IHS Holding Limited Ordinary Shares

Good day and welcome to the IHS Holding Limited first quarter 2025 earning results call for the three-month period ended March 31st 2025. Please note that today's conference is being webcast and recorded. If you'd like to ask a question please press star and then one on your telephone keypad at any time. At this time I'd like to turn the conference over to Robert Berg. Please go ahead sir.

Thank you operator. Thanks everyone for joining the call today. I'm Robert Berg, Head of Investor Relations here at IHS. With me today are Sam Darwish, our Chairman and CEO, and Steve Howden, our CFO. This morning, we filed our unaudited, condensed, consolidated interim financial statements for the three-month period ended March 31st, 2025 with the SEC, which can also be found on the Investor Relations section of our website, and issued a related earnings release, presentation, and supplemental deck. These are the consolidated results of IHS Holding Limited, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol IHS, and which comprises the entirety of the group's operations. Before we discuss the results, I would like to draw your attention to the disclaimer set out at the beginning of the presentation on slide 2, which should be read in full, along with the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking statements set out in our earnings release and 6K, filed as well today. In particular, the information to be discussed may contain forward-looking statements which, by their nature, involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other important factors, some of which are beyond our control, that are difficult to predict, and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements, or industry results to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements, or industry results expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements including those discussed in the risk factors section of our form 20f filed with the securities and exchange commission and our other filings with the sec We'll also refer to non IFRS measures, including adjusted EBITDA that we view as important in assessing the performance of our business, ALFCF that we view as important in assessing the liquidity of our business, and consolidated net leverage ratio that we view as important in managing the capital resources of our business. a reconciliation of non-IFRS metrics to the nearest IFRS metrics can be found in our earnings presentation, which is available on the investor relations section of our website. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Sam Darwish, our chairman and CEO.

Thanks, Robert, and welcome everyone to our first quarter 2025 earnings results call. We're reporting a strong start to 2025 with solid growth across our key metrics of revenue, adjusted EBITDA, and ALFCF, and a reduction in total capex, all in line with our expectations. As a result, we are pleased to reiterate all elements of our full year 2025 outlook. Our positive quarter results and momentum reflects, one, the continuing macroeconomic stability in our countries, two, the continued strong secular trends that we are seeing across our business, and three, strong operational focus as we continue to benefit from the significant commercial and financial progress that we made in 2024 and continues into 2025. Looking at our revenue, we saw 26% organic growth driven by almost 8% constant currency growth, as we saw increased revenues from collocation, lease amendments, new sites, and CPI escalators. First quarter revenues also saw a significant benefit from our Forex resets and power indexation, which play a vital role in helping to offset currency devaluation or movement in power prices. our strong organic growth more than offset the impact of the Kuwait disposal, which we completed in December, 2024 and some currency depreciation. Turning to profitability, our adjusted EBITDA reached $253 million in the quarter with a margin of 57.5% up 1,320 basis points compared to this time last year. ALSCF was $150 million during first quarter 2025, an increase of almost 250% year-over-year, driven by improved profitability and a re-phasing of interest payments. Total CapEx was $44 million in the quarter, down 17.8% year-over-year, given our narrowed focus on capital allocation. We continue to assess group-wide cost, JAPEC structures, and new ways to operate our networks, including how we can introduce more technology, especially artificial intelligence, into our ways of working to help us realize future efficiencies. As we discussed in detail at our recent full year 2024 results, and as you can see from our first quarter results in 2025, we have made significant progress across a number of our strategic initiatives. And our focus on financial discipline and capital allocation is delivering sustained improvements in our profitability and cash flow generation. These improvements, supplemented by select assets disposals, has resulted in a further reduction in our consolidated net leverage ratio to 3.4 times, down from 3.7 times at the end of 2024, and a strong liquidity position with over $900 million of available liquidity at the end of March. Following this strong start to the year, we are continuing to implement our strategy to further improve profitability and cash flow generation while strengthening our balance sheet with the goal of maximizing returns for all our stakeholders. In this regard, we are pleased to today announce further progress in our strategic priority related to asset disposals, as we have agreed to sell 100% of IHS Rwanda for an enterprise value of $274.5 million, implying a transaction multiple of 8.3 times adjusted EBITDA after NEASES. The agreement to sell our Rwanda operations was carefully considered as part of our strategic initiatives targeted at shareholder value creation options. The 8.3 times multiple achieved is materially higher than the IHS group multiple, highlighting the value contained within our wider portfolio. We have enjoyed more than 10 years of commercial success in Rwanda and are deeply appreciative to our colleagues, customers, and the government of Rwanda for helping make IHS Rwanda the success it is today. This latest disposal in Rwanda comes after we disposed Kuwait and Peru in 2024, as well as exited the Egyptian market. Not only are we raising the capital we previously targeted, we are also streamlining our markets of focus that remain within the IHS group. Please note that the quarter on quarter 0.3 times reduction in leverage from 3.7 multiples to 3.4 multiples does not reflect the proceeds from the Rwanda disposal. We will continue to assess if there are additional value creative disposal opportunities. Looking ahead, we remain excited by the strong growth opportunities across our footprint, underpinned by continued 5G deployment across our markets. Our confidence in the outlook for the remainder of the year is further supported by the improving backdrop within our two largest markets, Nigeria and Brazil. And with that, I will turn the call over to Steve.