Helios Towers plc

Hello everyone and thank you for joining the Helios Towers H1 2025 results call. My name is Sammy and I'll be coordinating your call today. During the presentation you can register a question by pressing star followed by 1 on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind please press star followed by 2 on your telephone keypad to remove yourself from the question queue. I'll now hand over to your host Tom Greenwood, CEO to begin. Please go ahead Tom.

Thanks very much Sammy. Hi everyone and welcome to our H1 2025 earnings call. I'm Tom Greenwood, Helios Towers CEO. Thanks very much for joining us today and I hope you and your families are doing really well. So we're pleased to report a strong set of results for the first half of the year. The business is performing very well across all of our key strategic and financial metrics. We've delivered strong tenancy growth, P&L expansion and a further step forward in free cash flow and return on invested capital. As we reflect on yet another quarter of unbroken growth over the last 10 years, and as we lead up to our capital markets day in November, it's important to remind ourselves of priority one in our strict capital allocation policy. Our first priority is always high returning organic growth and investing capital expenditure to capture the unique growth in the telecom towers industry in our regions. As I enter my 16th year with this company, what I can say with absolute confidence is that the runway of growth we see ahead is as strong today looking into the future as the growth we have seen over the last decade. Furthermore, following our free cash flow inflection last year and the continued growth of cash generation already in the first half of this year, we're getting to the point of being able to balance and sustain both significant organic growth with continued deleveraging and potential shareholder return. Most importantly for today, we're firmly on track to meet our FY25 guidance and we're executing with consistency and discipline. positioning the company well for long-term value creation as we move into our next five-year strategic cycle which will be launching on November the 6th at our London office in Bishopsgate at our Capital Markets Day which we have announced today and would love for you to attend. The big focuses here will be our enhanced capital allocation policy focusing on investor return and value creation what we are seeing and targeting in terms of high returning growth for the next five years and deeper insights from some of our wider leadership team on how we drive excellence and resilience for our customers experience and our business so moving to slide two today i'm joined by Manjit our CFO and Chris our head of IR on to slide three as always We'll begin with strategy, move to the financial results and close with Q&A. But first, I want to recognize the entire Helios Towers team and our partners across Africa and Middle East. Every day, our team delivers critical infrastructure and services for mobile connectivity, often in remote and complex environments, with high professionalism and global quality. It's this execution and our relentless focus on customer experience excellence that enables our consistent delivery and ensures that the 156 million people covered by our Towers today have their daily connectivity needs met, enabling their voice communication, banking, payments, health, education, AI and everything else essential for daily life in today's world. and that delivery is happening against the backdrop of strong industry fundamentals which are mega trends not just for years ahead but for decades ahead. Unique mobile subscribers are forecasted to grow by almost 30% by 2030. There's a forecasted increase of four times in data usage by 2030 and of course there's a population boom across our footprint. These are powerful long-term drivers that underpin our growth strategy, which means the top-line growth and compounding cash flows have a trajectory ahead for many, many years. Moving to slide 4, this image is a simple but powerful summary of our model. We build or acquire towers, lease space to mobile operators, and then drive revenue and cash flow return by increasing the number of tenancies on those towers. Going from one tenant to two and then three, as you see here, is incredibly value accretive with small marginal incremental costs each time a new tenant is added, leading to the majority of new tenant revenue flowing through to the bottom line. Strategic cycle objective of 2.2 tenants per site by 2026 goes to exactly this point. And we're proving this model out at scale with clear and consistent focus on operational delivery. And now to slide five, our highlights. Looking at the highlights, the performance at half year shows we're very much on track for our full year guidance. We've added over 1200 tenancy additions year-to-date, including 190 new sites. Tenancy ratio we've expanded now to 2.11, up 0.1x year-on-year and with very strong momentum towards our 2.2 by 2026 objective. EBITDA is up 9% year-on-year. ROIC rose another percentage point to 14%. and free cash flow of 30 million, which represents an upward swing of 40 million year on year. This reflects record H1 surplus free cash flow generation for our business. Net leverage continues to trend downwards, now at 3.8, which reflects a reduction of 0.4 year on year. We also strengthened our financial position further. Moody's affirmed our B1 rating and moved us to a positive outlook. Fitch has upgraded us to double B minus. And recently, we've also reduced our cost of debt from 7.2% to 6.9% through some refinancing of term loans. Our full year guidance is reaffirmed across the board with two to two and a half thousand tenancy ads, 460 to 470 million of EBITDA, 40 to 60 million in free cash flow that's the doubling or tripling of our free cash flow from last year and leverage trending towards three and a half these results are a testament to our team and our business model the growth is visible the cash conversion is accelerating and we're increasingly well positioned to deliver shareholder returns in the next phase of our capital allocation strategy now moving to slide six We've now achieved 10 consecutive years of double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth at around 25% average annual growth rate since 2015. Of course, this includes some very challenging periods, COVID, oil price shocks, rate hikes, and inflation. Yet through it all, we've delivered consistent, predictable, and resilient EBITDA growth. This is a major differentiator for Helios Bowers. and is thanks to the strength of our operating model, long-term inflation-linked contracts and high-quality customer base. Of course, this is all underpinned by the structural growth of the region and the sector, with population, mobile subscribers and data consumption all trending steeply upwards for decades, not just years, and all driving the demand for mobile infrastructure. Our thesis is simple. By operating the business at global quality levels with the best people and disciplined capital allocation, we will continue to deliver P&L growth and the consequential compounding cash flow to create significant value for our investors, customers, partners, communities and people. Our strategy of 2.2 by 26 is working. Since 2022 we've increased tenancy ratios from 1.81 to 2.11, ROIC has expanded from 10.3 to 13.6% and free cash flow has flipped from a 721 million outflow for high investment in 2022 to a 30 million surplus so far this year in H1. This is exactly the trajectory we targeted Improving efficiency, improving capital returns, and unlocking growing cash generation from our now scaled platform. If we move to slide eight, here we see our long history of tenancy expansion, which continues to be a key driver of value. The more tenants per site, the higher returns, rising from 12% cash on cash ROIC for one tenant to 25% for two and up to 34% for three. And because both CAPEX and OPEX are largely fixed, this margin expansion flows straight through to cash flow. Our operational teams are delivering this model day in, day out across nine markets and this underpins our strategy of tenancy ratio increase through co-location and highly attractive build to suit. Combining high quality platform expansion with accelerating power utilization. And onto slide nine, looking forward, the opportunity is substantial, not just for years, but for decades ahead. And if we zone in on our next five-year strategic cycle from 2025 to 30, we see 34,000 new market tenancies expected, 29% unique mobile connections growth and a four times increase in data consumption. All of this being underpinned by 3% population growth per year with our nine markets almost doubling in population in the next 25 years. You will see here that the total addressable organic market from 25 to 30 of 34,000 new tenancies is close to the 31,000 tenancies we have as a group today. So the total addressable organic market is essentially the equivalent of doubling Helios Towers today. And our tenancy additions for the past couple of years have been around 2,500 each year, which is consistent with the high point of our guidance for this year. So what this all means is that we can be confident of the demand drivers ahead creating this addressable market new volume and be confident about our ability to deliver strong growth each year going forward. This means more volume, stronger returns from the asset base and growing compounding cash flow for years ahead. And with leading positions in seven out of our nine markets, and trusted operational execution capabilities, we're extremely well positioned to capture that demand as the mobile network proliferate and densify to satisfy the tidal wave of demand for mobile services for the decades ahead. So on to slide 10. I'm really, really excited to announce we'll be hosting our Capital Markets Day in London on November the 6th. At this event we'll be presenting our updated five-year strategic plan our enhanced capital allocation framework with focus on high returning organic growth cash flow generation and potential shareholder return and we'll be hosting interactive sessions with the executive team explaining how we achieve customer experience excellence and are taking the business to the next level in terms of performance. We look forward to seeing many of you there and sharing more about the next phase of growth and value creation for Helios Towers. So with that, I'll now hand over to Manjit who'll take you through the financials in more detail. Then we'll be back at the end for Q&A.

Thanks, Tom. And hello, everyone. Great to be speaking with you all today. Starting on slide 12, I'll be going through the financial results. As Thomas outlined the first half of 2025 shows continued momentum and delivery and we are on track to deliver on our full year guidance across all metrics. We are exactly where we want to be in terms of tenancy growth with tenancies increasing by 1,211 year to date and that's a 7% year-on-year improvement and we're progressing really well towards our 2.2 by 26 target with our tenancy ratio increasing to 2.11 at the end of the half year. This tenancy growth continues to be the key driver of our EBITDA, which has increased by 9% year-on-year to £226 million for H1 2025, with the last quarter annualised EBITDA of £458 million, which is the bar you see in the middle bar chart. Our combination of capital efficient growth through Colo lease-up and leveraging operational improvements has also driven our return on invested capital, and that's driven up to 13.6%, up from 12.9% a year of growth, and tracking really well towards our full year target of 14%. Importantly, we continue to see our free cash flow generation accelerate, driven by EBITDA expansion and timing of discretionary capital additions. And we've delivered a 40 million increase in free cash flow year on year to 30 million. And we are confident of reaching our full year guidance of 40 to 60 million. Now let's jump into some of the detail and moving on to page 13. Here we set out the growth we're seeing in number of sites and tenancies. The number of sites increased by 330 year-on-year to 14,515 and that's an increase of 190 year-to-date. New organic builds are an important element of our strategy and ultimately adds the hopper to which we can then drive further colo lease-up. We're very selective in our approach to new site rollouts, utilising analytics from our proprietary GIS platform to conduct analysis to ensure that the sites we build have a clear potential for lease up and strong day one returns. Tenancies increased by 2043 to 30,617 and that's a 7% year on year increase with 1,211 added year to date. We're seeing growth across all markets with particularly large increases across DRC, Tanzania and Oman. and as I mentioned earlier we saw a 0.1 tenancy ratio expansion year-on-year to 2.11 and again we're making very good progress towards our 2.2 target. As we continue to engage and partner with our customers on new opportunities we are clear that we always have and will continue to deploy capital on accretive opportunities that will drive returns and as Tom went through earlier the growth dynamics of our markets combined with our execution capabilities of our fantastic teams mean we will continue to see and deliver on these opportunities over the coming years. Moving on to slide 14, our revenue growth. We've seen revenue growth of 10% year on year to 215 million, driven predominantly by our strong tenancy growth. Our hard currency profile remains unchanged at 67% of our revenue in hard currency, which translates to 71% of our adjusted EBITDA being in hard currency. As a reminder, four of our markets are innately hard currency, including DRC and Oman, two of our three biggest markets, being dollarized or dollar pegged, and Senegal and Congo-Brasil being pegged to the euro. Importantly, this means that the revenues our customers receive are also hard currency, and this is also what they pay to us. In our Romanian markets, we also have portions of our revenue linked to hard currencies, adding further to the overall mix, and our earnings are further protected by contractual escalators including CPI escalators and annual slash power annual slash costly power escalators and de-escalators 99% of our revenue is from large blue chip mobile network operators with no single customer accounting for more than 27% of our revenue as you can see in the second pie chart and finally we sign into long-term agreements with our customers with initial terms of 10 to 15 years and are largely non-cancelable Today, our contracted revenue of $5.3 billion has an average remaining life of just shy of seven years. In other words, we've secured minimum revenue of $5.3 billion in total without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earning stream that we complement the further growth driven by tenancy rollout. And moving on to slide 15, we present the usual analysis showing the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA greater more detail. As with previous results presentations, the key driver of growth has been organic tenancy growth. You'll see a decrease in power-related revenues this quarter, and that's largely due to lower fuel prices in DRC and Tanzania, which we pass on to our customers, while also seeing a corresponding decrease in our power operating expenses, hedging us well from an overall dollar perspective. Overall, the escalator movements for power and CPI have washed through to negligible EBITDA impact, despite lower power prices and inflation slash FX moves. In short, The key driver of growth is through organic tenancy growth and operational leverage from lease up and we demonstrated again that the business structure continues to be robust and resilient and operating as designed. Moving on to slide 16. For the first half we incurred total capex of 54 million of which 16 million was non-discretionary. Now capex can be lumpy and we continue to guide for the full year of 150 to 180 million. We have our orders out for the remaining capex and consequently we'll see a higher level of capex in H2 but this is all good capital investments going into strong returning new builds, co-locations and opex initiatives and we have a busy rest of the year which is very very positive. On to slide 17, looking at our balance sheet and credit profile. We've seen continued improvements in our credit ratings with Fitch and S&P upgrading us to BB- and Moody's upgrading their outlook to positive. All of this reflects the work we've done to drive free cash flow which is now past the inflection point and accelerating as well as deleveraging our business. Our net leverage decreased by 0.4x year-on-year to 3.8x and we have approximately 425 million in available cash and undrawn debt facilities. This morning we were also delighted to make further improvements to our balance sheet finalising an update to some of our loans a few hours ago which resulted in our cost of debt reducing to 6.9% from 7.2%, which is fantastic. As a reminder, 92% of our debt continues to be at fixed rates following our bond refinance in 2024. We have no near-term maturities until 2027. And given we are free cash regenerative, this all puts us in a strong position and we have the firepower we need to deliver on all of our targets. On to slide 18, looking at our recurring and bottom line free cash flow. Our 2.2 strategy supports high fall-through from adjusted EBITDA to recurring free cash flow, with $19 million year-on-year increase in our H1 EBITDA going directly to an increase of $20 million to our recurring free cash flow. This resulted in recurring free cash flow increasing by 40% year-on-year to $70 million. Recurring free cash flow is akin to AFFO and is the cash generated from operations that management can allocate towards discretionary capex, debt paydowns, and Shareholder Distributions. Bottom line free cash flow for H1 increased by 40 million year on year to 30 million, principally driven by just the EBITDA expansion and the timing of discretionary capex. Following the inflection of free cash flow last year, we're really seeing now this kick on and we expect to hit our target of 40 to 60 million by year end. And this takes us to slide 19, where we reaffirm our guidance for 2025. Our target of 2,000 to 2,500 tenancies for the year remains as we continue to progress towards our 2.2 strategy. For adjusted EBITDA, we reaffirm our target range of $460 to $470 million. CAPEX target remains between $150 to $180 million, of which $100 to $130 million is discretionary and $50 million is non-discretionary. And as I said, free cash flow we expect to be between $40 and $60 million, which as a reminder is more than double our 224 levels. Finally, we expect to end 2025 at circa 3.5 net leverage. In summary, we've delivered a strong first half performance. We are exactly where we want to be heading into a busy second half of year. And with that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.

Thanks very much, Manjit. I'm on page 20 now. So key takeaways. Of course, we've got strong momentum towards our 2.2 tenancy ratio target. and this is all driving the financial metrics, the P&L growth, the free cash flow and the ROIC and of course the deleveraging that's happening as well. 2025 guidance, reaffirm, we're very confident of continuing the delivery as we move into the next half of this year and really excited about the capital markets day that's happening on November the 6th here in London where we'll talk about the next five years and beyond. and update our capital allocation framework. So with that, I'll hand back to Sammy and we'll do the questions.

Thank you, Tom. To ask a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad now. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure your device is unmuted locally. I'll pause to allow questions to come in. Our first question comes from David Wright from Bank for America. Your line is open.

Please go ahead. Thank you so much and thank you for taking my questions. It's always quite tricky, isn't it? You've announced a CMD in a few months' time and I'm sure you want to keep your powder dry, so to speak. But I think the one thing that really strikes us from these numbers and your successive delivery, very clean delivery, on the back of your significant M&A is obviously how well practiced you are at integrating business, businesses, growing businesses thereafter. So I guess as you sort of come to your CMD, one of the discussions you must obviously be having is to what extent you want to continue any of these sort of expansion projects or move more towards a and just continue to drive the business organically. I just wondered if you could give us any sort of early commentary around footprint, whether you're feeling more comfortable now and would be sort of very small bolt-ons or you're never really tempted to kind of go again given how well it's gone so far. Sorry if that's a slightly roundabout question. I appreciate that you might not be able to give answers just yet, but worth a try.

Thanks, David. I really appreciate the question. Look, I mean, ultimately, as always, it comes down to our capital allocation framework and where the return is best found, where the capital is best deployed. The priority order that we've laid out over the past several quarters very much continues So, you know, that is number one, organic growth, expanding in the markets we're in, supporting our customers grow their networks in the markets we're in. And that provides the highest level of returns that we see today. Number two is the continued cash flow generation and deleveraging, which we're very much on track on. Number three is the potential shareholder remuneration and number four remains today M&A and you know that remains under under review but you know certainly for the foreseeable I see the current status continuing we've got great organic demand there's a lot going on in our markets in terms of network expansion network densification technology upgrades We've barely seen the effects of 5G yet across most of our footprints, which is a significant investment required in terms of rollout. So that's all very exciting, but we'll always continue to review this and be agile. But that's how we see the lay of the land today and for the foreseeable.

And if you don't mind me asking just a bolt on, we've been having some very interesting conversations with the the tower co's such as Inuit and Salnex. Inuit in particular starting to look at the possibility of RAN as a service now where you start to lease the actual RAN equipment as well as the passive tower base. Is that a discussion you guys are starting to think about like a tower co 2.0 so to speak?

It's certainly something that is being discussed generally in the industry. There are It's something that we're constantly assessing, but so far we haven't found the right opportunity for us. We very much see our core business of passive infrastructure you know co-locations built to suit we very much see large demand for that at the moment and for the foreseeable over the you know next five years and beyond so we're focusing on core which is our USP and which what delivers you know as far as we can see it the the best in terms of return and long-term cash flow Thank you so much. Our next question comes from Graham Hunt from Jefferies. Your line is open. Please go ahead. Yeah, thanks very much.

I've got a couple of questions. First one, Tom, I just wanted to come back to your comment about the 15 years you spent at the company and saying that the growth outlook for the next decade or so is at least similar to the growth you've experienced. But I'd want to get you to comment on how you see the risk outlook. If you went back to when you started at the company or when the company started, I can't imagine even then you would have predicted the exceptional predictability of growth in the business. But today, when you look forward, do you think that the market is in a more mature, more predictable, lower risk condition than perhaps a decade ago on top of that growth outlook that you're seeing? Second question really was just to kind of update on what you're hearing from your customers at the moment. From their public comments, it sounds like the second half of the year or the year has been going very well from a growth perspective. It just would be good to get your take on what they're saying to you in terms of their plans for your key customers. Thanks.

Yeah, thanks, Graham. That's a very interesting question, the first one. I think if we look back over the past 10 years, there's been significant global surprises, global shocks. We've had COVID, we've had inflation right down and then right up, and the rates followed. We've had various other macro shocks, oil prices. you know going down to almost zero then you know up over a hundred dollars and everything in between so I think there's been and of course currency movement through that time as well so there's been a lot of big macroeconomic type events or shocks over the past 10 years and what's you know been very clear from a Helio Starr standpoint is our business model is very resilient our teams and our operational capabilities are very resilient and therefore we've delivered consistent growth through that time and you know the the chart in the presentation shows going all the way back to 2015 where we had you know EBITDA of and 54 million. We've grown that hugely over that time through all of those shots, both up and down. What that tells me and why I'm so confident about the next five years and beyond is we know the demand is there. We're experiencing global megatrends at the moment, particularly across Africa and Middle East, the population growth, the telecom subscriber growth, the data consumption growth, all of that and the technology generation upgrades as well. All of that means that the telecoms infrastructure needs to expand, needs to develop, needs to densify over the coming years It's our job to play a role in that within the industry with our key customers to ensure that we're keeping up with that demand because the mobile subscribers are demanding it. There's more and more data usage happening by the day, by the week in our markets at the moment. The price of smartphones keeps coming down so more and more people have 4G enabled smartphones. That's going to happen to 5G over the next couple of years as well. And so we've got a huge responsibility to provide those levels of service and make sure that the networks don't become congested so that millions of people today and millions more people in the future can have good quality mobile service. So that's what we're focused on. and that will very much continue for the next five years and beyond and then the next part of that question is you know what we're hearing from our customers with we're seeing you know lots of lots of activity we're seeing investment in new coverage areas We're seeing investment in capacity because networks are getting congested because of this data boom that's going on right now. And we're seeing technology upgrades. I think the big push over the past year or two in quite a lot of our markets has been 4G. 4G is now a fairly common technology, particularly if you go to any of the large cities in our market, you know, Pretty much all 4G and some are now starting 5G as well. 5G is an early stage. But now, you know, we're planning for more 4G proliferation and starting the 5G as well, which has been a big, significant rollout globally over the past few years, which you've seen in other markets. and now, you know, that's kind of coming into our market now over the next few years. So we're expecting to be very busy, not just for the rest of this year, but for the, you know, coming five years and beyond. And, you know, we've already got a good pipeline building for next year as it stands.

Thanks very much. And yeah, looking forward to November.

Thanks very much.

Cheers, Greg.

Our next question comes from John Caradis, Deutsche Bank. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I've got three questions. I guess the first one's for Tom, the other two for Manjit. So, Tom, you noted that spending on organic growth provides the highest return on investment. I don't know whether at this stage you can say what you think about how this return compares with buying your stock in at current levels and cancelling it given the sort of huge growth runway that you've cited. For Manjit, please Manjit, rowing for established markets versus the new markets, what were those numbers and how have they changed year on year? And then secondly for Manjit, you've had 9% EBITDA growth in the first quarter, 10% in the second quarter. I don't really know what efficiency projects are going on internally, but help us assess how achievable the top end of your EBITDA guidance is, which implies 12% year-on-year growth for the full year. Thank you.

Yeah, thanks very much, John. I'll take the first one, which was around the organic growth compared with buybacks. So we'll be talking a lot more about this in November. So I'll keep it for them. But suffice to say, whenever any dollar is invested at Helios Towers, be that for organic allocations, organic bill pursuits, power investment projects, other forms of efficiency Thank you. Yeah, sure.

I'd say there's actually no material change that we've seen over the last couple of quarters for the returns, how they look established versus new. So really for the established, we're looking at high double digits, so nearing on close to the 20% mark, which again correlates to the fact that those more established markets have had longer periods of time as part of the group and, as Tom showed earlier, have a higher lease up. so given the fact that you've got markets like DRC and Tanzania that are over two times tenancy ratio that will be a big driver of that return whereas your newer markets their majority of those are still below a two times tenancy ratio and therefore have return on invested capitals nearing up to kind of high single digits but we see that as being something that would accelerate over time as well so as those new markets have a bit more time and continue to Lease up at the rates that we've seen historically so on the acquired portfolio itself about 0.1x on the ones that we're building and infilling you know multiple of that so 0.4x really over the last couple of integers we'll see that really start to kind of catch up with the kind of more established markets and again this will be something that will present to the capital markets day two and the roadmap for those but In general, the combination of both the established and the new markets coming together is really what's going to drive the group return on invested capital hitting 14% and then increasing by half to 1% per annum there afterwards. From a perspective of how we're trending towards the full year numbers, I'd say again, as I mentioned, we are exactly where we want to be. In terms of the acceleration, the second half of the year, We have a lot of rollout that's coming and so consequently we do expect ourselves to see some upside coming through. One of the things that we have seen historically as well is that sometimes the first half of the year although maybe not last year can be a bit slower but actually we've seen a pretty good cadence in terms of rollout and with some initiatives that we're doing such as solar and battery deployment in some of the markets we'll also start to see that coming through the numbers as well. So consequently, I do think that there's probably a good roadmap towards us hitting the top ends of our consensus numbers. So that's why we held it steady for the moment. But we're obviously going towards a high end of that.

Excellent. Thank you both. Thank you. Thanks very much, John.

Our next question comes from Rohit Modi from City. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, thank you for taking my question. Most of them have been answered. I have just one follow-up basically on the addition to new services and we have seen a lot of telcos in Africa are now focusing on investing into data centers. Is that something that also, you know, attacks Helios or makes sense for Helios to invest in? Thank you.

Hi Rohit, thanks very much for the question. I'll take that. I think going back to what I mentioned earlier around how we're focusing on our core business, that very much applies here as well. So we see the runway ahead for our core infrastructure and services of colos, built-to-suit, technology upgrades and amendments as very strong. We see that that's our core operational expertise. and we have our teams really set up and firing on all cylinders in driving that forward. So that's really the vast majority of our roadmap ahead. Of course, we do look at other services and other forms of infrastructure, but we see the core business for Helios Towers as Towers and Colos. we see that was the highest quality of contract and customer and that's our core area of expertise so that's very much what we're focusing on at the moment and expect that that's the case as we move forward into our new strategy.

Thanks, if I can ask one more question actually, looking at the tenancy additions and Oman is now Thank you very much.

and we're seeing a lot of activity from multiple customers as well not you know not just like one or two um so i would describe it as a healthy environment right now um good demand good investment coming through across the board and we're really excited about delivering on that as we move into the second half of this year and into next year so I wouldn't pull out one individual market as being a standout on that. I think what we're seeing is a pretty healthy demand across the board. We'll see tenancy growth all over the business as we move into the second half.

Thank you.

Thanks Rohit.

As a reminder, to ask a question, please put a star followed by one on your telephone keypad.

On this topic of performance by geography, I was seeing in the country breakdown of the EBITDA year-on-year which you provide on an interim basis that there was quite a bit of EBITDA growth from markets outside of your three core markets. So I was just wondering if you could talk about which were the countries that made the biggest contributions to that growth, perhaps year on year, if we look on it that way. And the second one, I was just wondering, Manjit, if you could just provide a little bit more information on these amendments to the loan instruments that you just achieved. So what loans are you referring to? How did you manage to reduce the interest cost? And was there any changes in maturity profile or anything like that as well? That would be great, thanks.

Sure thanks Stella I can take those so just I'll start on the loan one so on the loan piece we can't give too many details out but effectively we've been able to renegotiate with our existing lender group for one of our term lane facilities to reduce the cost of debt it's something that we'd actually raised a couple of years ago so we were able to look at efficiencies particularly in terms of the rates given the macros improved and we were able to lock that in this morning a couple of kind of minor amendments just to terminology but outside of that the covenant package is identical which is already quite favourable and in terms of the tenor that's remained the same as well so really it was quite a quick amendment once you got it all negotiated so I think frankly it's a really good deal for us and something that I think gives us incremental kind of upside as we go through the coming years I do think there's also putting it to one side any kind of macro adjustments that might happen over the kind of the short to medium term. But we do think there might be some other potential possibilities of looking at the debt package as well. So we'll continue to keep ourselves nimble to any opportunities that come about. But I think for now, we've got a very, very good financial package and something that gives us the flexibility that we need to hit on all of our targets that we have over the short to medium term. Then in terms of market growth, we don't give kind of market by market kind of guidance. We do it on the broad based kind of functional areas. But what I would say is that you know each one of those particular areas has shown pretty good levels of growth and it kind of aligns with what Tom was previously mentioning I think what we're seeing is really that the markets like Tanzania and DRC which are two of our biggest continue to have huge amounts of growth coming through a lot of opportunities in those markets as well but they're actually now really being supplemented well by Oman last year with the rollout for Vodafone and we're seeing that kind of come through the numbers as well but really on top of that we're seeing some of our newer markets, markets like Madagascar for example and Malawi really coming through as well so I think frankly there's kind of pro rata growth across the markets there's not really any others that would kind of hold out as differentiators but each element of the business is kind of holding its position so in that regard that's where we're seeing the growth coming through and finally the final point is that's also why you see our hard currency percentages kind of staying the same because each market is growing in a pro rata manner had increased a little bit last year because of the Oman growth, which is a hard currency market. But in general, that's all holding firm. So yeah, feeling very positive about that position.

That's super. Many thanks for that detail. And maybe if I could just ask you on the convertible bonds, that's obviously starting to come into the timeframe to think about how to deal with that. Do you have a kind of base case? I mean, would you look to remain in that market or perhaps the other potential options there?

Yeah so it's a very good question and tell you something that we're starting to think about and just to run again on the convertible bonds we raised that a number of years ago about 2020 and that was really to help finance some of the new markets the idea being that you can get what was at the time very very attractive pricing at sub 3% to 2.875% cash cost to help support the new markets and if it were to convert that's fine because you've got the equity upside of the new markets and if it doesn't convert you've had cheap financing so that was a Thank you very much. and a little bit of the convertible. The positive, I think, is that we have a number of options available to ourselves with that particular refi, but we're keeping our eye on it. I wouldn't say expect anything too soon on that, but really, we do keep our options open there.

Sure, that's super. Many thanks for that.

Thank you.

We currently have no further questions, so I'll now hand back to Tom for some closing remarks.

Thank you very much everyone for your questions and for listening in today. I hope you have a great day today and really look forward to seeing everyone on November the 6th in London at our Capital Markets Day. Take care. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. We thank everyone for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.