Helios Towers plc

Good morning everyone and thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the Helios Towers H1 2026 earnings call and I hope you and your families are doing well and thank you very much for being here with us today. Today we're going to cover two topics. Firstly our H1 earnings and outlook where we've delivered another very strong performance operational and financial and This has been driven by record tenancy growth, disciplined capital allocation, and operational excellence across the business. Secondly, we'll spend some time looking beyond today's earnings at the 15 year organic total addressable market through to 2040. And what is one of the most important aspects of the Helios Towers investment case, the long term structural growth opportunity across Africa and the Middle East for mobile infrastructure over the past few years we talked extensively about the strength of current demand and today we'd like to take a step back and examine what the next 15 years looks like and how mobile networks will need to evolve to support the rapidly increasing data consumption and why this creates decades of opportunity for tower infrastructure This deep dive covers one of our key pillars of the investment thesis and we expect to cover more of these in more deep dives from time to time going forward. So with that, let's move on. So I'll begin with the H1 highlights. Manjit will take you through the financial detail and then I'll return afterwards to introduce our multi-decade growth runway. before heading out to Marcus and Alan who will explain how networks need to evolve to meet that future data demand including looking at future network architecture of terrestrial and how satellites fit into that picture and then Sinesh will bring it back to the commercial opportunity across Africa and the Middle East before we conclude with Q&A Before we move to the H1 performance, I wanted to briefly frame today's presentation around the four components of the Helios Towers investment thesis. First, we operate in markets with a multi decade structural growth opportunity. Second, we built a world class operating platform and team with leading positions across high growth markets and a strong track record of delivery. Third, we've got a robust business model underpinned by long term contracts with top tier customers and inflation and power price protections. And fourth, we have a disciplined and flexible capital allocation framework, enabling us to invest in high return growth capex, strengthen the balance sheet and increasingly return capital to shareholders. And today's earnings demonstrate the strength of each of these elements coming through. In the second half, we'll go on to show why the long term growth opportunity extends well beyond the current impact 2030 period. So turning now to the first half highlights. There are four key messages I'd like you to take away from this slide. First, our customer demand continues to accelerate. We delivered a record of more than 2,500 new tenancy additions in the first half alone, including over 500 new sites. This drove a further 0.2x increase on our tenancy ratio year on year, taking it to 2.3 tenants per site today. Our customer order pipeline also continues to strengthen with demand already building for 2027. this reflects accelerating investment by our customers as they add coverage capacity and new technologies to their networks to satisfy that growing end-user demand second this demand is translating directly into strong financial performance with EBITDA increased by 14% year-on-year recurring free cash flow by 52% and ROIC increased by further 0.8 percentage points demonstrating both the quality of the opportunities we're investing in and the discipline with which we are deploying our capital. Third, our capital structure continues to improve, leverage down by 0.4 times year on year to 3.4x. And we completed 34 million of shared buybacks so far this year and have now returned $58 million cumulatively in buybacks since the program was launched last November. And today we're announcing our inaugural interim dividend of 0.6 pence per share being $8 million with a $25 million dividend expected in total for FY26. And this is another important milestone as we continue executing our impact 2030 capital allocation framework with a combination of growth investments, balance sheet improvement and increasing shareholder distributions. Finally, given the strength of customer demand, we're once again upgrading our guidance for this year. And we now expect between 3,500 to 4,000 new tenancy additions this year. We're increasing EBITDA guidance to between $520 to $535 million. We're increasing recurring free cash flow to between $220 to $235 million. And we're increasing discretionary capex to between $215 to $245 million to support the additional growth opportunity we're seeing come through. Importantly, our planned shareholder distributions of $76 million remain unchanged at the same time that we're accelerating our growth investment. Stepping back from this, perhaps the most important point is that none of this is being driven by one-off events. It reflects structural demand from customers investing to meet rapidly increasing subscriber and mobile data consumption opportunities across our markets. And that growth, of course, is underpinned by record $5.9 billion of contracted future revenues with an average remaining initial contract life of 6.5 years. Now, one of the things that has characterized Helios Towers over the past decade is consistency. In 2015, our EBITDA was around $50 million. And since then, we've grown it by around 10 times to over half a billion dollars today. And we've done that through multiple periods of global volatility, including oil price shocks, Brexit, US-China trade dispute, COVID, global inflation, rising interest rates, tariffs, and more recently, geopolitical conflict. Throughout that period, though, one thing has remained constant mobile connectivity has become increasingly essential to consumers businesses and governments and as connectivity has become more important demand for mobile infrastructure has continued to grow but market demand alone does not create value it is our operational excellence capability to deliver consistently across our markets combined with our disciplined capital allocation framework that enables us to turn that demand into growth for our customers, improve connectivity for the communities we serve and returns and growth for our investors. We've built strong local operating platforms with great people, digital processes, supply chains and technical capability required to deploy infrastructure at scale and then operate it reliably over the long term. So that combination of structural demand and operational excellence has delivered more than 10 consecutive years of EBITDA growth. And today's upgraded guidance continues that trend. Before handing over to Manjit, I wanted to briefly remind everyone of the framework we've been following since launching Impact 2030 last November. Our approach to capital allocation is simple. Our first priority is investing in high return organic growth opportunities. We expect to deploy more than $500 million in organic growth capex over the impact 2030 period. And these investments are capital efficient, accretive to ROIC and continue to generate incremental returns above 30%. that investment supports our target of more than 9% EBITDA compound annual growth between 2025 and 2030 and second we continue to strengthen the balance sheet leverage has a clear downward trajectory and we intend to operate within our target range of two and a half to three and a half times and a stronger balance sheet increases resilience and gives us the flexibility to continue investing when attractive growth opportunities arise finally cash generation continues to grow we're returning increasing amounts of capital to shareholders through a combination of buybacks and a growing dividend our target remains to deliver more than 400 million dollars of shareholder distributions through to 2030 important point here is that these priorities are mutually reinforcing strong operating cash generation is enables us to continue investing for growth while simultaneously strengthening the balance sheet and increasing our shareholder returns so that is the cash compounding sweet spot at the heart of impact 2030 and I'll now hand over to Manjit who'll take you through the financials in more detail thanks Tom and hello everyone it's great to be with you here today

Moving on to slide number nine, I'll be going through the financial results in a bit more detail. And we are really pleased with the strong set of financial results we put out today, where we've taken the strong momentum from Q1 into Q2. And it's that momentum that continues to build our robust pipeline and has allowed us to upgrade our full year guidance today by a further 500 tenancies. That means we're now targeting a record of 3500 to 4000 tenancy additions for FY26. Last year, when we delivered organic tendencies of 2,538, that was a record for the company. And we broadly hit that number already at the half year. So we're on course for a very strong year for growth and investment. And I'll extend a big thank you to our committed and talented colleagues and partners who are working in the field right now and rolling out for our customers as we speak. Now, later in the presentation, we'll be doing a deep dive into the multi-decade growth runway. But in short, the combination of population growth and lower smartphone costs is driving phenomenal data growth which is driving demand for mobile and therefore demand for mobile infrastructure. And we are seeing that demand and printing results that echo that consistently in our numbers now for many years. The tendency increase of 500 upgraded target will be split evenly between 250 new sites and 250 co-locations. We expect that the new incremental tendencies will be rolled out in the latter part of the year and therefore the incremental in-year EBITDA we're expecting to see is roughly around five million dollars and as such adjusted EBITDA has been upgraded to 520 to 535 million it's worth noting that the 500 tenancies will be expected to deliver over 10 million of annualized EBITDA which we'll see come through fully in 2027 and onwards we've also upgraded our recurring free cash flow to 220 to 235 million which is previously 215 to 230 million again with 5 million in-year impact and over 10 million of annualized impact later I'll go to the capital allocation overview but these tendencies are exactly the types of investments we are constantly looking for and should be deploying capital on as they give fantastic cash compounding returns and really drive the business forward so we're really very pleased to be up ticking guidance again today as really a testament to the market growth we're seeing and demonstrates the confidence we have in our pipeline for the remainder of the year which will set a fantastic foundation for achieving our overall 2030 targets Now to jump into the H1 results, and on this slide we set out our tenancy metrics. The graph on the left hand side shows the growth we've achieved in our total sites, increasing by 5% with 755 new sites added year on year, of which 524 were in the first half of the year. We've achieved record tenancy additions with 3,838 added year on year, with 2,511 of those in the first six months of the year, with DRC, Tanzania and Oman once again showing strong growth. Given our sites and tenancy additions our tenancy ratio has increased to 2.3 with particularly fast lease up in DRC, Congo B, South Africa and Tanzania. Now moving to slide 11 and you can see how the growth in tenancies has really translated into strong revenue performance increasing 11% year on year to 237 million. Our hard currency profile remains strong 69% of revenue and 71% of adjusted EBITDA are in hard currency. four markets are inherently hard currency DRC's dollarized Oman is dollar pegged and Senegal and Congo and Brazzaville are both pegged to the euro in our remaining markets we also have a portion of revenues linked to US dollars adding further to the overall mix our earnings are further protected by contractual protections including power and CPI escalators with CPI escalators typically escalating in Q1 and prior price escalators which go up or down depending on local pricing and these escalate either quarterly or annually depending on the contract. Around 70% of our revenue come from investment grade customers and all revenue come from blue chip mobile network operators. Our customer contracts typically have an initial term of 10 to 15 years and are largely non-cancellable and today our contracted revenue of $5.9 billion has an average running life of 6.5 years which excludes auto auto renewals which would increase this further. Ultimately, we have secured a minimum revenue stream of $5.9 billion without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earning stream that we layer the growth driven by incremental tenancies on top. So now on slide 12, this illustrates the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth in a bit more detail. Now many of you will recognise this analysis and consistent with previous quarters, tenancy additions remain the principal growth driver. while our escalators help to offset macro movements and protect US dollar earnings. Tenancy additions contributed 7 percentage points of the 11% revenue growth with CPI escalators and FX contributing the balance. At the EBITDA level, tenancy additions contributed 12 percentage points to the overall 13% growth as CPI and power price related movements largely offset the corresponding revenue increase. In a few slides, we'll walk through the total addressable market out to 2040. I would encourage you to keep this analysis in mind because the opportunity becomes even more compelling in that context. We've already demonstrated that the business can consistently convert tenancy growth into US dollar revenue growth and attractive US dollar returns. What we'll then show is that the underlying market provides a multi-decade runway for tenancy growth. Importantly, this extends the duration of the proven value creation engine, reinforcing the opportunity for sustained long-term US dollar returns, which is ultimately what we find so compelling about the business. Turning to slide 13 and disciplined capital allocation remains central to Impact 2030. As set out in the capital markets day, our priority is high returning organic investments, i.e. co-locations, OPEX initiatives and selective new builds. These investments deliver blended returns of more than 30% on invested capital and we will continue to allocate capital where returns are the most attractive. Our overall capex for H1 was $115 million, discretionary capex being $102 million, which resulted in an additional 2,511 tenancies. The continuing strength of this demand and its carry-through into our pipeline means we've upgraded our guidance by $35 million to reflect the additional 500 tenancies. Non-discretionary capex remains unchanged at $50 million, as do planned shareholder distributions of $76 million for the year. Now, the revised discretionary capex range of 215 to 245 million represents a meaningful portion of our impact 2030 guidance of 500 million plus to be spent on discretionary growth investments. This reflects the strength of customer demand and the opportunity to reinvest now in high returning sites and tenancies. At the CMD, we kept over 400 million of our accumulated $1.3 billion of recurring free cash flow and allocated. this gives us the flexibility to capitalize on growth opportunities when they land which supports in turn higher recurring free cash flow generation in the future all of this while continuing the shareholder distributions already announced now we're only two quarters into a five-year impact 2030 program so for now we are not upgrading the broader targets but we are extremely encouraged by the performance to date and will continue to monitor our medium-term trajectory and provide updates as we get better visibility Onto slide 14, which demonstrates that despite the ongoing global volatility, we have continued to strengthen both our balance sheet and our debt maturity profile. Through proactive balance sheet management, we've reduced our blended cost of debt to 6.7% while maintaining an average debt maturity of approximately four years. In addition, we've recently secured a 250 million term loan, which remains undrawn and provides us with flexibility to manage the potential maturity of the convertible bond in March 2027. Following these transactions, we now have more than $500 million of available liquidity through cash on balance sheet and our undrawn debt facilities. Our net leverage also continues to decline, reduced by 0.4x year on year to 3.4x. Overall, this provides us with a strong financial platform from which to execute our medium term strategy. Which takes us on to slide 15 and a quick reminder of our upgraded full year 2026 guidance. We delivered record size and tenancy greater than H1, and the strength of demand across our markets gives us confidence to upgrade once again. We now expect 3,500 to 4,000 tenancy additions representing 10 to 12% year-on-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA of 520 to 535 million representing 10 to 13% year-on-year growth. Recurring free cash flow guidance is now 220 to 235 million representing 6 to 11% year-on-year growth and discretionary capex guidance increased to 215 to 245 million to fund the additional organic growth we're also progressing with shareholder distributions as planned we've invested 58 million through the buyback program since it began last year and today we're also announcing our inaugural interim dividends of 8 million dollars which reflects the intended one-third two-thirds phasing with the final dividend in respect of FY26 expected to be paid in H1 2027 subject to the usual approvals overall this is a very strong start to impact 2030. We're converting structural mobile demand into tenancy growth, cash generation and attractive compounding returns while maintaining balance sheet discipline. With that, we'll now do a deep dive on the multi-decade runway and why we feel incredibly excited and confident about our markets and our future growth opportunities within them. Tom, back to you.

Thanks very much Manjit. So now for the second half of our presentation which moves into the deep dive and this is a really you know key strategic discussion for investors today. We often receive questions around how long the growth opportunity for telecom towers in Africa and the Middle East will continue. Well the answer in our view is decades and we'll lay out why here. We also received another frequent question from investors around how satellites will play a role in mobile networks in the future. And, you know, rather than discussing these topics only at a high level, we've examined the underlying physics, the engineering and the market dynamics that will shape mobile networks for the coming decades. And the conclusion is clear. Data demand is set to grow significantly. The overwhelming majority of that demand will continue to be carried through terrestrial networks and satellite technology will play an important and complementary role in expanding that coverage that connectivity So there are really three conclusions from this first mobile data demand is still at the early stages of its growth journey and Data consumption in our markets has increased by six times over the past five years And this is really what we're seeing in the business on the ground today with record tenancy rollout in each of the past three years and expecting a fourth record year this year as we've guided to all in support of the data consumption demand growth and Forecasts show that data consumption will increase by a further 12 times by 2040 Well ahead of the seven times increase expected globally second the Overwhelming majority of that demand will continue to be served by terrestrial networks with 97% of all data demand to be carried by terrestrial infrastructure in 2040 and supporting that volume of traffic will require sustained investment in dents and networks greater capacity and successive generations of mobile technology and and this obviously underpins the long term investment thesis of Helios Towers and provides growth opportunities for decades ahead and third, satellite technology should be viewed as complementary to terrestrial satellites will extend coverage into locations that have previously been uneconomic or impractical or impossible to collect and they're also opening up new locations where terrestrial sites can now be built using satellite backhaul and these locations were not previously possible for cell towers later in the presentation we'll actually show you a live example from Madagascar where this is already happening today so satellite extends the reach of the overall communications ecosystem while terrestrial networks continue to provide the capacity to serve large numbers of users bringing these factors together we estimate that the total addressable organic market for our nine markets is approximately 72,000 additional tenancies by 2040. Now that is around twice the size of the Helios Towers footprint today. The reason for this long term growth opportunity starts with the demographics. Africa and Middle East are expected to see decades of outsized population and mobile growth relative to the rest of the world. and here you see between 2025 and 2040 the population of Africa and Middle East is expected to grow by around 600 million people that represents growth of around 33% compared with 5% across the rest of the world unique mobile subscribers so people getting phones for the first time are expected to increase by around 800 million across the region growth of 43% compared to 12% elsewhere And smartphone devices are expected to increase by approximately 1 billion across the region, which is a growth of 80% compared with just 20% across the rest of the world. So these numbers are clearly very significant. Quite simply, more people, more mobile subscribers and greater smartphone adoption will drive the increasing demand for digital services. And as more people use more data intensive services, Operators will continue to have attracted investing opportunities for new subscribers and increased data Adding to the coverage and capacity requirements of the networks This creates a powerful and sustained demand environment for shared mobile infrastructure as well as the whole mobile industry at large And ultimately, as I've said, everything comes back to one number. It's data consumption. Data is the currency of our industry. And globally, total data consumption is expected to increase by around seven times by 2040. And across the Helios Towers markets, data consumption is expected to increase by around 12 times over that same period. So our markets are expected to grow at almost twice the global rate and that's an extraordinary level of demand growth and it's been driven by a number of structural factors working together as I said population increasing mobile penetration rising smartphones are becoming more affordable users are migrating from 2G and 3G towards 4G and 5G and over time 6G and customers are more and more using mobile networks for video, social media, financial services, education, commerce, healthcare the list goes on AI enabled applications increasingly as well and therefore you know the key question is not whether demand exists the key question is how networks evolve to support it and that's exactly what this next section addresses so let me briefly introduce the three colleagues who will take us through the next section Marcus Weldon is our senior technical advisor at Helios Towers and the former president of Nokia Bell Labs one of the world's leading innovation institutions Marcus will set out how future networks need to evolve including the role of spectrum, network density, satellite and AI Alan Fairburn is our chief technology and digital officer and the executive director of DRC Alan brings deep operational experience across Africa and the Middle East and will translate the technology into the practical infrastructure required to deliver it and Sinesh Vallabh is our chief commercial officer with more than two decades experience across Africa telecoms Sinesh will bring the discussion back to the customer demand the market growth and the commercial opportunity for Helios Towers so they'll take us through the underlying technology and the infrastructure required and right through to the customer and growth opportunity. So Marcus over to you.

Thanks Tom. It's really a pleasure to be here and my role at Bell Labs, that famous institution was understanding the fundamental limits of technology and where they apply and therefore how networks would evolve and what innovations were required to drive that evolution. So I'm going to share some of that with you today. And yes, you're going to get a live demo of satellite and terrestrial technologies. You can't believe it, but it's true. So wait for that. So I thought I would start with what you all want to understand, which is the propagation of electromagnetic spectrum. You were all here to understand that today, and you're going to understand it very shortly. So the figure on the left here is electromagnetic spectrum across the entire spectrum. and I want you to focus in on the part called cellular and then I'll talk also about microwave and satellite. Cellular spectrum is actually quite a narrow band. It's about a gigahertz wide and that has to be shared between many different technologies as you see them advertised there. And it's narrow because it has unique propagation characteristics. We'd like it to be much wider but actually it has to propagate through the Earth's atmosphere. It has to deal with cluttered environments meaning buildings and objects and trees. has to be received by the small antenna in your phone, and it has to have enough capacity to provide all the data you need. Meeting all those criteria is just in that narrow band. So keep that in mind, it's a narrow band and it's priceless. Above that is a slightly higher frequency microwave and satellite band. It's wider bandwidth, so that's attractive, bandwidth means capacity, but it's actually much harder to propagate. What you see from the criteria there, it actually gets absorbed by the air, It gets absorbed by the air. It gets scattered by buildings It actually can't be transmitted indoors. So it's a much harder propagation Environment, so it's really complementary I think of cellular as primary spectrum a satellite and microwave secondary spectrum any but what you're beginning to see is they they start overlapping and that's what you've seen in the media, but there's a question about what's the role of satellite type spectrum versus cellular type spectrum and I'm going to address that today and All right, so let's do that a little bit and here we go. This is a terrestrial network today It actually is a series of technologies the lowest frequency spectrum in that cellular band is actually the best propagating But it's the narrowest bandwidth generally spectrum as you grow up in bandwidth has more bandwidth available so you start here and you can think of these as the technology generations 2g 3g 4g 5g and So low frequency was was the best propagating that was the original mobile network as you go through the generations You go to higher frequencies, but they don't propagate as far you can see the cell radii So it becomes more challenging we get more capacities in case if you don't get something but nothing you get that capacity but smaller Cell radius which means towers have to come closer together. It's something that Alan is going to talk about But now let's talk about the satellite part His satellite it actually interestingly uses some of those same high frequencies that you're beginning to see in 5g And you'll see even more in 6g But it's much further away, and this is going to be the absolutely critical point and the point of my demo So using those same frequencies that are hard to propagate you put them much further away And when you do that that signal is going to attenuate massively, but it also spreads out because it's further away I'm going to show you how beams Spread out so although in a cellular network you can keep it quite tightly focused at those high frequencies in a satellite network It's going to spread out and you see a stated of being with there because satellites tend to be 300 kilometers to 2,000 or even 30,000 kilometers above the earth if you're wondering what the terminology is Leo is low Earth orbit satellite is the type of satellite gets deployed for communications networks for example by starling 300 kilometers away by the time the beam has spread out and It's eight kilometers of being which on the surface compared to something much smaller for terrestrial networks So in fact the takeaway here this is terrestrial networks Use a combination of frequencies some give you a lower capacity, but very good coverage some give you higher capacity less coverage and satellite doesn't have a problem with coverage and because it makes very nice large spots but has a capacity problem because the beam or the signal is so far away and that's what I want to dive into now and you're hopefully and you're going to get the demo and hopefully you'll understand that there are intrinsic limitations of the two technologies but they are inherently complementary so here we go and you're going to see the live demo so here's my torch you see the torch creates a beam and it has a beam angle and that beam angle no matter how much you try to focus it will always spread, and that's because there's a diffraction limit. Those of you who remember your physics and diffraction, if you try and tightly focus a beam beyond a certain point, it actually becomes a broader beam, oddly enough. So there's a limit to how much you can focus a beam, and then when it goes forward, when it propagates, it gets wider and wider and wider. So let's take the example of a satellite. So a satellite at 350 kilometers away from the signal from its origin, the satellite sits 350 kilometers above the Earth, By the time I've gone 350 kilometers, the beam width on the Earth's surface is 14 kilometers. In fact, this is the published number in Starling's IPO for typical beam width. They actually talk about 160 square kilometers of beam area. Now, if we compare that to the one kilometer case, much more like a cellular network, think of turning that flashlight on its side and doing a cellular terrestrial network, much smaller beam areas on the order of kilometers. that fundamentally means and again I've not talked about anyone's technology or any particular operator fundamentally means when you're that far away because of the physics you cannot focus the beam as much it's going to be a large beam covering a large area large areas good coverage but the capacity gets diluted because that capacity is shared over that entire area and you've got a tight beam that capacity is focused in that beam so time for the demo you think okay this is very high-tech we invested a A lot of money, I think, in this, isn't it? Yeah, we do. So here it is. Here's the demo. Yeah, I know. So here we go. This is our cellular network. You see, I'm very close to my subscriber. My subscriber's sitting here on the wall. Nice tight beam, high intensity. All that radio energy is in a very small area, and I get a very good signal. You see how bright and tight it is. Now, here's a satellite. It's just a fact of the propagation physics. It's a much wider beam area with all that intensity shared over all those subscribers. So here, it's just this simple. And nothing here is to do with anyone's innovation or technologies. It's just the physics of propagation of any electromagnetic spectrum. Cellular satellite. And all the energy from the bulb is shared over a much larger area here, and here it's shared over a much smaller area. An area equals subscribers. So here they the subscribers smaller number with much higher intensity signal here larger potential number of subscribers from much lower intensity signal So the net effect is that they are entirely Complement complementary technologies and we thought we'd do a little demo here in terms of how your demonstration in terms of London so if we took a satellite service a Leo service at about 350 kilometers away and and mapped it to London you could have 14 of those large beams covering the area of London that sounds fantastic only 14 beams required but the problem is all that spectral intensity is shared over those large beams so it's spread out that's the way to think about it so as a result and by the way beams cannot overlap because they would interfere so you can't double up on the amount of capacity in those beams without using more spectrum so you'd have 14 beams Trying to serve the 13 million people in London, the net effect is you basically, at the numbers that Starlink says they could serve, which is sort of about 512 users, they say you could offer service within a given beam, you could serve actually 7,000 of the 13 million people in London could have a reasonable service. It's not fantastic. The privileged few. On the other hand, if you look at the Celion network, where we've created about 11,000 towers in the London footprint, each of those 13 million people could have that service because we've subdivided that spectrum into small little pockets same amount of capacity but over a much smaller area so everyone gets a brilliant service so you see that there's intrinsically here no way that a satellite because its footprint is so much larger than a terrestrial network can actually compete with terrestrial what it does instead is complements terrestrial as Tom said two ways it complements terrestrial it goes beyond where terrestrial can get because you couldn't get to a certain site with a piece of fiber or with a microwave link you can now use satellite for backhaul and Alan's going to show you that the other thing it does is it can go direct to device using a limited amount of spectrum in those same areas using your cell phone because that now the satellites use some of the cell phone frequencies and that's why I said that the overlap is beginning to happen so you can use some of the cell phone frequencies to go direct to device or you can use them to go and provide backhaul services entirely complementary to what we see in our terrestrial network infrastructure. And that's going to be the case into the future. Nothing will change because of what I've said. I think we can, yes? Yes, go ahead.

Yeah, sorry, it's David from Bank of America. If we stood together and we had two torches far apart, we would get overlapping. But my understanding is the V3 satellites. I really enjoyed your white paper. I felt it was a little bit V2 focused. Is that reasonable critique?

V2, I think, is what they're planning for the mobile service. So, yes, it was V2. Right.

So when V3 overlaps the actual signal, you can then get increased capacity because you can have multiple beams. It can coordinate the beams across users. So is that a bit simplistic when we're thinking about V3 coming online?

The only way that can be true is if you use different spectrum in V3 than they're using V2, which I think is part of their plan. It's hard to know exactly what spectrum they're going to use in each of the generations. The only way you can overlap beams. Obviously you can do beam steering a little bit, but then again that's subdividing, right, because now you're moving the beam to be a different sub area of the overall beam. The only other way you can do it is use different spectrum, which is why you see them talking about acquiring spectrum, et cetera. With more spectrum, yes, but here's the limit. They can never own more spectrum going to your device than the terrestrial operators already own. That's because the terrestrial operators basically own everything available On the ground and they have to use that same spectrum for a couple of reasons. It's propagating in the same area But it's also going to a device this That is designed for terrestrial spectrum. And in fact, you could say okay. Well, perhaps I could make this good for microwave spectrum So we've talked about this this then would become a backpack from the old mobile phones to receive satellite or microwave spectrum you'd need a parabolic antenna and So you to then take this from being a small device with a tiny antenna to a having a backpack with an antenna on it So it's sort of like the old satellite phones in some ways, but even bigger antennas So they can only have the same spectrum in an ideal case as a terrestrial operator and their footprint will always be that much larger You see what I mean? Yeah, appreciate it So the v2 is directed device the v3 is

exactly right and if they did try and use it for the directed device what I said would be fundamentally the case thank you thank you Marcus and as Tom has explained that data consumption will grow 12x by 2040 and that data is the true currency of our industry and Marcus explained excellent you know how the physics behind the networks are designed And over the next few slides, I will show you how networks need to evolve to meet the demand across our markets, and the solutions we at Helios Towers are achieving to support this. On this slide, you will see how networks will evolve over the next 15 years, with terrestrial networks filling 97% of the infrastructure across the entire ecosystem, with satellites helping to extend coverage in remote and hard-to-reach places. Over the next decade, towers will be more densely populated than ever before, as you see on the left-hand side of this slide. This will mean more co-locations, more street furniture and more in-building solutions. All to deliver the speed, capacity and low latency that customers expect and need on the ground. In deep rural areas where we continue to see strong build to suit demand and alongside that, satellite technologies create an exciting opportunity to extend our networks even further. But let's dive deeper into technology on the next slide. Why are we so excited about the opportunity ahead? Well, we're still in the very early stages of the technology evolution, and today only around 5% of the population across our markets are connected to 5G, meaning the vast majority of the investment cycle is still ahead of us. And as operators continue expanding 4G and 5G and eventually deploy 6G, we see decades of infrastructure investment still to come. This technology of evolution benefits Helios Towers in two ways. is network densification as operators move through the technology generations they deploy progressively higher frequency spectrum and higher frequencies deliver much greater capacity but over shorter distances as Mark has clearly explained earlier and this means tower spacing roughly halves from one generation to the next so to maintain coverage and meet growing data demand operators need significantly more tower sites and second Every new generation adds more equipment to each site. Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, new technologies are layered into it, requiring additional radios, antennas and power capacity. And that's why we've invested heavily in developing highly efficient hybrid power systems that deliver this increasing energy demand. Moving on to slide 29. As Marcus explained earlier, using London as an example, satellites are great for expanding coverage in the total addressable market. And this slide aims to show where satellite technology does create new opportunities. On the left hand side of the chart illustrates where direct to device services can be realistically deployed. And that's typically in remote areas with fewer than five people per square kilometre. And in these areas, satellites deliver around about two megabytes per second, equivalent to 3G download experience. And this unlocks communities that have traditionally been uneconomic or impossible to connect. and as population density increases satellite capacity is shared between those users making direct to device much less practical again as we discussed but instead satellites are better used to provide backhaul connection connecting mobile towers into the wider mobile network where fibre or microwave isn't available and this creates two opportunities first it expands the addressable market by connecting communities that previously couldn't be reached second It drives incremental power demand in locations that were not commercially viable previously. Satellites expand the market and enable more tower deployments. And this isn't just a future concept so let me show you a short video showing how we're already doing this in Madagascar today. So this is a remote site in Madagascar where fibre or microwave backhaul simply wasn't practical and instead the satellite antenna you see at the base of the tower provides the backhaul connection linking the site into the operator's wider mobile network. The tower then does what terrestrial networks do best, providing high quality radio coverage and capacity to the surrounding communities through the mobile antennas situated at the top of the tower. Satellites connect the tower, the tower connects to the customer, giving connectivity to people who have never been connected. The capacity delivered to subscribers is still ultimately determined by the backhaul connection. Fibre remains the highest capacity solution, followed by microwave, with satellite providing effective alternatives when neither of those is practical. But this doesn't fundamentally change the network architecture or the infrastructure ecosystem. Rather, it opens up new tower opportunities in locations that previously couldn't be connected. In addition to this, we are deploying satellite backhaul on a small number of sites across the group this year. It's another example of satellites and existing terrestrial networks are complementary. This final slide brings everything together and as our customer networks evolve so does our infrastructure portfolio. Whether it's 100 meter lattice towers providing wide area coverage or 10 meter rooftop towers with bespoke designs we provide the right infrastructure for every deployment. And alongside our towers we deliver ultra efficient hybrid power systems that keep every site operating 24 7. We're also expanding our digital network solutions ensuring we continue to meet our customers needs both now and in the future. The key message is simple. Whatever our customers need to deploy, we have the infrastructure and operational capability to deliver it. And I'll now hand over to Snesh who's going to take us through the opportunity ahead.

Thanks, Alan, and good morning to everyone. You've heard today about the multi-decade growth runway outlook, but what is perhaps most encouraging that these are not just trends for the future they are already visible today across our markets digital adoption is accelerating at a pace well ahead ahead of many developed economies let's put that into perspective social media adoption has grown by 18% year on year across our footprint versus only 4% in the rest of the world video traffic in Africa and Belize has increased by 14% versus 10% in the rest of the world And there are over two times more mobile money transactions being executed in the region as compared to the rest of the world. This means users in the region are consuming more and richer digital services, meaning that every new user spends more time online and generates more traffic than the last. These services and more are supporting sustained rather than occasional or temporary traffic growth. That creates structural demand for additional capacity, supporting and accelerating the need for denser and wider networks. For operators, increasing demand has a very predictable consequence. They have to invest. Subscriber growth expands the customer base and higher output drives investment. Operators increasing capital expenditure demonstrates they are already responding. Since 2023, mobile subscribers have grown 14%. Over that same period, average revenue per user increased by 34%. This reflects both higher data consumption, yes, but also a continued migration towards higher valued services. The major mobile operators across our footprint have responded to this very swiftly. They have collectively increased capital expenditure by over 33% during that same period. In fact, just this week, Vodacom Group announced accelerating growth capex in the region. ETL noted continued acceleration investment into the network and other digital solutions. Orange disclosed record number of new data subscribers in Africa and the Middle East. This is exactly what we expect to see. When I speak to customers, they're all saying the same thing. The need to invest more into the networks to address the growing demand and consumer base. Most importantly, for Helios Towers, that translates directly not only to additional built-to-suit sites, but more collocations, more equipment on each tower, and increasing demand for power and digital network solutions. Our confidence that this continues for decades is based on reinforcing structural trends. First, smartphones continue to become dramatically more affordable. As handset prices decline, Hundreds of millions of additional consumers gain access to the digital economy. And in our markets, mobile is overwhelmingly the way people access the Internet. Second, technology evolution drives network densification, as you've heard from Marcus and Ellen, which means more sites and more equipment needed as operators move from 4G to 5G and beyond. This introduces new antennas, new radios, new power requirements, means more towers but it also means that existing towers become more valuable because they support more equipment and tenants and increasingly sophisticated services. Finally, almost all future traffic growth continues to come through mobile. AI, video, cloud computing, enterprise applications and connected devices all require higher bandwidth and lower latency. You heard from Tom speak about the massive 12 times data growth. 97% of that traffic will be carried through the terrestrial infrastructure. When we bring these trends together, the long-term opportunity becomes clear. Population growth adds around 600 million people by 2040, supported by one of the youngest populations globally with 65% under the age of 30. Rising GDP supports increasing consumer spending, enterprise investment, and digital inclusion. Overlay those with around 800 million new mobile connections. Let that sink in. 800 million new mobile connections. That's more than the population of the entire Europe, more than two times the population of the U.S. This will come online as new users over the next 15 years. That combination underpins an estimated 72,000 additional addressable total tenancies by 2040, which is about double the size of our existing portfolio, as you've heard Tom mention. Importantly, this is not based on cyclical assumptions. It is supported by long-term demographic, economic, and technological trends that are already underway. Decades of growth to come for sure. Our structural growth creates the opportunity but execution determines how the value is created. Hillis Towers is uniquely positioned because of its operational excellence and financial value proposition underpinning our customer experience excellence strategy. We deliver 99.99% power uptime because reliability directly impacts our customers revenue. This makes resilient infrastructure

It's a much wider beam area with all that intensity shared over all those subscribers So here it's just this simple and nothing here is to do with anyone's innovation or technologies It's just the physics of propagation of any electromagnetic spectrum cellular satellite and all the energy from the bulb is shared over a much larger area here and And here it's shared over a much smaller area an area equals subscribers So here they the subscribers smaller number with much higher intensity signal here larger potential number of subscribers from much lower intensity signal So the net effect is that they are entirely complement complementary technologies and we thought we'd do a little demo here in terms of how your demonstration in terms of London and So if we took a satellite service, a LEO service at about 350 kilometers away and mapped it to London, you could have 14 of those large beams covering the area of London. That sounds fantastic. Only 14 beams required. But the problem is all that spectral intensity is shared over that those large beams. So it's spread out. That's the way to think about it. so as a result and by the way beams cannot overlap because they would interfere so you can't double up on the amount of capacity in those beams without using more spectrum so you'd have 14 beams trying to serve the 13 million people in London the net effect is you basically at the numbers that Starlink says they could serve which is sort of about 512 users they say you could offer service within a given beam you could serve actually 7,000 of the 13 million people in London could have a reasonable service it's not fantastic The privilege for you on the other hand if you look at the cellular network where we've created about 11,000 towers in the in the London footprint each of those 13 million people could have that service because we've subdivided that spectrum into small little pockets same amount of capacity but over a much smaller area so everyone gets a brilliant service so you see that there's intrinsically no way that that a satellite, because its footprint is so much larger than a terrestrial network, can actually compete with terrestrial. What it does instead is complements terrestrial. As Tom said, two ways it complements terrestrial. It goes beyond where terrestrial can get, because you couldn't get to a certain site with a piece of fiber or with a microwave link. You can now use satellite for backhaul, and Alan's going to show you that. The other thing it does is it can go direct to device using a limited amount of spectrum in those same areas. using your cell phone because now the satellites use some of the cell phone frequencies and that's why I said that the overlap is beginning to happen so you can use some of the cell phone frequencies to go direct device or you can use them to go and provide backhaul services entirely complementary to what we see in our terrestrial network infrastructure and that's going to be the case into the future nothing will change because of what I've said I think we can yes yes go ahead

yeah sorry it's David from Bank of America um if we stood together and we had two torches yes far apart we would get overlapping but my understanding is the v3 satellites and I really enjoyed your your white paper I felt there was a it was a little bit v2 focused is that reasonable critique

V2, I think, is what they're planning for the mobile service. So, yes, it was V2. Right.

So when V3 overlaps the actual signal, you can then get increased capacity because you can have multiple beams. It can coordinate the beams across users. So is that a bit simplistic when we're thinking about V3 coming online?

The only way that can be true is if you use different spectrum in V3 than they're using V2, which I think is part of their plan. It's hard to know exactly what spectrum they're going to use in each of the generations. The only way you can overlap beams, obviously you can do beam steering a little bit, but then again, that's subdividing, right? Because now you're moving the beam to be a different sub area of the overall beam. The only other way you can do it is use different spectrum, which is why you see them talking about acquiring spectrum, et cetera. With more spectrum, yes, but here's the limit. They can never own more spectrum going to your device than the terrestrial operators already own. That's because the terrestrial operators basically own everything available on the ground and they have to use that same spectrum for a couple reasons is propagating in the same area but it's also going to a device this that is designed for terrestrial spectrum and in fact you could say okay well perhaps I could make this good for microwave spectrum so we've talked about this this then would become a backpack remember old mobile phones to receive satellite or microwave spectrum you'd need a parabolic antenna so you then take this from being a small device with a tiny antenna to having a backpack with an antenna on it so it's sort of like the old satellite phones in some ways but even bigger antennas so they can only have the same spectrum in an ideal case as a terrestrial operator and their footprint will always be that much larger you see what I mean? V3 is for the dish broadband as well so the V2 is directed device the V3 is

that exactly right and if they did try and use it for directed device what I said would be fundamentally the case thank you thank you Marcus and as Tom has explained that data consumption will grow 12x by 2040 and that data is the true currency of our industry and Marcus explained excellent you know how the physics behind the networks are designed and over the next few slides I will show you how networks need to evolve to meet the demand across our markets and the solutions we at Helios Towers are achieving to support this. On this slide you will see how networks will evolve over the next 15 years with terrestrial networks providing 97% of the infrastructure across the entire ecosystem with satellites helping to extend coverage in remote and hard to reach places. Over the next decade Towers will be more densely populated than ever before as you see on the left hand side of this slide. This will mean more co-locations, more street furniture and more in-building solutions. All to deliver the speed, capacity and low latency that customers expect and need on the ground. In deep rural areas where we continue to see strong build to suit demand and alongside that, satellite technologies create an exciting opportunity to extend our networks even further. But let's dive deeper into technology on the next slide. Why are we so excited about the opportunity ahead? Well, we're still in the very early stages of the technology evolution. And today, only around 5% of the population across our markets are connected to 5G, meaning the vast majority of the investment cycle is still ahead of us. And as operators continue expanding 4G and 5G and eventually deploy 6G, we see decades of infrastructure investment still to come. This technology of evolution benefits Helios Towers in two ways. is network densification as operators move through the technology generations they deploy progressively higher frequency spectrum and higher frequencies deliver much greater capacity but over shorter distances as Mark has clearly explained earlier and this means tower spacing roughly halves from one generation to the next so to maintain coverage and meet growing data demand operators need significantly more tower sites and second Every new generation adds more equipment to each site. Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, new technologies are layered into it, requiring additional radios, antennas, and power capacity. And that's why we've invested heavily in developing highly efficient hybrid power systems that deliver this increasing energy demand. Moving on to slide 29. As Marcus explained earlier, using London as an example, satellites are great for expanding coverage in the total addressable market. And this slide aims to show where satellite technology does create new opportunities. On the left hand side of the chart illustrates where direct to device services can be realistically deployed. And that's typically in remote areas with fewer than five people per square kilometer. And in these areas, satellites deliver around about two megabytes per second, equivalent to 3G download experience. And this unlocks communities that have traditionally been uneconomic or impossible to connect. and as population density increases satellite capacity is shared between those users making direct to device much less practical again as we discussed but instead satellites are better used to provide backhaul connection connecting mobile towers into the wider mobile network where fibre or microwave isn't available and this creates two opportunities first it expands the addressable market by connecting communities that previously couldn't be reached second It drives incremental tower demand in locations that were not commercially viable previously. Satellites expand the market and enable more tower deployments. And this isn't just a future concept so let me show you a short video showing how we're already doing this in Madagascar today. So this is a remote site in Madagascar where fibre or microwave backhaul simply wasn't practical and instead the satellite antenna you see at the base of the tower provides the backhaul connection linking the site into the operator's wider mobile network. The tower then does what terrestrial networks do best, providing high quality radio coverage and capacity to the surrounding communities through the mobile antennas situated at the top of the tower. Satellites connect the tower, the tower connects to the customer, giving connectivity to people who have never been connected. The capacity delivered to subscribers is still ultimately determined by the backhaul connection. Fibre remains the highest capacity solution, followed by Microwave, with Satellite providing an effective alternative when neither of those is practical. But this doesn't fundamentally change the network architecture or the infrastructure ecosystem. Rather, it opens up new Tower opportunities in locations that previously couldn't be connected. In addition to this, we are deploying Satellite Backhaul on a small number of sites across the group this year. It's another example of satellites and existing terrestrial networks are complementary. This final slide brings everything together. And as our customer networks evolve, so does our infrastructure portfolio. Whether it's 100 meter lattice towers providing wide area coverage or 10 meter rooftop towers with bespoke designs, we provide the right infrastructure for every deployment. And alongside our towers, we deliver ultra efficient hybrid power systems that keep every site operating 24 seven. We're also expanding our digital network solutions, ensuring we continue to meet our customers' needs both now and in the future. The key message is simple. Whatever our customers need to deploy, we have the infrastructure and operational capability to deliver it. And I'll now hand over to Snesh, who's going to take us through the opportunity ahead.

Thanks, Alan, and good morning to everyone. You've heard today about the multi-decade growth runway outlook, but what is perhaps most encouraging is that these are not just trends for the future. They are already visible today. Across our markets, digital adoption is accelerating at a pace well ahead of many developed economies. Let's put that into perspective. Social media adoption has grown by 18% year on year across our footprint versus only 4% in the rest of the world. Video traffic in Africa and the Middle East has increased by 14% versus 10% in the rest of the world. And there are over two times more mobile money transactions being executed in the region as compared to the rest of the world. This means users in the region are consuming more and richer digital services, meaning that every new user spends more time online and generates more traffic than the last. These services and more are supporting sustained rather than occasional or temporary traffic growth. That creates structural demand for additional capacity, supporting and accelerating the need for denser and wider networks. For operators, increasing demand has a very predictable consequence. They have to invest. Subscriber growth expands the customer base and high output drives investment. Operators increasing capital expenditure demonstrates they are already responding. Since 2023, mobile subscribers have grown 14%. Over that same period, average revenue per user increased by 34%. This reflects both higher data consumption, yes, but also a continued migration towards higher valued services. The major mobile operators across our footprint have responded to this very swiftly. They have collectively increased capital expenditure by over 33% during that same period. In fact, just this week, Vodacom Group announced accelerating growth capex in the region. Airtel noted continued acceleration investment into the network and other digital solutions. Orange disclosed record number of new data subscribers in Africa and the Middle East. This is exactly what we expect to see. When I speak to customers, they're all saying the same thing. the need to invest more into the networks to address the growing demand and consumer base. Most importantly, for Helios Towers, that translates directly not only to additional built-to-suit sites, but more co-locations, more equipment on each tower, and increasing demand for power and digital network solutions. Our confidence that this continues for decades is based on reinforcing structural trends. Smartphones continue to become dramatically more affordable. As handset prices decline, hundreds of millions of additional consumers gain access to the digital economy. And in our markets, mobile is overwhelmingly the way people access the internet. Second, technology evolution drives network densification, as you've heard from Marcus and Ellen, which means more sites and more equipment needed as operators move from 4G to 5G and beyond. This introduces new antennas, new radios, new power requirements. It means more towers, but it also means that existing towers become more valuable because they support more equipment and tenants and increasingly sophisticated services. Finally, almost all future traffic growth continues to come through mobile. AI, video, cloud computing, enterprise applications, and connected devices all require higher bandwidth and lower latency. You heard from Tom speak about the massive 12 times data growth. 97% of that traffic will be carried through the terrestrial infrastructure. When we bring these trends together, the long-term opportunity becomes clear. Population growth adds around 600 million people by 2040, supported by one of the youngest populations globally, with 65% under the age of 30. Rising GDP supports increasing consumer spending, enterprise investment, and digital inclusion. Overlay those with around 800 million new mobile connections. Let that sink in. 800 million new mobile connections. That's more than the population of the entire of Europe More than two times the population of the U.S. This will come online as new users over the next 15 years. That combination underpins an estimated 72,000 additional addressable total tenancies by 2040, which is about double the size of our existing portfolio, as you've heard Tom mention. Importantly, this is not based on cyclical assumptions. It is supported by long-term demographic, economic, and technological trends. that are already underway. Decades of growth to come for sure. Our structural growth creates the opportunity, but execution determines how the value is created. Helios Towers is uniquely positioned because of its operational excellence and financial value proposition underpinning our customer experience excellence strategy. We deliver 99.99% power uptime because reliability directly impacts our customers' revenue. This makes resilient infrastructure critical. We can also bring co-location customers online within 24 hours, enabling operators to address traffic hotspots as they emerge. Financially, our shared infrastructure model Lowest operators total cost of ownership by 30%, allowing them to focus their capital on their core business rather than on passive infrastructure. As networks become denser, that capital efficiency becomes increasingly more valuable. To close out, I would like to leave you with a simple message. There is a lot of growth for a long time to come, and we are exceptionally uniquely positioned to capture this proportionate share of that. Thank you very much. Tom, back to you.

Thanks very much, Sinesh and Marcus and Alan. I look forward to questions. I'll just wrap up quickly and let me start by bringing it back to our investment case. First, our business continues to demonstrate very strong momentum. Record tenancy growth has translated into another period of strong financial delivery and another upgrade to guidance we delivered more than two and a half thousand tenancy additions in the first half EBITDA increased by 14% recurring free cash flow by 52% and ROIC continues to improve our pipeline remains very strong and demand is already building for 2027 Second, that performance is enabling us to continue executing our disciplined capital allocation framework for impact 2030. We're investing in high return growth opportunities, leverages on the downward trajectory, and we're increasingly paying shareholder returns through both buybacks and dividends with our inaugural interim dividend announced today. Third, the long term outlook remains highly compelling. data consumption across our markets has already increased by six times over the past five years and is forecast to grow by another 12 times by 2040 and that's almost twice the global rate that level of demand requires sustained investments in terrestrial mobile infrastructure and terrestrial networks will continue to carry the vast amount of mobile data because they provide the density the capacity and the indoor coverage needed to serve large populations Satellite technologies will also play an increasingly important role. They'll extend coverage, open up new locations and provide backhaul to terrestrial sites that could previously not be connected. So taken together, we see a long runway of structural growth underpinned by an estimated 72,000 additional addressable tenancies in our markets over the next 15 years. And that's around twice the size of Helios Towers footprint today. Helios Sales therefore is very well positioned to deliver on this opportunity we have leading market positions a world-class operating platform and team strong customer relationships and a disciplined capital allocation framework that enables us to turn this market demand into growth for our customers improve connectivity for the communities in which we serve and attractive growth and returns for our investors so with that thank you very much for joining us today and we're now very much looking to taking your questions thank you everyone so if the five of us come up to the stage um yeah come come come here

All right, all right. The q&a, we will start in the room, then we'll go to the conference line. And thereafter, we'll do any questions tapped in by the webcast as well. So I think as he had his hand raised earlier, we'll start with the James Q&A, if you're ready.

Hi, thank you. It's James Lock here from Peel Hunt. A question for Marcus. Yes, hi. As I understand it, Starlink uses RF today for its direct devices, which is what you were talking about. But it does use lasers to communicate between its devices. while smartphones obviously require standard microwave signals is it logical to think that over time satellites could use lasers to the ground towers which then handle the final local RF communications so to clarify for Starlink satellite to satellite communications laser line of sight laser lasers do actually scatter so and yes there have been

attempts to do ground station to satellite laser technology obviously you wouldn't do that to a phone and fundamentally it's that last part to the phone that is the constraint because as we talked about there are lots of ways to get good backhaul of which line of sight laser is one fiber microwave that's got lots of bandwidth because it's light has actually the biggest amount of spectrum it's terahertz of spectrum so if you can use light you're going to get terahertz of backhaul that doesn't solve that last mile problem where you've got to communicate with the mobile and fundamentally that's related to having a small antenna in your phone a few millimeters and there are many of them actually for all the different frequency bands small antenna in the phone you have to use spectrum that can propagate well without having to be focused on your laser would have to track you like this and it obviously doesn't go through objects light doesn't go through objects so RF or that cellular band has this great combination of properties of it pretty much goes through objects you know obviously gets attenuated but it does it can scatter off buildings or be reflective of buildings so it finds you something called multi-path it can be received by a small antenna that you can make in a small device with low power and it's got enough bandwidth to deliver these incredible services so if you think about trying to sell for all those things really you can only do that in that frequency band and that is the fundamental constraint not the backhaul constraint does that help can we could lasers be going to the ground station they can then you then use RF so actually there's more opportunities maybe faster or more towers in different areas that could use lasers as well to get the backhaul which then uses the RF to the device yes but my point is actually the backhaul isn't really the constraint so you could do that but if you've got the constraint being you just can't generate enough bandwidth why would you put a laser that has terahertz of bandwidth when in my radio network I've only got gigahertz you see it's off by a factor of a thousand so it's just not worth doing but yes you could and some technologies exist to do exactly that

And the second question is just on the rest of the year. So you've done about the same number of tenancies in the first half as you did last year. If we double that, we don't get to what your guidance is, obviously. Can you talk about the cadence of the next couple of quarters and whether or not there's the ability and what would get you to the top end of that range and is there more to come potentially as well?

Yeah, so I think overall... We're seeing very strong sentiment in terms of investment. And these tenancies are doing a number of things. Some of them are for coverage, new sites. Some of them are for capacity. And some of them are...