Helios Towers plc

Hi everyone and welcome to the Helios Sales 2024 earnings call. I hope you and your families are all doing well and thank you very much for your time today. So I'm Tom Greenwood, Group CEO and we're very excited to be here discussing our 2024 results which included record tenancy additions and strong organic top line and bottom line growth. 2024 marks a pivotal point in the Helios Towers evolution where we move into a surplus free cash flow phase of our journey. Our rigorous capital allocation framework is serving us well. First, we invest capex in high return projects to deliver this organic growth. Second, we optimize our balance sheet with the appropriate level of financial leverage And what we saw over 2024 is that Helios Towers now has the scale in our business model where recurring surplus free cash flow will be generated with an improvement of $100 million over the course of the year to report $19 million of free cash flow for the full year. Our capital allocation framework will remain firmly in place, investing and continuing this organic growth, but with rising returns on our capital, The surplus free cash flow will grow, and so we will move our capital allocation framework focus to the third bucket, that of shareholder return. You will hear more on this topic as the year progresses, and I look forward to discussing this more with you, our shareholders, through the course of this year. So moving to page two, we've got the usual lineup for you of me, Tom, Manjit, and Chris. And as we see on page three, we'll cover the business, strategic and financial highlights and then be open for Q&A at the end. Now, first of all, I'd like to say a huge thank you and well done to all of our people, partners and customers across the business whose collective efforts have driven the strong performance in 2024. The business continues to be optimally positioned in closing the digital infrastructure gap across Africa and Middle East, the region growing faster than anywhere else in the world. Our telecom power leasing and power model, which involves hosting multiple mobile operators on individual sites, ensures a robust and predictable cash flow stream, which grows significantly as power utilization increases with the proliferation and densification of mobile networks. Our business model couples with our ability to execute operational excellence has driven 10 years of uninterrupted EBITDA growth at 26% compounded annual growth rate since 2015. There is fundamental and structural growth across the region, with population growth of 3% per year, which means doubling by 2050. Coupled to this, only 50% of the population have a mobile phone today, which compares to 90% in Europe and North America. Subscribers are growing at 5% per year and data consumption is forecast to grow by four times in the next five years, which is double the rate of the rest of the world. Through our laser focused business excellence strategy, we aim to provide the best customer service in the market and deliver global quality standards to ensure we're the digital infrastructure partner of choice for our customers. In doing so, we support the essential connectivity for the 150 million people who are covered by our mission-critical towers, where mobile is often the only available form of communication. As well as voice and messaging, this provides the platform for data applications such as banking, education, health, AI, social media and streaming. Services essential for life in today's world. So in short, our business provides investors with the unique opportunity of world leading infrastructure growth rates and high quality cash flow returns to deliver significant value as we move forward in our next chapter. Now to page five for the highlights. In 2024, I'm pleased to report that we delivered very strong growth and exceeded expectations across all key metrics. It was a particularly standout year because we inflected the bottom line free cash flow generation for the first time following previous years of large platform investment. And we're now really seeing that switch in the business and motoring forward. going up the gears and accelerating performance and recurring surplus cash flow generation. We've made solid progress towards our 2.2 by 2026 tenancy ratio strategic objective, arriving at 2.1 tenants per site by the end of 2024, driven by adding close to 2,500 tenants in the year, most of which were co-locations. and this was our highest year for organic tenancy additions of all time. The largest rollouts were in Tanzania and Oman where respectively 4G and 5G coverage and densification were the key focus and through our customer partnerships and operational capabilities we were able to ensure safe and fast rollout of hundreds of new points of service thereby enabling mobile access and improved quality of service to millions of people across the market. Organic tenancy growth and tenancy ratio increase are the main drivers for our strong financial metrics and in 2024 we delivered 10% revenue growth, 14% EBITDA growth, 1 percentage point ROIC increase, and very importantly a hundred million dollar positive swing in our free cash flow versus the prior year. 2024 was the first year in our history where we delivered surplus free cash flow of 19 million whilst at the same time delivering strong top and bottom line growth. This shows our strategy of increasing asset utilization to drive returns and cash flow is very much delivering. Furthermore, our leverage continues to decrease now to 3.98. Our credit rating has now been re-rated upwards again for the second time within 12 months. We now stand at BB- with S&P. We move forward with a strong balance sheet with fixed interest costs, meaning that growth in operational cash flow off of a fixed cost base drives amplified growth in bottom line free cash flow. And turning our focus now to 2025, we see the momentum of 2024 very much continue in terms of operational business growth, cash flow generation, and leverage reduction. We're guiding to 2,000 to 2,500 tenancy additions, which drives EBITDA growth. And with our capex focusing on high returning tenancies being carefully controlled at similar levels to 2024. All of this drives 2025 bottom line free cash flow surplus are two to three times from 2024 levels and leveraged down half a turn again to three and a half. As we move into this new territory of lower leverage and surplus free cash flow generation, we're very much looking forward to engaging with investors over the coming months on potential shareholder distributions from 2026. Moving now to page six, we can see here that the the consistency of our delivery against guidance across the board we've exceeded guidance on all metrics in 2024 following upgrades and tightening through last year and feel very good about the strengths of our team in delivering this performance and our ability to continue our disciplined growth and delivery in 2025 and beyond the 2025 year for all of us is about The operational metrics driving a steep step up in surplus free cash flow to our guided range of 40 to 60 million and leverage coming down to the mid threes. And our focus and drive for future performance is backed up by our historical performance as we see on page seven. 2024 marks 10 years of US dollar EBITDA growth at an annual compounded rate of 26%. showing our resilience and ability to deliver. And the drivers for this are threefold. One, the structural macroeconomic and mobile telecoms growth in our market, which are growing multiple times faster than the rest of the world when it comes to population, GDP, mobile subscribers, and data. Number two, our long-term cash flow business model, which provides predictability, and I'll come to this on the next page, and three, the strategy and capability of our team to deliver customer service excellence in a structured and methodical way to our leading mobile operator customers, aiming to be the partner of choice for all mobile infrastructure needs. With the growth dynamics set to continue for decades ahead and our team's dedication to customer partnership and operational excellence, We're ready to continually innovate and continue this trend for the next 10 years and beyond. Now on page 8, I'll talk you through our business model. Whilst the operational complexities of running thousands of sites across millions of miles of land, often with poor road and grid infrastructure, can sometimes be highly complex, The high-level unit economics of our business is beautifully simple. We're essentially a real estate and power company for mobile operators and create cash-on-cash returns in excess of our cost of capital through enabling the sharing of infrastructure. We own and operate the passive infrastructure of a site, which means the tower, the power, and the security equipment. We guarantee power-up time at close to 100%. providing maintenance and security services at the site and in this way the mobile operators have outsourced a non-core but essential activity to us which means they can focus on the front end radio and transmission networks and all the intricacies that come with that whilst we keep the site powered up and manage site access so when we buy or build a site it will always have at least one tenant on the anchor tenants from day one. We then increase the utilization of the tower over time through adding co-location tenants. The first tenant, the anchor, provides a cash on cash ROIC of 12% covering our cost of capital. And then with the second and third tenant, the ROIC steps up to 25 and 34% respectively, reflecting the incremental revenue coming through on the relatively fixed cost base. The long-term cash flows and resilience of the business come about through the long-term nature of mobile networks, which is mirrored in our lease contracts. These are typically 10 to 15 years minimum term, include annual CPI and power price escalators, and the majority of our revenue is dollar or euro based. As at the end of FY24, We had $5.1 billion of minimum contracted future lease revenue across all our tenancies equating to an average seven years of lease length remaining and this is before renewals or adding any new tenancies. This provides a very robust future revenue stream base for the coming years supporting our balance sheet and further growth as we add incremental tenancies to drive higher earnings and cash flow generation in the future. And on the subject of adding tenancies, let's move to page nine. And here it shows our consistent track record of successfully adding tenancies at a 7% to 10% rate every year since 2019. This reflects our 24-7 relentless focus on delivering customer service excellence on power uptime, speed of rollout, and overall customer experience to ensure that we work with our customers as partners, understand their needs and requirements early so that we can be operationally ready to deliver for them when they need us. Our focus for 2025 is clear. We aim to deliver between 2,000 to 2,500 new tenancies and we already have a strong pipeline at this point in the year. Now moving to page 10. I wanted to talk about how our tenancy ratio focus and 2.2 by 2026 target is directly driving ROIC and free cash flow returns. In 2021 and 22, we successfully acquired portfolios in four new markets doubling the size of the platform and diversifying our business on a geographic and customer basis whilst also increasing our hard currency earnings mix. We were acquiring tower portfolios from mobile operators which are often inherently underutilized and these four portfolios came with an average tenancy ratio of 1.2. Therefore on a short-term basis This brings about dilution of key metrics like tenancy ratio and ROIC, as well as being free cash flow consumptive with over $1 billion invested. Then, following ownership transfer to Helios Towers, we set about embedding our operational excellence on the assets to drive efficiency, and most importantly, start adding second and third tenancies to the new towers we've just acquired. And we've made strong progress since 2022. with tenancy ratio going from 1.81 to 2.05, ROIC going from 10.3% to 12.9% and free cash flow going from 721 million negative in 2022 to 19 million positive in 2024. So in the space of two years since our last acquisition, ROIC is in excess of our whack and growing and free cash flow has inflected by almost $750 million to become positive in 2024 and the surplus will be stepping up steeply in 2025 and beyond. Which brings me on to page 11 to reiterate again our disciplined capital allocation policy. We continue to prioritize capital efficient and high returning organic growth, principally co-locations and selected new bills This drives our operational EBITDA and cash flow growth, meaning that we continue to deliver at about half a term per year, now being below 4x and heading to 3x in 2026. Having delivered positive surplus-free cash flow in 2024 and expecting for that to step up in 2025 and each year beyond, our cash flow profile and balance sheet will be in the position to support potential investor distributions from 2026. And we will be engaging with all investors on this over the coming months. And finally, M&A continues to be de-prioritized for us, for the foreseeable, as we prioritize organic growth within our existing markets to drive high quality cash flow generation and shareholder returns. And with that, I'll hand over to Manjit for the financials and look forward to talking with you at the Q&A.

Thanks Tom and hello everyone, great to be speaking with you all today and starting on slide number 13 I'll be going through the financial results. As Tom has outlined 2024 was a year of continued delivery across multiple metrics and free cash flow inflection as is shown in the chart from this page. On the far left hand chart, you'll see we've delivered another year of strong tenancy growth, beating our upsized guidance and improving lease up by 0.1x. And this has really been the key driver of our EBITDA growth of 51 million year on year. And it is the combination of capital efficient growth through co-location lease up and also leveraging operational improvements, which has driven our return on invested capital by 1% to 13%. and we're expecting similar progression in 2025, expecting to reach 14%. Importantly, we saw an inflection in our free cash flow. We had guided to neutral and ended 2024 with positive 19 million, which is a hundred million increase year on year. And you can really see the swing over the last few years on the far right hand chart, where following key investments to expand to new high growth markets, we have and will continue to leverage the expanded portfolio to drive capital efficient organic growth in line with our capital allocation strategy which Tom just went through. Excitingly we see the cash compounding returns come through and we expect to see 2025 ending at circa 40 to 60 million dollars of free cash flow. I think this page really sums up the key successes of 2024 but also sets out that this is just the springboards for 2025. and now to jump into some of the detail and moving on to page 14 our site and tenancy growth from a site perspective we saw our sites growing by two percent representing an incremental 228 sites year on year we are very selective in our approach to new site rollouts ensuring the sites have clear lease up potential and try to partner with M&A's to identify and build in the most attractive locations from a tenancy perspective we had record organic tenancy additions of 2,481 tenancies year-on-year, a 9% increase, and that was really driven by our three largest markets of Oman, Tanzania, and DRC. And we're pleased to see that our tenancy ratio continues to track well to our 2.2 tenancy ratio target by 2026, following a 0.14 tenancy ratio expansion year-on-year ending at 2.05. Moving on to slide 15, our revenue growth. We've seen revenue growth of 10% year-on-year with growth in revenues across all three of our geographic regions. We have a strong hard currency profile with 68% of our revenues being in hard currency which translates to 71% of our adjusted EBITDA being in hard currency. Four of our markets are innately hard currency including DRC, Senegal, Oman and Congo Brazzaville being either dollarized or paged to the euro. meaning that the revenues our customers receive are hard currency which is also what they pay us in our remaining markets we also have a portion of revenues linked to hard currency adding further to the overall mix our earnings are then further protected by contractual protections including power and cpi escalators the cpi escalators typically escalating in q1 and power escalators escalating either quarterly or annually depending on the contract 98% of our revenue comes from the large blue chip mobile network operators with no single customer accounting for more than 26% of our revenue as you can see in the second pie chart and finally we sign into long-term agreements with our M&A partners with initial terms of 10 to 15 years and are largely non-cancelable today our contracted revenue of 5.1 billion dollars has an average remaining initial life of 6.9 years in other words We have secured a minimum revenue stream of 5.1 billion dollars without pursuing any new business and this provides a strong underlying earning stream that we can complement the further growth driven by tenancy rollout. All the dynamics mentioned in the bullet really do demonstrate the robust earning stream we have and moving on to slide number 16 we show how these dynamics work in action. And here we present the usual analysis showing the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth in a bit more detail. As with previous results presentations, 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. And this is shown clearly on the two bridges presented here, with Power, CPI and FX broadly offsetting one another. to ensure growth is driven predominantly by tenancy additions and operational leverage. 10% revenue growth from organic tenancy additions drove 10% revenue growth year-on-year. 15% EBITDA growth from tenancy additions drove 14% EBITDA growth year-on-year. In short, the key driver of growth is through tenancy additions and operational leverage from LeaseApp and we demonstrate again that the business structure continues to be robust and resilient and operating as designed. and onto slide number 17. Here we present correlation between our adjusted dollar EBITDA growth and tenancy additions over the past 10 years. Despite movements in some FX rates and Brent Cruz as shown in the dotted lines, our business model has continually delivered consistent US dollar EBITDA growth over that time and demonstrates an extremely high correlation to tenancy growth with an R squared of 0.96, which is almost perfectly correlated. Again this demonstrates that our business has been effectively set up to grow with tenancy additions which as you saw in Tom's section has been remarkably consistent since IPO and importantly through structural growth dynamics is expected to continue to grow over the long term and therefore drive further dollar growth. Now moving on to slide 18 and a look at our capex. CAPEX is tightly controlled and focused on capital efficient opportunities that drive return on invested capital expansion and for the full year we incurred total CAPEX of 169 million dollars which is primarily made up of 93 million of gross CAPEX reflecting the record tenancy growth we've seen this year and 42 million of non-discretionary CAPEX. This was slightly below our guidance largely reflecting the fact that we had a higher number of co-location additions. and looking out to FY25 we're guiding to 150 to 180 million of full year capex of which 50 million is non-discretionary. On to slide number 19. Looking at our leverage and debt, our net leverage at the end of Q4 decreased by 0.4x year on year to just under four at 3.98 to two decimal places and in line with guidance. We have approximately $255 million of undrawn facilities at both group and opco levels and together with $160 million cash and balance sheet means we have over $400 million of available funds. As a reminder 92% of our debt continues to be at fixed rate following our successful bond refinance earlier in 2024 and we have no near-term maturities until 2027. Finally, we were delighted to receive our second credit rating upgrade by S&P within a year to be awarded a BB- in February 2025, which reflects the combination of the business performance, but also the improved sovereign credit ratings of our markets, with Tanzania in particular receiving a positive update. On to slide 20. We set out a bridge here showing the drivers of our free cash flow. Our strong adjusted EBITDA performance supported portfolio free cash flow growth of 11% year on year. Our recurring levered free cash flow, the bar that says RLFCF, is a metric that reflects the capital available to management to deploy on discretionary capex, debt pay downs, and or shareholder distributions. And this increased by 59% to 148 million, demonstrating the leverage on our largely fixed cost finance costs and improving working capital. Importantly we have now inflected our free cash flow to positive 19 million as mentioned earlier and that reflects an improvement of 100 million dollars year on year and with continued execution of our capital allocation strategy again targeting capital efficient organic growth investments we expect to see further free cash flow growth in 2025 and beyond which takes us to slide 21 where we provide guidance for 2025. As we continue to see progress in our 2.2 strategy We target between 2,000 to 2,500 tenancies for the year. For adjusted EBITDA, we target between $460 to $470 million, meaning we are estimating double-digit growth at the midpoints for 2025. CAPEX, we target $150 to $180 million, of which $100 to $130 million is discretionary and $50 million is non-discretionary. Free cash flow, we expect to be between $40 and $60 million, more than doubling from 2024 levels. and finally we expect to end 2025 at roughly 3.5 net leverage all in all we're really pleased with the delivery in 2024 and the two milestones of inflecting free cash flow and our 10th year of adjusted EBITDA growth reflecting the efforts of our fantastic colleagues and I'm really very excited about the prospects for 2025 and beyond so with that I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up

Thank you very much, Manjit. I'm on page 22 now. For the takeaways, I think the business has really hit a good rhythm and we've got great momentum coming into 2025. We're getting closer to our strategic targets of 2.2 tenants per tower. making really good progress on that the operational and cash flow related items are all growing significantly as we've outlined and we've got a solid solid pipeline of further tendencies to come in 2025 as we talked about a big focus on free cash flow expansion this year doubling or tripling from and the bottom line surplus free cash flow that we delivered in 2024 and we'll be engaging with investors over the coming months for potential shareholder distributions from 2026. So lots to be excited about and we're very much looking forward to it. So I'll hand back to Drew now to take the Q&A. Thanks everyone.

Thank you. We will now start today's Q&A session. If you would like to register a question, please press star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. And to withdraw your question, it's star followed by 2. Our first question today comes from Paradis from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning. I'd like to sort of hit two topics, please. One, guidance for adjusted EBITDA in 2025. And secondly, frontier risk. So consensus estimates right now are a whisker away from the top end of your guidance for 2025. How do you feel about that? And then secondly, can you talk about the consequences to Helios Towers of the strife that seems to be continuing between Rwanda and DRC? Thank you.

Yeah thanks very much John and I'll take, sorry for Manjit please chip in as well. I think we're feeling very confident about the business performance. The momentum that we're moving into 2025 with is strong. I think the guidance we put out is you know it's solid growth it's in line with market consensus as we as we always do we'll be keeping everyone updated as we move through the year and you know we're confident of delivering well this year like we always do on DRC. DRC is one of our most exciting markets, always has been, and there's amazing opportunity there. We've operated in DRC for 15 years, so civil disturbances has been and is a part of working life there. We've had multiple elections, Ebola outbreaks, sometimes unrest. But the key thing we focus on is we operate effectively in these environments by focusing relentlessly on the safety of our people and enabling the critical mobile services to continue We maintain our virtually 100% levels of power up time during these times. That's the same today as it has been in the past. That's why our customers rely on us. We're focused. Our DRC team is doing a great job. We've got a small number of towers, immaterial number for the group in the affected area at the moment. And of course, mobile services are very much continuing to support the millions of people who live and reside there.

Yeah, and if I can just add on the consensus point, I mean, one thing I would definitely point out here is that from a least tenancy perspective, if you look back on the last few years, initial guidance, which, by the way, is also challenging, there's always around 1,600 to 2,100. We're now effectively saying it's 2,000 to 2,500 from the beginning of the year, which shows a sign of confidence in terms of Thank you both.

Thanks, John.

Our next question today comes from David Wright from Bank of America. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hello, guys. Thank you so much for taking the questions. A couple from me, please. First, just conceptually on the cash return debate, what are the factors that you think could weigh on your decision making? I would probably propose, and I'm sure you would agree with me, that stock price does not reflect the value of the business. So that could obviously represent very accretive M&A, so to speak. But you also have a liquidity issue. So just how you're thinking about the factors that drive the potential mix. And then the second question is a little bit more top-down. One of the attractive... The main characteristics behind your business model is of course that mobile telephony is the dominant driver of connectivity across emerging markets because of the poor economics of fixed line but there's a new player in town which is satellite and I'm just wondering to what extent you feel some of the operators are starting to think differently about network topography whether it is essential to Manjit Singh Dhillon, Lara Coady, Fritz Dzeklo, Colard Nkole Tshiyoyo Manjit Singh Dhillon, Lara Coady, Fritz Dzeklo, Colard Nkole Manjit Singh Dhillon, Lara Coady, Fritz Dzeklo, Colard Nkole

Not to punt the debate, but the reality is at the moment, we're still sticking to the capital allocation framework that we have today, which is very much focused on driving the really good organic investments that we have, a real focus on deleveraging, and then looking at how that capital gets dispersed after that point. We would very much agree with you that the shares are undervalued. and so as we go through our next phase of engagement with investors and as we continue to update our thinking we'll be looking at how we then look at that broader capital allocation framework there afterwards but to my mind I think it's very exciting on the basis that we're at this precipice we're at the point where we're now going to be generating further free cash flow and it really isn't about that decision how you then utilize it whether it be dividend buyback combination of everything we'll have to wait and see but that's kind of where we see things at the moment.

Thanks Manjit.

Yeah and just to add I mean clearly there's a great buying opportunity for investors I think when a business is inflecting on free cash flow with a clear trajectory upwards and you know giving itself options on introducing potential new shareholder distribution policies and by the way we we inflected on actually bottom line profit net income as well in 2024 so it's really showing the direction of travel of the business and our ability to create real real returns for investors in the you know coming months and years so very exciting time and then on saturday yeah i mean look great question lots of the news about that at the moment and The satellites are a very kind of interesting area because I think what they do they provide a complement and essentially increase the size of the pie of the connectivity market worldwide. There's huge differences between the spectrum capacity possible in a satellite beam versus a Thank you very much. A terrestrial beam has a diameter of half a kilometre or one kilometre or something like that. And they're both using the same sort of spectral capacity. So the ability for satellites is very much for rural locations. It's very much for areas that Towers and terrestrial networks can't get to, like shipping and Aeroplanes and some IOTs and certainly you know you can have a viable satellite business particularly on the scale because of you know all of that kind of growing demand in those areas but the minute there's enough users in a location You'll need to put on a terrestrial antenna. So to the extent there's satellite companies doing partnerships with mobile operators, we think that's great. That opens up some ubiquitous coverage to areas that simply were impossible or uneconomical to cover currently. But as and when there becomes a reasonably small mass of users in those areas, there will need to be Thanks for your thoughts Tom

Our next question today comes from Emmet Kelly from Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open, please proceed.

Yes, good morning Tom, good morning Manjit, thanks for taking the questions. I've also got a question please on the DRC. An announcement that actually came from a couple of your Telco customers with Orange and Vodacom. Manjit Singh Dhillon, Lara Coady, Fritz Dzeklo, Colard Nkole Tshiyoyo Manjit Singh Dhillon, Lara Coady, Fritz Dzeklo, Colard Nkole Tshiyoyo Manjit Singh Dhillon, Lara Coady, Fritz Dzeklo, Colard Nkole Tshiyoyo And then secondly, just on the capital allocation, you were pretty clear that M&A is off the table at the moment. You said that you'll be selective about BTS. Can you say a few words about building towers, please? If you just set the balance sheet aside, would you rather build a lot more towers? And as the balance sheet leverage comes down towards three, could we expect you maybe to build more towers in the future? So kind of two connected questions, please. Thank you.

Yeah thanks very much Emmet, great questions. So DRC, Vodacom and Orange are two of our key customers there and we're continually working with them day in day out and we very much enjoy working with them and very much continue to do so. um they're they're looking at uh this park we saw the the release for that um and and yeah look that's that's very much focused on um the the kind of rural locations where ARPUs are low it's not really viable to um or economical at the moment to have full-scale towers and so we very much welcome that. It's going to improve connectivity across DRC. And remember DRC is actually an outlier versus our other markets. It's over 100 million people but only 60% of those live in an area with any coverage whatsoever today. So there's 40 million people in DRC with No coverage, which is actually different to all our other markets where 95% plus people live in an area of some coverage. So we're very pleased to see that progression and we continue to work with both of those customers and our other valued customers in DRC and expect to be very busy this year as well in DRC on new rollouts. and then capital allocation, Manjit do you want to take that one?

Yeah sure so this is really about the buy versus sorry the build cycle. We have a perhaps a lighter year in terms of builds during 2024. I think what we will see actually is some of those builds that we had in the hopper during 24 actually coming into 25. So we will see a bit of a tick up during the course of 2025. But I wouldn't say leverage is necessarily the reason why we're not building. We will always go and build and look at optimized organic investments. And what I mean by that is there are a number of really attractive build pursuits that you can do where you have high visibility in terms of potential lease up, which is a good investment. That will drive return on invested capital improvements, which is ultimately the end of the game. Should I make that higher than our cost of capital? and as Tom went through earlier 12% day one but really steps up there afterwards and so we will have capital available to do that to support our M&A partners to build and we'll see a bit more coming during the course of the year but we are very very laser focused as always in terms of ensuring that we're trying to find the best locations where it's got the most opportunity of lease up and where we can partner with the most customers possible because that will actually one provide better coverage and to provide more of the not cheaper coverage for the end consumer because you're sharing that fixed cost with more M&Os means that the end consumer should get a cheaper product as well. So it has a ripple on effect and so that's what we're doing at the moment.

Okay, great stuff. Thank you both.

Thanks, Emmett.

Our next question comes from Graham Hunt from Jefferies. Your line's now open. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thanks very much for the questions. Just two from me, thank you. First one, from DRC, is it possible just to quantify the number of sites you have in regions that you're, I suppose, tracking on the eastern borders that could be at risk, just to get a sense of your site's exposure in terms of numbers? And then second question, just going back to Starlink, so am I understanding correctly that you don't, So I'll just carry on. Second question on Starlink. Am I understanding correctly that you don't see that as a risk to the TAM that you're addressing, if anything it is on top of? And if that's not right, I'd just be interested to understand With your coverage rollout growth plans, how much of that you see is potentially exposed to alternative models like satellite? Thank you.

Yeah, thanks very much for the Great questions. On DRC, the eastern side, as I mentioned before, operations are very much continuing there. The mobile service is essential for the millions of people who live there, as well as the UN, the Red Cross and humanitarian efforts like that. But it's a de minimis amount. kind of one to two percent of group towers are in that area so we're keeping a watchful eye on it but from a financial perspective it's not material and we expect you know operationally to very much continue providing service there and on the points around satellite companies the The real use cases there are, as well as for things like shipping and aeroplanes and very rural locations, there's essentially two ways of doing it. One is directed advice, where largely the satellite company partners with a mobile operator to use a bit of the spectrum that the mobile operator has or it's a dish service whereby you have an antenna dish you know put on your house or your buildings which uses the satellite frequencies and the spectrum capacity The spectrum density of the beam allows for a small number of users on a single beam, which enables people largely living in very rural locations to benefit from it. Obviously, you can use it in a city, but only a very small handful of people can use it in a city before it stops working. yes it's very much complementary and you know it could as I mentioned before lead to potential accelerated rollout of some sites and some locations this is partly because direct-to-device if it happens could get a few people using phones who didn't before and then You need to put a tower up as soon as there's a small critical mass. That being said, the pricing point for people in rural locations in Africa is just not viable. But that's a potential evolution, albeit difficult. And the other one is actually using it for backhaul. And look, satellites have been used for backhaul for 30, 40 years. So this is nothing new per se to use satellites for backhaul. It's just with the LEO satellites, the pricing point is lower and the connectivity is better than previous versions of it. So that could open up more sites and locations where there is no fiber in the ground There is no line of sight to the next tower to ping the microwave signal. Usually the maximum distance you can use for that is about 20 to 25 miles due to the curvature of the earth. So in the past there is some limitation of where you can put the next tower because you're more than 25 miles from the previous one. Whereas with you know the potential for better satellite backhaul that could open up a few more locations to do it in. So there's a few ways where there could be complementary elements to it and you know that's great that's exciting for us and obviously the community but in order to deliver real good you know quality to any kind of massive people you need terrestrial antennas because of the capacity requirements on the spectrum.

Thanks, that was very helpful.

Thank you.

As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question on today's call, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad and to withdraw your question, it's star followed by two. Our next question today comes from Gustavo Campos from Jefferies. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Hey, hello, Gustavo from Jeffrey's fixed income desk team. Just a few questions from my side. Thank you for the presentation. Congratulations on the results. Firstly, if I understand it correctly, your EBITDA margins on your fourth quarter were slightly lower, around like 51%. And I was trying to understand if that's a one-off and if you could please elaborate on on what happened there. That's my first question. Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you very much. Good start. Manjit, do you want to take that one?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think in Q4, actually, it was actually coming out at around, well, for the half year, it was about 53% for Q4 on an EBITDA margin perspective. actually it was closer to yeah it was 53 percent 52.6 percent so there might be a little bit of a an error in the in the calc on your side but in general I think as you go throughout the course of the year it's bounced anywhere between 52 to 54 percent so we're slap bang in the range of that so yeah I think uh nothing more to really mention there weren't any one officer I think like that understood yeah thank you very much um

And the other question, I just wanted to quickly follow up on Graham's question. As far as you know, the conflict in the DRC and the surrounding areas, you mentioned that it represents 1 to 2% of the towers. Is that towers of the total group or just the towers in the DRC? Thank you.

Yeah that's of the group but again just to reiterate operationally these very much continue and service very much continues and remember Gustavo we've operated in DRC for 15 years so you know we're used to managing complex you know situations and the mobile networks are absolutely critical and critical service for everyone there because there is virtually no fixed line and the mobile is how people communicate. So it's a real critical service that we're providing and our teams are very, very experienced in dealing with situations and we move on and we continue to grow.

Understood. Yeah, that's very clear and very helpful. Thanks again. I was also wondering if you're planning on meeting with Fitch. I think their update was sometime in the middle of last year. Are you expecting enough grades from them as well? If you could elaborate on that, comment on that, that would be great. Thank you.

Yeah, I can take that one. We've got our annual catch-ups with both Moody's and Fitch, actually. So we'll be having, hopefully, some very constructive conversations with them, as we always have done. And from our side, we'll be pushing, and we'll see where we get to on that one.

Sounds good. Thanks again. And last question, if I may. How much of your discretionary KPEX would you be able to reduce If needed, just trying to understand, you know, we understand that this is focused on expansion, but understand your flexibility would also be very helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, sure. I can pick up that one too. So in terms of the capex guidance we get, so the 150 to 180 million, the 50 million is really the capex that we need to have to do normal course maintenance and what we call non-discretionary, i.e. That is something that we very much expect that we will have to be incurring on an annual basis to look after the fleet of towers that we currently have today. Theoretically, and this is why we distinguish between non-discretionary and discretionary, the balance, i.e. the discretionary CapEx, could theoretically be switched off as you stand at the beginning of the year. So if you wanted to curtail a little bit of the growth because you're not going to be worrying about tenancies, et cetera, and run it for cash, and that could theoretically go down to your free cash flow lines and then clearly your VATAR would be a bit lower. So yeah, as it's done at the beginning of the year, the split would be 100 to 130 million discretionary and therefore at the disposal of management and the non-discretionary part, the 50 million is what we would need to do to keep the VATARs in good order.

Understood, yeah. Thanks again and congratulations on the results again. Thank you.

Our next question comes from Rohde Modi from Citi. Your line is now open. Please go ahead.

Thank you so much for the opportunity. Most of my questions have been answered. Just a few follow-up and one other question. Firstly, in terms of site additions, your discretionary capex going down as an absolute amount from last year. If I look at per tower capex, there will be inflation included. So I'm just trying to understand, are you expecting much lower site additions compared to last year? In that case, how much of your tenancies are already committed and tenancy guidance is committed and how much is based on assumption. Second, on capital allocation again, sorry. Just to understand what your three times leverage guidance in 26, I believe based on not having any kind of shoulder return. or that includes you know some assumption of shareholder return as well and if not what could change your view on you know capital allocation in near term I mean you know as you discussed around you know any rating upgrade or rate changes anything that could change your view on capital allocation and expect you know early shareholder return lastly on your some few markets smaller markets Senegal, Madagascar where you're not seeing the tenancy growth you know in line with other markets and you know in terms of your return on investment capital how it looks like in those markets and what do you think about those markets in future? Thank you.

I'll take the second seat first and then Manjit if you take the capex one. and Rohit. On the capital allocation, we're very much on the track. We're not changing course on the capital allocation. We're very focused on one, high returning organic growth, two, cash flow generation and deleveraging, and as you mentioned, you know tracking towards three in 2026 and then the third bucket being shareholder distribution potential which we'll be engaging with investors with over the the coming months so we're very much continuing on on that track and M&A is you know very much off the table for the foreseeable future and we're very confident in delivering on what I just described across the first three buckets. And then just on the kind of market questions, markets at different times are going to have different growth rates. That's just simply a factor of the investment cycles from the mobile operators and You know, that basically is what drives it. I think we look at the business and the assets on a very long-term basis. These are extremely long-term infrastructure assets which stand for decades and we're essentially providing that platform for the networks to proliferate and densify over time. In some markets, in some years, there's going to be very busy times. In some markets, in some years, there's going to be quieter times when there's a lull in rollout, for example. But the key is to ensure that the quality of assets is high, the assets are in the right location, and over time, those assets are going to be utilized more and more. so that's our view and you know we're very happy with the overall performance of the portfolio as we move into 2025 and Manjit if you take the capex yeah absolutely so from a noble quantum perspective you know capex was so broadly aligned on a year-on-year basis

but one thing to kind of mention is that in prior years you've had probably higher levels of upgrade capex which is effectively the capex that we underwrite as part of our acquisition thesis but is effectively used to get the newly acquired site up to helios standards so they're ready for co-location etc that is as you can see on the charts on on page 18 that is reducing over a period of time and we can expect that to reduce further also the acquisition earn out payments will reduce as well so actually what you're finding is not necessarily a reduction you're finding that the capex spend is flicking from being around upgrading acquisition flicking into growth so we'll see a bit more coming through on that basis and all things being equal we will see a few more sites being built during 2025 than we did see in 2024 but again this expands the base to which we can then drive that really high returning co-location growth on top so yeah I think that's uh it's looking to be a pretty good uh year in terms of the capital deployment thank you so much thanks thanks very much our final question today comes from Yul Adamson from T. Rowe Price your line's now open please go ahead hi good morning congratulations again on the on the good results

Just regarding your clients in countries where they sort of receive revenues in local currencies, do you get sort of any of them approaching you and trying to renegotiate the contracts which you have as you say most you know set up in a way that is effectively in hard currency in several cases? Is that sort of a widespread tendency for that? And secondly, Just a little willingness to outsource this service from the mobile operators across Africa. Do you sort of see that that willingness is growing or decreasing, given that some of the examples of some of those operators being hurt by these hard currency contracts?

Thank you. Sure. I'll take the first part of that question. In terms of the more kind of local currency markets, I think the key distinction and the important part here is that when we do get a portion of revenues that might be linked to hard currencies, it is more often than not on a minority of that overall contract. So it's more on the periphery than being necessarily asking a local currency market to receive 100% or a large portion of the revenue to come through to us in hard currency, i.e. passing all the FX risks on to the mobile network operator. So in that regard it's more fairly shared and therefore more sustainable. Is it an area of conversation? Occasionally, but I think what we provide as well is a sustainable pricing point as well. So on average across all of our contracts we provide a pricing point that is 30% lower than the total cost of ownership that it would cost the mobile network operator to operate the site by themselves. and what that therefore means is that you have that buffer between what we are providing not only in terms of quality in terms of what we're providing but from a price point that means that if there are these kind of areas where sometimes effects might be a little bit of a determining factor you've got that buffer to say well actually we're still providing this at a vast vast improvement versus what you can do yourselves and that therefore gives us a little bit more sustainability and also why you see year on year we re-sign contracts you don't see a change in our contracted revenue base or our contracted earnings and that's kind of the proof point as it were in terms of the propensity for mobile network operators to try and partner with our companies including ours particularly in our markets I'll start and then Thomas please feel free to add in but I think that pricing point and the quality point are really critical on this on this journey the fact that we are able to provide the highest levels of power up time speed to market around really does put us at a competitive advantage not just against peers but also against the mobile network operators doing it themselves and we're able to do that very efficiently and keep that network up and running to the highest level almost perfect power in a lot of situations when there's an imperfect broad infrastructure environment and also we have a very very good expanded portfolio which is always ready for lease up so if an MNO does want to roll out we more than often than not in very very valuable locations have that site ready to go so we see M&A proactively say if you want to put your equipment on our site you can often go within 24 hours meaning that they're able to get that revenue almost overnight on the on the investment that they've made in their active infrastructure so we're not seeing any reduction and in fact given the guidance we've given to the year of 2000 to 2500 what we're effectively saying is we're seeing that partnership deepen and it's quite accelerated

That's really helpful. Thank you very much.

That does conclude today's Q&A session. I'll now hand it back over to Tom Greenwood for closing remarks.

Thank you very much everyone today for dialing in and spending time with us. And thank you to everyone asking the great questions we just went through. We're really looking forward to seeing a lot of you on the Roadshow. Over the next couple of weeks, I look forward to more discussion. We're really excited about the business for this year and beyond. The business is really motoring forward and generating high-quality cash flow. We're going to keep performing. We're going to keep delivering for our customers the world-class service that we're into day in, day out. and we're going to continue growing and generating those cash flows. So very much looking forward to engaging with everyone over the next couple of weeks and through this year and beyond and take care and have a great day.