IHS Holding Limited Ordinary Shares

Good day and welcome to the IHS Holding Limited second quarter 2025 earning results call for the three month and six month periods ending June 30th 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 to everyone for joining the call today. I'm Robert Berg, head of investor relations here at IHS. With me today is Sam Darwish, our chairman and CEO, and Steve Howden, our CFO. This morning we filed out unordered condensed consolidated interim financial statements for the three month and six month periods ended June 30th 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 two, 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. By their nature, forward looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other important factors that are difficult to predict and that may be beyond our control, including those discussed in the risk factors section of our form 20 F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our other filings with the SEC. As a result, actual results, performance and achievements or industry results may be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements or industry results expressed or implied by these forward looking statements. 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 Rob. Good morning everyone and welcome to our second quarter 2025 earnings results call. I'm pleased to share that we've delivered another quarter of strong results ahead of expectations with strong performance across all our key metrics, revenue, adjusted EBITDA and ALFCF. And we've done it while also spending less total CAPEX. This evidence says that our strategy is working. We're driving organic growth, efficiency and cash flow. And the environment is moving in our favor. We're seeing an improving macroeconomic and forex backdrop as well as fundamental telecom market performance, especially in Nigeria. With all of that, we are raising our full year 2025 outlook across every single key metric. Steve will take you through the details shortly, but the headline is we're operating better, we're more profitable and we're strengthening our balance sheet as we had planned. Let me walk you through the quarter's highlights. Revenue came at $433 million ahead of plan with 11% organic growth driven by collocation, lease amendments, new sites and CPI escalators. Adjusted EBITDA came at $248.5 million with a margin over 57% stable year on year showing continued financial discipline. ALFCF came at $54 million as expected, reflecting the rephrase interest payments following our November 2024 bond refinancing. And total capex came at $46 million down 14% year on year thanks to more disciplined capital allocation. In Q2, we repaid $154 million of high interest debt. That lowered our weighted average cost of debt for the whole company by 100 basis points. And that's tangible progress towards our debt reduction and free cash flow goals. On net leverage, we ended the quarter at 3.4 times, down from 3.9 times a year ago, right in the middle of our target range. We expect net leverage to continue to decrease between now and year end, and that's irrespective of the proceeds from our Rwanda sale signed during the quarter, which we expect to close in the second half and further reduce net leverage. During the quarter, we also refinanced our $300 million group RCF, which remains undrawn, until the third quarter of 2028. Liquidity remains strong, over $830 million even after paying down $154 million of debt. So looking ahead, our priorities are clear. First, continue prioritizing paying down debt while continuing to grow organically. Second, stay disciplined with capital allocation, and as we approach the low end of our leverage range, evaluate the introduction of dividends and or share buybacks. Third, unlock further efficiencies by bringing more technology and AI into how we work. Fourth, continue assessing growth opportunities with the highest returns, given the high level of demand we are seeing from our customers. And finally, further disposal activity remains under consideration, and we are continuing to assess additional value creative disposal opportunities. We see significant potential across our markets. The ongoing rollout of 5G across our biggest markets, the MNO tariff increases in Nigeria, and of course the stable Naira. We believe all of these set the stage for sustained growth and strong returns. We'll keep focusing on building the business, increasing free cash flow, and strengthening the balance sheet with discipline, all with a firm eye on driving shareholder value. And with that, I'll hand it over to Steve.