Helios Towers plc

Hi everyone and welcome to the Helios Tales H1 2024 Global Investor Call. Really excited to talk to everyone today and I hope you and your families are all doing well. So we're looking forward to providing you with our progress through the first half of 2024 and of course our outlook for the rest of the year. So on page two we've got our usual lineup. Myself, Tom, Manjit, Dhillon and Chris Baker-Sams. We'll cover the business, strategic and financial highlights and then look forward to the Q&A at the end. So moving to page five. Very pleased to say that our business continues to deliver with the strong momentum that we started the year with in Q1 and our outlook for the year remains strong. Our key strategic equity value creation targets including ROIC, cash flow generation and deleveraging have all seen improvements in the quarter, the half year and the last 12 months. And we remain laser focused as a team on expanding enterprise value, reducing leverage and creating significant equity value. As 4G and 5G continue to proliferate our markets, as well as general significant coverage and capacity demand requirements, We continue to partner with all key customers in helping deliver high quality mobile services to the people across our markets. Remember that in our market fixed line largely has been leapfrogged so mobile through our infrastructure is the only form of connectivity for most of the population. Thank you very much. This being the fastest growth anywhere in the world and really driving the demand for the infrastructure and services that we provide. Given these dynamics, our ability to deliver service excellence to our customers and our uniquely positioned portfolio, we've delivered over 1600 tenancy additions in H1, a record number and seen tenancy ratio expand Tendency growth has been the key driver of our financial metrics with revenue up 11% EBITDA and portfolio free cash flow up 19 and 14% respectively and ROIC up to percentage points. Furthermore, we continue to strengthen our balance sheet with leverage reduction of 0.2x in the quarter and 0.6x year on year. We've secured our debt at fixed rates for the next five years and also saw upgrades from Moody's, S&P and Fitch in the quarter. In terms of full year outlook and following the strong performance in H1, We're tightening our guidance up at the bottom end for tenancies and EBITDA and continue to track well towards our targets for leverage being below 4x and the inflection point for free cash flow being neutral this year and growing higher thereafter. Now turning to page 6 where we can see the progress year to date versus our guidance. And as you can see from these, we have good confidence in achieving our guidance by year-end. Tenancies are well over the halfway point, 1649 additions year-to-date. Q2 annualized EBITDA is 416 million already, so towards the higher end of our guidance before the mid-year, and with a similar dynamic for portfolio-free cash flow. Our teams have done a great job working collaboratively with our customers on rollout, which has delivered a very high quarter of tenancy additions in Q2 with 888 added, which to some extent reflects some tenancies earmarked originally for H2 accelerating into H1. Hence, we haven't shifted the top end of our guidance yet, but we will continue to monitor progress and provide a further update at our Q3 release. We've got a strong pipeline of tenancies and are currently working with all key customers on rollout plans and executing that day in, day out. And you should not infer from this strong Q2 that there is any structural change and flattening off of growth, quite the opposite in fact, and hence there's more upside pressure on the guidance figure

I think when we come to Q3.

Now to page 7 where we see how our tenancy ratio expansion is driving the equity value creation financial metrics. And over the 18 months since FY22 when we completed the last of our four acquisitions, our tenancy ratio has expanded from 1.81 tenants per site to 2.01. at H124. And this being the key driver for ROIC increase, which has increased 260 bits to 12.9% over that period. Furthermore, our bottom line free cash flow, which you can see at the bottom of the chart in red, is well on course for reflection this year, following the previous few years of high acquisitions and growth capex investments now starting to pay back. and we expect the minus 10 million at H1 to be neutral at year end and continue upwards after that. On page 8 is a slide you've seen before and here all I'm doing is reiterating our disciplined approach to capital allocation and returns. We continue to be focused on accretive organic growth and deleveraging. targeting below 4x by the end of this year and around 3x by 2026, at which point we expect there to be capacity for investor distributions. M&A remains at the low end of capital allocation policy for the foreseeable. Moving to page 9, and here I wanted to showcase the success that our Oman team has had since starting operations there in December 22. Oman, as a reminder, was the largest of our four acquisitions a couple of years ago and really demonstrates well the execution of our integration and growth strategy. Oman is led for us by Jadawi Al-Riyami as the MD of our market there and supported by Phil Lowidon at regional level. In focusing on our people and business excellence strategic pillar, from day one we ensured a strong localized team with 91% local workforce. They've now trained almost half of our team on Lean Six Sigma as well as fully rolling out all of our systems and processes and embedding the Helios Towers culture of customer focus and excellence. All of this has contributed to a 92% improvement in power performance since starting operations and a 0.36x increase in tenancy ratio, which has been the key driver in the 46% EBITDA increase. We're very pleased with how our team and partners have performed so far and worked so collaboratively with our customers and are very excited for the future performance of Helios Towers OMAR. And finally, to page 10, we take a look at our sustainability KPIs, and I'm very pleased we're making good progress here across the board. Just to pull one out from here, we're continuing to increase our power-up time performance, reaching 99.99% across the portfolio in H1, meaning that our customers' networks are improving continually and subscribers in our communities are experiencing better and more reliable mobile use quality. Our strategy on business excellence and leveraging technology to improve performance continues as we strive towards our 2026 target across all of these measures. And with that, I'll hand over to Manjit and look forward to talking with everyone in the Q&A.

Thanks, Tom. Hello, everyone. Great to speak with you all again. And starting on slide number 12, I'll be going through the financial results. And following on from what Tom spoke to you earlier, we remain focused, as always, on driving organic growth and lease up on our portfolio, in turn supporting return on invested capital growth, both across our new and existing markets. And on this slide, as usual, you see we've summarized our performance in the main KPIs. And I'll be going through those in more detail over the next few slides. So moving on to slide 13, our sites and tenancy growth. From a site perspective, we saw site growing at 10% year-on-year. That represents an incremental 315 sites year-on-year and 88 sites year-to-date. Just a reminder, we are very selective in our approach to new site rollout, ensuring that the sites have clear potential for lease-up, and then we try to partner with MNOs to identify and build in the most attractive locations. From a tenancy perspective, we had near record organic tenancy additions of 2,691 tenancies year on year. That's a 10% increase, and as Tom mentioned, that's driven by our largest markets, including Oman, Tanzania, and DRC. And we're particularly pleased to see that our tenancy ratio is now above two, tracking well to our 2.2 tenancy ratio target by 2026. And that follows a 0.14 improvement in our tenancy ratio year on year. Moving on to slide number 14, We've seen revenue and EBITDA growth in all our reporting segments, and that's predominantly driven by the tenancy additions and tenancy ratio expansion, which we've spoken through. We've seen revenue growth of 9% and EBITDA growth of 17% year-on-year, with the Middle East and North Africa and Central and Southern Africa delivering year-on-year growth of 35% and 20%, respectively. Our EBITDA margin increased by 3 percentage points to 53%, again, all driven by lease-up and operational improvements. Now onto slide 15. Here we present the usual analysis which shows the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth. As with previous results, the key driver of growth has been tenancy additions, with the escalators effectively working to offset macro movements to protect our EBITDA on a dollar basis. This is shown quite clearly on both charts. If you look at the left-hand bar of both bridges, tenancy growth effectively drives the entirety of both revenue and EBITDA growth year on year. Now as a tower company this is what we want to have our growth driven by tenancies which comes down to our ability to identify attractive markets enter them through buy and build opportunities and then partner with M&A's to proactively lease up our space and drive operational improvements. This is exactly what we do and what we focus on every day. Just as a reminder though, we have escalators present in all customer contracts in one form or another. For example, for power, roughly 50% of our contracts are quarterly power escalators, 50% are annual power escalators, and these escalators go up and down depending on the local pricing of fuel and electricity. So if the local prices go up, then the escalator goes up, and if the prices go down, then the escalators go down. And for CPI, we have annual CPI escalators, and they typically kick in between December and February. I won't go through all the movements on the bridges in detail, but you can see here, similar to prior results analysis, that the net effect of the escalators is to broadly offset and protect the business from the impact of FX and power price movements, with a key driver of EBITDA growth being tenancy additions and operation improvements. In short, our business structure continues to be robust and resilient. On to slide number 16, and this focuses on our drivers of free cash flow. Our strong EBITDA performance has supported a portfolio free cash flow growth of 40% year on year. Our leveraged portfolio free cash flow increased roughly in line by 60% to 50 million and that demonstrates our operational and financial leverage on a largely fixed interest cost base. We continue to follow a disciplined approach to capital deployment and only invest in projects that exceed our target work thresholds which Tom spoke through earlier. Importantly, now over 90% of our debt is fixed and with leverage set to reduce further we expect to see our levered portfolio free cash flow grow over the coming years especially as we expect capital efficient EBITDA growth being leveraged on broadly fixed interest costs and for H1 we've started to see this effect with free cash flow improving to an outflow of 10 million compared to around negative 40 million outflow in the same period last year with Q2 having generated a positive free cash flow of plus 18 million dollars and that represents the best organic performance we've seen since we've doubled the size of the company. We continue to expect free cash flow to be neutral this year and growing there afterwards and we reiterate that today. Moving on to slide 17, capex has and continues to be tightly controlled and in the first half of 2024 we incurred total capex of 80 million which is primarily made up of 38 million of growth capex and that reflects the strong tenancy growth that we've seen and also 23 million of non-discretionary capex. In terms of guidance we've tightened our tenancy guidance upwards as Tom mentioned and we've marginally updated our guidance on capex from 150 to 190 million to 155 million to 190 million accordingly. 45 million of non-discretionary capex which we spend on regular maintenance of our towers to keep them to high operational standards That will remain consistent from the guidance we gave at the beginning of the year. Now on to slide 18. I wanted to touch on our successful bond refinance we executed in May. As a summary, we raised an £850 million five-year bond at 7.5% coupon to repay our £650 million note, which was expiring in December 25, with the remainder of the proceeds repaying our local facilities in Senegal and partially the floating component of our group term loans. both of which carried higher interest costs compared to the new bond rate. As you can see on the charts on the right hand side with the bond refinance we have successfully pushed out our average remaining life of our debt from two years to five years. The transaction is leveraged neutral and despite increases in US Treasuries we've seen over the past few years our blended cost of debt has now remained broadly static at 7.3% and in the call out you can see that the spread that is US Treasuries has reduced substantially when compared to when we listed. I think this transaction really reflects the improved credit profile of the company, having diversified into new markets, continued to grow organically and drive free cash flow and deleveraging, and the strong operational and financial performance we've delivered over the past few years. This was also reflected in the recent upgrades we received from Moody's and S&P, the B1 equivalent, as well as the positive outlook change by Fitch. I want to also take a moment to thank our debt investors for their continued support and excitingly with the capital and capital structure we need to deliver our great ambitions over the coming years and whilst there may be further macro volatility we are fairly well insulated from that through the combination of this transaction and also our robust business model. On to slide number 19. Just again touching on our leverage in debt. Our net leverage at the end of H1 has decreased by another 0.2x to 4.2 and that's 0.6 reduction year on year. There was no change to what we announced earlier this year and we're committing to getting net leverage down to below 4x by the end of 2024. We have approximately 255 million of undrawn facilities at both group and opco levels and together with circa 145 million of cash on balance sheet means you have 400 million of available funds available to us. About 50% of the cash on balance sheet is held at group with the remainder spread amongst the opcos for capex and lacking capital purposes. and as we've mentioned earlier more than 90% of our debt is at fixed rate as we use the bond proceeds to repay the floating rate portion of our existing liabilities and this now gives us a clear fixed cost base which we can leverage our growth on. And finally moving to slide 20. We've tightened up the 2024 guidance for tenancies EBITDA, portfolio free cash flow and capex. We guide now to 1,900 to 2,100 on tenancy additions, compared to 1,600 to 2,100 previously. For adjusted EBITDA, we expect to be in the range of 410 to 420 million and portfolio free cash flow in the range of 280 to 290 million, both tightened upwards by 5 million at the low end of previous guidance. With the expectation of higher tenancy growth, we expect capex to be in the range of 155 to 190 million, which I went through a few slides ago. All of these changes will support reducing our net leverage to below 4x and free cash flows to become neutral. It's been a busy and strong start to the year. We're tracking well towards our full year guidance. And with that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.

Thanks very much, Manjit. So just on page 21 now for the key takeaways. As you can see, we've had a very strong start to the year in terms of Supporting our customers' rollout with record tenancy additions that's fed through to strong double-digit EBITDA growth and of course the ROIC expansion, deleveraging, continuing and well on track for our full-year targets with guidance being tightened upwards and really continued focus on organic growth Capital efficiency, right expansion and the leveraging for the full year and beyond. So thank you everyone for listening and we'll now open up to the Q&A.

As a reminder if you'd like to ask a question today please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now to enter the queue. If you're preparing to ask your question please ensure you are unmuted locally at star followed by one. First question today comes from David Wright from Bank of America. David, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the questions. I guess just back to the guidance a little. You've obviously had a very, very strong H1 in terms of the tenancy ads. And if we take the midpoint of new guidance, say 2000, and you've pretty well, you've done over 1600 in the first half. Why such a A change in pace implied in H2, you know, effectively falling around sort of three quarters. Why is that? And then I guess, you know, with the very, very strong sort of tenancy momentum, I guess the question is, why is that maybe not dropping through towards a slightly more positive view on the EBITDA line? I appreciate you brought up the low end. but you know not maybe gapping up the higher end by a similar amount it is is the it's a difficult question to ask but is there a quality of tenancy ads effect here where maybe they're coming in at a sort of lower revenue or is it a phasing effect if they only come in at the end of the quarter I'm just trying to sort of piece this together it just feels like the tenancy guidance is so very very cautious unless there are other dynamics at work. So just appreciate any call you guys can give on that. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thanks, David. I'll start off with Manjit Shippin as well. So I guess a couple of things there, David. Yeah, just the first one, just on your last point on the timing effect of tenancies. Absolutely, yes, there is always a timing effect of The tenancy number reported is the tenancy achieved by the last day of any quarter and so therefore unless all of the tenancies in that quarter come in on the first day of that quarter, which obviously never really happens, you don't see the full effect financially in the given quarter. But obviously all of these tenancies coming on stream are all you know standard tenancies with us typically 10 to 15 year minimum terms and then renewals thereafter so you know from a future annuity point of view the tenants are now on they're paying and you know that's there for many many years ahead so that's why the financials in the quarter don't always quite sync up with the actual I think just in terms of the sort of overall guidance, you know, I guess the sort of back of the envelope calculation that you did. Yeah, look, it's mid year, you know, we felt that it was right to, you know, slightly tighten things. We'll give a more update in Q3. You should not infer that there's any kind of major slowdown happening or anything like that. We're very, very busy with rollouts. We're busy with all our major customers. And we'll certainly be giving a lot more color on that at the Q3 update.

but but I guess just just if I may jump in Tom I don't know whether Manjit was about to to add but you know when you mentioned you shouldn't infer a major slowdown but the guidance tells us there's a major slowdown in tenancy ads right um you know it's it's basically falling by 75 in the second half so you know we shouldn't infer it but it's kind of presented in the guidance so what's the what's the missing part there well we're being you know we're being

Cautiously optimistic at the mid-year. We've outperformed in H1, so I think it's very important to make the point. The Q2 tenancy edition was a huge effort by the team. That was certainly an outperformance. The full-year guidance remains intact. We've tightened the lower end. as we have done with the key financial metrics and you know I think the Q2 outperformance should not be seen as a negative if anything it should be seen as a positive and you know as more tenancies come in over the coming months we'll be monitoring as to what guidance we give at Q3 which you know as I mentioned earlier I suspect there was more upwards pressure on that than downwards pressure but we've got more work to do to secure them and roll out as we move through the year but we're very very confident of doing that as the performance in H1 has demonstrated and we'll certainly be giving you know further updates on that.

Thanks, Tom.

Yeah, and I'll just add as well that tendencies are never evenly spread throughout any year. That's never been the case for our company history. Typically, H2 is actually a bigger phasing than H1. Except for the last two years now as Tom mentioned the tenancies is a position at the end of the period but what you want to try and do is lock in those tenancies as quickly as possible because they will give you typically lifelong cash flow so you want to try and get that into the business quickly so what you're seeing at the moment is two three tenancies being bought in into the h1 so we can start to earn that income as it goes through the end of the year Now, as we know from our tenancy pipeline system today, it looks a little bit more back-end loaded because we've already bought some of those Q3s into H1. The rest will probably come in more broadly in Q4. But still, standing back, and we look at this on a year-on-year basis, we're still guiding to about 10% growth in tenancies year-on-year organically and also growing in really quality markets. Just to remind you, we're growing in markets like DRC and Oman, dollarized markets, which give further strength to the business. all of those things are really really important as well as Tanzania which has a multiplayer market so we're feeling very confident we've been very happy about the operational delivery in terms of getting these in and I think this is actually all positive moves for the year more generally.

I think if I might just add Manjit and hopefully I'm not going to monopolize too much longer but when you say you know bringing them in earlier you know what's kind of changed in the execution of Colo to all of a sudden bring in you know such a kind of Structural shift of tenancies into Q2. Has there been any kind of new process, any innovation or is it the learning curve in Oman perhaps? Has there been any sort of specific change that means you've been able to bring these guys on earlier?

Yeah, I would say to be anything kind of structural as such in terms of anything revolutionarily happening. It's just the teams are really, really improving on a day-to-day basis. And we're utilizing all the Lean Six Sigma training that we have and we've implemented particularly new markets like Oman. And you've seen the fruits of that. And that's why we want to do that deep dive in the overall presentation. So it really is just operational excellence. It's also the fact that we do have our site upgraded in the main so that they are colo-ready. So when those orders are coming through, The next question is from Graham Hunt from Jefferies. Graham please go ahead your line is open. Thanks very much. I think two questions and then maybe just one technical one.

First, just staying on the guidance, I don't know if there's any color you can give us on the quantum of tendencies that were brought forward from Q3 into Q2 that could sort of give a sense of the normalized run rate. And then thank you for sort of confirming they are what you'd see as standard contracts. Should we therefore infer that actually, because you brought them on a little bit earlier, that now your second half EBITDA and cash flow is probably picking up a bit higher than you maybe first thought it would do at the beginning of the year. And then second question, just on the investment environment, I hear you when you say you remain laser focused on deleveraging. But just wondering, as we're starting to see bond yields tick down a little bit, is there anything in the pipeline that you're seeing that if we were to see another 100 basis points Thank you very much, Graham. I'll take the first couple and then Manjit can take the tax one.

Yeah, look, I mean, you know, if you look at the sort of trend of recent quarters, you can probably say, you know, a couple of hundred or so extra were in Q2 and sort of brought forward. That would, you know, that would align roughly with previous quarters or previous recent quarters at least. Just on the M&A, you know, we're really just focused on in-market organic growth. We're very focused on continuing to do leather, very focused on accreting ROIC and driving equity shareholder return and we're not looking at and M&A expansion plans for the foreseeable. So no, if rates move down 100 bps, something like that's not going to tempt us to move off this course. We're very disciplined and see if continuing for the foreseeable. Okay.

I'll take the tax point. So yes, it's all about timing when it comes to tax and sometimes it can be lumpy. So typically you do see tax payments happening in the first half of the year. We will expect to see a few more eating through through the second half as well though. So one of the guidances we give is that to model anywhere between 4% to 5% of revenue as taxes. So I'd have that in the model and keep that steady.

The next question comes from John Kyridis from Deutsche Bank. John, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. I'd just like to ask the question on guidance a little bit differently. It would be Really useful if you went through the top three markets individually. You tell us at the end how many competitors are there, but we can't really get a flavor for what the competitive intensity is there. Just to give us some confidence that mobile operators are not pulling back from capital expenditure because A couple of your customers, and among them your biggest customer, is talking about counting the pennies a bit more intensely, not just in one market, but in multiple markets. So if you can give some assurance there, that would be good. Please. And then my second question, super simple. Any update on the Oman Bolton opportunity in terms of timing? And if you could remind us what the number is in terms of your investment there, if you make it.

Yeah, thanks, John. Yeah, so I'll take that one for the Three major markets, or three largest markets, Tanzania DRC and Oman. I guess Tanzania DRC are similar in mobile operator dynamic for major mobile operators in each market and sort of the reason that you can spread market share. And, you know, these are all large multinational mobile operators with whom we've worked with for many many years and then Oman is a three-player market which obviously we've been operating in for a little over 18 months but doing business with all the operators there. I think it's worth just remembering that DRC and Tanzania mobile subscriber penetration on a unique basis is still quite substantially below 50% with very high growth year-on-year, high single digits or low double digits. Of course, data growth is exponential. in those markets as well. What we're seeing is basically continued need to closing both coverage and capacity gaps in the networks as well as 4G and 5G upgrades happening at the same time. Now, as we all know, rollout comes a little bit in fits and bursts in this industry, which is natural when mobile operators are choosing to do large rollouts. And if you remember, in 2023, we saw a real kind of outperformance in DRC, particularly with a number of the mobile operators Paul James Barrett, Fritz Dzeklo, and Tan Mir and Omar have both had very significant rollouts in the first half of this year, which are continuing. We're very happy with our progress in all those markets. We're very close to all our customers in those markets, continuing to work. with all of them on rollouts as we speak and plans for the remainder of this year and into next year. And I think the dynamics in the markets are very, very strong. Of course, we're the leading power operator by a long way in all three of those markets as well. We have a substantial portfolio that we're able to sell for co-location and of course we do build the suits as well for all major customers.

Thank you. I don't know, just before we go to the Oman point, can I ask us again, the mobile operators keep talking about renegotiating. Not just with TowerCoach, but with pretty much all their suppliers, given their mess they're in with FX and inflation. So can you give us some assurance that these type of discussions, the pricing discussions, are not exceptionally intense now versus before? Is it business as usual or not?

Yeah, absolutely, business as usual. I think what you're referring to is heavily focused on one market, to be honest, where we do not operate, that being Nigeria, where there has been effect challenges that are quite publicly known about. And I think that we continue business business as usual. We're working with all our major customers as we speak. We're rolling out probably as I'm talking for most of them today. We're not seeing any out of ordinary pricing pressures that's unusual for any business. Remember I guess A lot of our markets are innately hard currency. So if you think of Oman, which is hard pegged to the dollar, DRC, which is dollarized, so everything there happens in dollars, Senegal, Congo D, which are hard euro pegged. And within our other markets, we have mixes of and others. We've got a very good portfolio mix both from a country perspective, a customer perspective. and also a currency perspective. Over 70% of our EBITDA is hard currency and the local currency portion is all power prices and CPI linked escalators. So we've got a robust position on that and that's how we do our business and that's how we'll continue to do our business.

Great Tom, thank you.

If it's possible to get an answer on the mind that would be lovely please. No timing confirmation on that as yet. We'll continue to monitor that and see what happens if it happens. The rough amount You know, a little over 50 million total, which H2 would provide 70% of. But yeah, the timings are not certain at all yet. So no update on that as of now.

Great. Tom, thanks very much for everything.

Brilliant.

Thanks, John.

Cheers for the questions.

The next question comes from Rohit Modi from Citi. Rohit, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thanks for the opportunity. Hope I'm audible. Most of my questions have been answered. It's just a follow up on the mix of all the questions, particularly the interest from mobile operators. Given site additions have been slowing down, and I believe site additions bring a more sustainable long term Better quality revenue than co-locations. I understand there has been a focus on co-locations. But, you know, the decline in Southside Tradition, is this something that you have, you know, that was part of your guidance that you were expecting? And, you know, is it kind of a major slowdown that you're seeing from the operator's side? If you can give a bit of color around that. Second, just to confirm the decline, the 53 million effect impact you have on the P&L, is that particularly related to this decline in the change in your policy around the debt where you have moved some of the amortized costs? Is that going to P&L?

Hey there, Tom, let me take the first question and Manjit can take the second question. So just on Kolos versus Built to Suit, for sure the major rollout focus has been on Kolos. That's been in part our strategy to focus on lower capital intensity growth, Kolos being the lowest capital intensity product that we usually have. and partly what mobile operators are looking for in terms of increased capacity, increased coverage where we have site locations already and therefore don't need to build a new site and technology upgrades. So all of that has driven a much higher percentage of colos versus new site builds or build-to-suits as we call them. Just a slight correction there in terms of your mention on the financial quality of new sites being better. The financial quality is the same. The colos and the pursuits operate under the same contracts, same terms, everything. So the financial quality of the revenue streams coming in are identical. whether that's a colo or a built-to-suit. The built-to-suit requires us building a new site which has a higher capex amount than a colo does which is just putting a tenant on an existing site so it has minimal capex and that's really the only difference between them. And then Manjit, do you want to just take the second question?

Yeah, sure. Sorry, I was slightly struggling to hear you, but I think it was in relation to the FX. So there's two component parts to this. So one is part of the bridge that we walked through, where you see a bit of an FX decline as a consequence of revenue impact. And that had a minus six year on year, but that's kind of compensated by the CPI escalation. So from that perspective, it's kind of net net. I think I heard you also mentioned P&L, so I'm assuming you're also referring to some of the FX pieces that may be going through finance costs. Yeah, that's still in relation to predominantly some of the movements that we're seeing in FX rates across the market, particularly you've got some historical elements related to shareholder loan reclassifications, although that is changing as an accounting policy at Helios, so that'll be going through other comprehensive income in due course, so you'll see that decline period on period. but really this is where we do operational transactions across the group in the first half of the year so there's a few impacts there of FX but in general as a business we're pretty well covered by all of these and from a cash perspective FX is well covered by all of the tenancy ratio movements that we have and all the escalators that we have going through the group so then you might see an accounting impact but from a cash flow perspective they're very much under control.

Thank you. The next question is from Maurice Patrick from Barclays. Maurice, your line is open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks, guys. Yes, Maurice here from Barclays. Thanks for taking the questions. Just a couple from me, please. The first one, just, I guess, a bigger picture question. I mean, you've talked about some of the growth you're seeing from your clients being capacity and coverage, but just what is that split in terms of urban and rural in terms of your tenancy ads but also new sites you know is it is it is it majority sort of urban capacity or is there any a majority coming from more so rural coverage build-outs and then just related to that is it safe to assume that the vast majority of all of your tenancy growth is coming from your core MNOs as opposed to growth coming from other verticals or new entrants and then just one sort of small one given the IHS MTN News for yesterday around the restructuring of that contract in Nigeria. Are you seeing calls from your customers to change the structure, to have more local FX elements? I think you've touched about it in the past, but any updates on that thinking would be very welcome. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks, Maurice. Let me start. I mean, first of all, on the urban versus rural, yeah, look, majority urban. or Suburban. That's where we're seeing most of it. We do some rural sites as well. We're seeing quite a lot of coverage and capacity needs in urban and suburban areas. That's where our customers are focusing a bit and still doing some rural as well. Just on the IHS contract point. Yeah, look, I won't comment on another company's contract, but, you know, in respect of our contract, it's fairly normal to do, you know, renewals of tenancy, master lease agreements from time to time. We have a very diverse spread of customers across the group and so therefore the percentage contribution from a single customer's contract for Helios is relatively low so perhaps wouldn't hit the headlines in the way that it did yesterday. but yeah we continue to work with all of our customers and when ones come up for renew you know there are certain terms in there that are important to us and we ensure that we maintain those ones where needed. I'm sorry Maurice, can you just remind me of your second question?

Yeah, it was just to understand, I'm assuming the majority, if not all of your tenancies are coming from your major customers, your major MNOs, just making sure there's nothing coming from new entrants or other third parties or different types of tenancies would be helpful, thank you.

Yeah, absolutely, vast, vast, vast majority, virtually 100% from core MNOs, absolutely.

That's helpful, thank you.

Thanks.

As a final reminder, that's staff followed by one to ask a question today. As we have no further questions, I'll hand the call back to Tom for some concluding remarks.

Brilliant. Well, thank you, everyone. Thanks for your questions. Thanks for listening in today. Really appreciate it. As always, we're available for calls or meetings. Please do get in touch if you'd like any follow-up and we really look forward to speaking with you again at Q3 for further updates and look forward to completing another successful year at Helios Towers.

So have a great day everyone and we'll talk soon. Thank you.