pleased with progress in our new markets and centering and we're targeting strong growth in all of these including Oman for this year. Now turning to page seven where we're providing some medium-term guidance on how to think about growth of the newly enlarged portfolio. As you can see from the left-hand side, during our previous organic harvesting period 2016 to 20, we delivered strong margin and tenancy ratio growth. Then in 21 to 22 with our acquisition, this obviously brings some margin and tenancy ratio dilution in the short term because we're buying underutilized assets which are ready for co-location and operational efficiencies to drive EBITDA, margin and returns up in the quarters and years ahead. And we're already seeing strong tenancy rollout in Q1 this year, which Manjit will provide some updates on later. As you can see from the right-hand side, with our leading positions in structurally growing markets, we expect continued levels of tenancy growth of around 7% to 9% each year in the medium term. which is what we've delivered in the past few years. This year that's translated into roughly 13% organic growth of EBITDA and we expect 10% to 12% growth on this each year following through to 2026. And so to back some of that up, here on page 8 we show some of the structural drivers which mean our market and our business are growing at elevated levels to other parts of the world. We have roughly 50% mobile penetration across our markets, which compares to around 90% in mature markets. This means subscribers are growing at 4% per year, which actually equates to 68 million subscribers coming online in our markets in the next five years. And this compares with 1% per year in mature markets. And of course, population growth of 2% on average across our markets further contributes to the increased demand for telecoms infrastructure. and therefore our revenue growth, which compares to roughly flat population across the G7 market during this time. All of this in our markets is driving the forecasted 8% points of service growth per year through to 2026, which is of course supporting our tenancy and EBITDA growth during this time. And as you can see on page nine, we have delivered around 8% tenancy growth Organically year on year since our IPO in 2019 which has all been within guidance each year and we're providing similar guidance of around 8% for 2023 which equates to around 1600 to 2100 tenancy additions we expect this year. Furthermore with the chart on the right hand side I was keen to explain the tenancy ratio change year on year and how the new site dilutes that initially. As you can see, we grew our sites in hand at the start of the year by 0.08x and then significantly grew the site count through new build pursuits and acquisitions during the year, leading to ending the year at 1.81. This of course provides us with a new enlarged asset base, which we're busy leasing up now to drive organic EBITDA and returns growth through this year and beyond. And on that note, Looking now at page 10, we really do have a good track record of leasing up both acquired and new-built sites. We've got 0.2 or 0.3x tenancy ratios increased each year on built-to-suit and 0.1x on acquired sites. This, of course, is no coincidence. It's based on our assessment of commercial potential wherever we deploy capital by buying or building a site. Lease up potential is our number one criteria we look at when assessing any site location and putting additional tenants on a site translates into the financial return that you see on the right hand side. And on the subject of infrastructure sharing and telecom coverage growth, the next page 11 shows some key highlights from our sustainable business strategy. We were really pleased in 2022 to receive a triple A rating from MSCI, which actually is their highest rating. This really demonstrates our credentials in this space from one of the most recognized agencies in the world. We're building on this in 2023 and beyond by further embedding non-financial KPIs to management incentives, which you can see on the right. The targets you see here are our key metrics that we focus on within our five-year sustainable business strategy. and cover key areas including digital inclusion, female and local empowerment, people development and climate change. The first two are linked to our annual bonus, the next three are linked to our three-year LTIP and the final two which is key enablers to delivering our sustainable business strategy. So this means management has significant financial incentives driving all of these which are all very important to us as a business. Without further ado, I'll hand over to Manjit and look forward to talking to everyone at the end of the Q&A. Over to you, Manjit.

Thanks, Tom, and hello, everyone. It's great to be speaking with you all today. I'll be going through the financial results and starting on slide 13. Continuing on from what Tom mentioned earlier, and despite broader macro volatility we are seeing across the globe, we've had a very strong year, delivering on all metrics of our 2022 guidance. Looking at our actual performance versus guidance, 2022 was one of our best ever years in terms of organic tenancy growth, with 1,601 tenancies added, which was at the upper end of guidance of 1,400 to 1,700. From a financial perspective, our lease rate for tenants has landed at the high end of the guidance range at 4% year-on-year, and adjusted EBITDA margin and capex both came within the guidance given. I'll be going through the financial details of these results over the next few slides but in general we are proud of our strong financial and operational delivery in 2022. Moving on to slide 14 where we present some of our main KPIs. We've continued to see adjusted EBITDA and portfolio free cash flow growth both the double-digit year-on-year growth which was predominantly driven by tenancy additions. In a few slides we'll present how our robust business model effectively protects us from broader macro volatility and which importantly results in growth being linked to what is within our control i.e. operational improvements and tenancy additions and the effects of this is evident in our dollar EBITDA progression. Now we have seen some moderate return on invested capital dilution which is previously signposted during the year and at our capital markets day and is really due to the initial dilution from our new acquisitions. These portfolios come with lower margins and lower tenancy ratios as they were purchased from mobile network operators who ran these as cost centres rather than as pure pay businesses. And this is where we see the opportunity to invest, to develop and lease up these assets to deliver long-term compounding returns, all of which will drive up return on invested capital in the coming years. Moving on to slide 15, our site and tenancy grade. and as mentioned earlier we've delivered record organic sites and tenancy growth in 2022. From a site perspective we saw 42% increase year-on-year reflecting organic growth of 751 sites and 3,242 acquired sites across Malawi and Oman. Year-on-year we've added 5,716 tenancies which is a 30% increase from 2021 Organically rated 1601 as mentioned earlier and this is our second best every year of organic tenancy growth for the company. Our tenancy ratio has dropped slightly on a group basis and again this is largely driven by the lower tenancy ratios of the acquired sites in Malawi and Iman which combined have a tenancy ratio of 1.3. On an organic basis our tenancy ratio remains broadly flat and this is due to the large site rollout during the year. And onto slide 16, we see here our revenue growth and EBITDA growth, which is 25% and 18% year-on-year, and up 14% and 9% organically, respectively. The revenue growth is principally driven by tenancy addition, in addition to CPI and power escalation, which I'll come on to more detail on the following slide. Adjusted EBITDA growth was driven by our organic tenancy growth and contributions from our new markets. Our EBITDA margin declined by 3 percentage points year-on-year, The margin decrease is driven is driven due to the dilution of new markets, but these margins will grow over the coming years and also due to higher power costs, which I'll explain now on the next slide. So moving on to slide 17. And here we set out the walkthroughs of our revenue and EBITDA progression for 2022. We've shown this detail breakdown throughout the year to really show our robust business model in action. So to take you again through the analysis. The first four bars of each bridge, organic tenancy growth, power escalation, CPI escalation and FX, all combine to make up organic growth and acquisitions being the contributions from new markets. Organic tenancy growth of 1,601 year on year has driven the 8% growth in revenue and 10% in EBITDA. But I want to take a minute here to focus on escalation movements. As a reminder, we have escalations in every customer contract in all of our markets. For power, 50% of our contracts have quarterly power escalators and 50% have annual power escalators. These escalate in relation to the local pricing for fuel and electricity. So if the local prices go up, then the escalators go up, and if the prices go down, the escalators go down. For CPI, we have annual CPI escalators which kick in around January. Year on year we've seen that on average local fuel prices have increased by 36% and that's principally driven by DRC, Tanzania and Ghana which has accordingly increased revenues by 6% with further escalations expected in the first quarter of 2023. We have a robust business model by design. We have structured the increasing revenues to effectively offset the increased OPEX due to higher power prices to protect our EBITDA on a dollar basis. On the left hand side you can see that the power revenues have increased by 25 million and that falls through to flat EBITDA on the right hand side. So from a margin perspective there is some dilution because the EBITDA margin on the power price movement is lower than the overall group margin and in this case there's diluted margin by two percentage points. However in a year of macro volatility where we've seen 36 percent power price increases we've been able to keep our EBITDA flat on this portion meaning that our contracts are escalating effectively and offset the off-ex impact of higher power prices. Moving on to CPI and FX, local CPI is currently around 9% but our revenue is up 2% from our CPI escalators which occur annually as I mentioned earlier and principally in the earlier part of the year. The FX movements we've seen mainly in Malawi and Ghana occurred largely in the second half of the year which have partially were offset by the CPI escalators that kicked in early last year. This has still left a minor impact on overall group results. However, we expect to see escalations capturing more of that CPI movement at our Q1 results as CPI estate is kicking around now. I think standing back, this is a useful demonstration of our business mechanics. And looking at this from an EBITDA level, what you can see clearly here is that the key driver of growth is tenancy additions, both organically and inorganically. Previously, as we mentioned at the Capital Markets Day, we showed how over the past six or seven years, our EBITDA growth has highly correlated to tenancy growth with little to no correlation to FX or oil prices. And this here is further demonstration of our earnings growth being driven by tenancy additions and being well protected against macro volatility due to our robust business model. All meaning that we are and will continue to efficiently and effectively capture the compelling growth opportunity across our markets that Tom spoke through earlier. Moving on to slide 18. Again, here we've set out a simple example showing the margin impact of power escalators. On the left-hand side, we show an illustrative example where a Tower Co. does not have power escalators in their contracts. And in this simple example, we show PowerOffX increased by 10 million without a corresponding increase in revenue, resulting in EBITDA reducing by 10 million and EBITDA margins reducing by 20 percentage points. On the right-hand side, we show the same illustration, but with the Helios Towers power escalators. and the middle table you can see simply here that the OPEX price increase has been offset by the corresponding revenue increase from power price escalators. This protects the EBITDA at 20 million however given the revenue has increased to 60 million to offset the OPEX increase there is a margin dilution of 7 percentage points which is lower than the without power escalations example. On the far right we show this example in action and again what this shows is our revenues and OPEX have increased due to power prices and the subsequent impact of margins. I think the combination of this slide and the walkthrough and the prior slide show that whilst there may be macro volatility importantly we as a company are set up effectively to ensure that our dollar EBITDA is well protected. Moving on to slide 19. Here you'll see the usual breakdowns that we normally provide which is very consistent from previous updates. 98% of our revenue come from large blue chip mobile network operators who are largely investment grade or near investment grade comprising Airtel Africa, Vodacom, Tico, Axiom and Orange. Our largest single customer exposure is 28% and that's spread across five different markets. We have strong long-term contracts with our customers and at the end of the year, we had long-term contracted revenues of $4.7 billion with an average remaining life of 7.6 years up from 3.9 billion at the end of 2021. This means excluding new wins and rollouts, we already have that revenue contracted and provide a strong underlying earning stream for the business. We also have 63% of our revenues in hard currency being either US Dollars or Euro TAG which increases to 67% when you annualise the new market acquisitions and that translates to 72% when looking at it from an adjusted EBITDA perspective. This is a fantastic natural FX hedge for the business which is further complemented by the escalators which I spoke about earlier. Finally on this slide for the new market expansion we're seeing a more diversified set of revenues per market and pro forma for the full year of acquisition no single market accounts for more than 34 percent of revenues. On to slide 20 and a look at capex. In 2022 we incurred total capex of 765 million which includes 557 million of acquisition capex principally related to Malawi and Oman. Organic capex came in at about £208 million which is slightly above our guidance and this is principally due to some capex spent in Oman late last year when we closed the transaction. For 2023 we're guiding to a capex range of £170 to £210 million of which £130 to £170 million is discretionary and £40 million being non-discretionary, both of which are in line with prior guidance we shared at the Capital Market Day. As you can see in our CAPEX guidance now that we've gone through a key phase of expansion in 2023 we'll be focusing on organic growth and leasing up our expanded portfolio and keeping CAPEX tightly controlled as always. Moving on to slide 21 and taking a look at our cash flow. As mentioned earlier we've seen portfolio cash flow up of 201 million up 20% year on year. This is principally driven by adjusted EBITDA growth, higher cash conversion and controlled non-discretionary capex expenditure. With regards to working capital, we've seen an 87 million working capital outflow. This is related to investments in advance for growth in 2023 on our larger, more diversified platform, which has now actually supported more than 400 tenancies being delivered so far this year, which is a fantastic start to the year, substantially above our typical seasonality. and again evidence of the structural growth opportunities in our market. Additionally, the working capital outflow also reflects the timing of customer payments which as we've seen year on year and quarter on quarter can be lumpy and can struggle period ends and that is typical for our business with our receivables days increasing from 46 to 57 days at 122. To be clear, this is purely linked to timing and not related to any bad debt issues and year to date we've already made good progress on receiving a good portion of that outstanding balance. As always, cash flow management and capital allocation is top of mind and disciplined which brings us to slide 22 which is a summary of our financial debt. Our net leverage at the end of 2022 was 5.1x and that's above our medium term target range of 3.5 to 4.5 as we had communicated in prior results and throughout the year. The increase is due to the closing of our new markets where we utilise predominantly debt capital for consideration However, excluding Oman, our net leverage was a turn lower at 4.1x, so around the midpoint of our target range. Due to the US dollar peg and relative risk profile of Oman, this allows it to be more highly levered, with around 200 million of local debt and minority shareholders alone utilised to partially fund the acquisition. Importantly, we continue to have headroom against our financial covenants, and the business is on a clear path to deliver at roughly a rate of half a turn per annum driven by organic growth. As it stands today we have ample liquidity and roughly around half a billion dollars worth of available funds comprising 120 million cash on balance sheets and 375 million of undrawn debt facilities. We sit on a very strong balance sheet with long 10-year debt with an average remaining life of four years. 83% of our drawn debt is also at fixed rates so overall we're in a great position to say that we have a very stable financial package and if we do look through any financing or refinancing, we'll be doing this for strategic reasons. On to slide 23 and a look at our guidance. We've changed the format of our guidance to provide expected ranges of expected outcomes for the year and this will be the format going forward. So starting with tendencies, given our robust tendency growth and pipeline, we're targeting organic tendency growth of between 1,600 to 2,100 in 2023. This implies a year-on-year growth of 79%. We're guiding adjusted EBITDA to a range of $350 to $365 million, reflecting our strong commercial pipeline for tenancy growth and continued operational improvement. Portfolio free cash flow is expected to be in a range of $230 to $245 million, and as mentioned earlier, capex is expected to reduce significantly to a range of $170 to $210 million, of which $40 million is expected to be non-discretionary. As you can see, we're targeting another record year in 2023, and this again simply demonstrates the robustness of our business model through macro volatility as well as the compelling structural growth of our market. And finally on to slide 24, a housekeeping item. Following the completion of the key phase of expansion and investment in four new markets, we will now align our financial reporting to these segmented regional structures. This broadly mirrors the coverage of our regional CEOs and how we track performance internally. East and West Africa will include Tanzania, Senegal and Malawi and will become one reporting segment. Central and Southern Africa will be another, including DRC, Ghana, Madagascar, Congo Bay and South Africa, while Oman will be part of the Middle East and North Africa. We will provide financial metrics now on these groupings and the new reporting structure will become effective from Q1 2023. And with that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.