Turkcell Iletisim Hizmetleri AS

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Polina, your Chorus Call Operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Turkcell conference call and live webcast to present and discuss the Turkcell fourth quarter and full year 2025 financial results. All participants will be in a listen-only mode and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. Should anyone need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on your telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mrs. Özlem Yardem, Investor Relations and Corporate Finance Director. Mrs. Yardem, you may now proceed. Thank you, Polina.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Truxell's 2025 Year-End Earnings Call. On the call today, we have our CEO, Ali Taha Koç, and CFO, Kamil Kalyon. They will provide an overview of our operational and financial results for the quarter and the year, followed by a Q&A session. Before we begin, I would like to kindly remind you to review our Safe Harbor Statement, which is available at the end of our presentation. With that, I will now turn the call over to Mr. Ali Talcoş.

Thank you, Özlem. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. We close 2025 with a strong finish, exceeding all of our expectations. Revenues increased by 11%, and we achieved an EBITDA margin of 43.1%. Net income from continuing operations reached 17.8 billion Turkish Liras, up 23% year-on-year. These outcomes reflect disciplined execution and strong momentum across the business. 2025 was pivotal for our long-term strategy positioning. we were awarded the largest spectrum in the 5G auction and secured our fiber footprint through the agreement with BOTASH. These moves strengthen our network leadership and expand our capacity to capture 5G demand. We maintain a robust balance sheet through prudent financial management. This preserves flexibility and liquidity. We deliver shareholder returns through a solid dividend payment and launch a three-year share buyback program. Turkcell is a technology company. We are reinforcing that identity through focused investments. In 2025, we allocated 15% of CapEx to strategic areas, primarily in data center, cloud infrastructure, and renewables. These investments deepen our digital infrastructure. enhance energy resilience, and support long-term value creation. A major milestone for Turkey is our strategic partnership with Google Cloud. We are building a hyperscale cloud region in Turkey. This cloud region will help enterprises accelerate cloud adaption, to secure their data sovereignty as well as access advanced capabilities in AI, cybersecurity, and digital platforms. Turkcell is at the center of Turkey's digital transformation. With this partnership, Turkcell will have sustainable, technology-led growth. Next page, please. Over the past three years, we have executed with discipline to show that Turkcell's leadership in connectivity and digital infrastructure. This transformation shapes how we operate today and how we allocate capital to deliver long-term value creation. Our capital allocation framework is built on three pillars. First one, investing in our business to sustain leadership and capture future growth. We continue to advance mobile rollout and expand our fiber footprint. With 5G, our fixed wireless access solution, SuperVox, will extend our coverage beyond fiber. In parallel, we are investing in data centers and cloud, which will bring future growth. As we scale this business, We may also evaluate selective inorganic opportunities. Our expected capex intensity of around 25% reflects this investment cycle. The second one, delivering attractive shareholder returns. Last year, we distributed 72% of net income from continuing operations. This is our ninth consecutive year of dividend distribution. nine consecutive years. We also launched a new share buyback program and repurchased $58 million of shares to date, reflecting our confidence in long-term value of our business. Thirdly, maintaining a strong balance sheet. We continue to diversify our funding sources, from sustainable bond issuance to Islamic financing structures. We remain committed to maintaining net leverage below one times, preserving flexibility to invest in growth while continuing to support shareholder returns. Overall, we have a crystal clear capital allocation plan to invest in strategic infrastructure, capture structural growth opportunities, and deliver sustainable shareholder value. Next page, please. We can now move to the quarterly performance. The fourth quarter marked another period of solid execution for Turkcell's leadership. Performance was driven by operational excellence and supported by our key growth engines, with outstanding performance across all core segments. In this quarter, revenues grew by 7% year-on-year to 63 billion TL. Results were underpinned by ARPA expansion, continuous subscriber momentum, and scaling of our data center business. All of these reinforce the strength and resilience of our growth model. Group EBITDA increased 12% to 26 billion Turkish Liras, reaching a solid 41.2% margin. Margin expansion reflects continued cost discipline and as well as the operational efficiency. Focused financial management also supported our bottom line, with net income from continuing operations increasing 11% to 3.6 billion Turkish Liras. We achieved 905,000 net postpaid additions in the fourth quarter. This is the strongest quarterly result in the last six years. This was driven by targeted value propositions as well as customer-focused strategy. Another good news, this growth also came with real ARPA expansion, reflecting balanced growth. On the other hand, our data center and cloud business continue to scale, with revenues growing by 32%. Renewable energy installed solar capacity reached 62.2 megawatts. Next, please. Let us turn to the key operational highlights that shaped our great quarter. Competition remained elevated for much of the year, but it eased moderately in the middle of the fourth quarter. 2025 was marked by record high mobile number portability. In this environment, our customer-centric approach and pricing strategy helped us strengthen our market leadership and expand our customer base. we had 2.4 million postpaid net additions for the year 2025, the highest level in the past 26 years. Rising share of the postpaid subscribers was a key driver of revenue growth. It increased by 4.7 percentage points year on year to reach 81% strengthening the resilience and the visibility of our revenue base. Revenue quality also improved. Through our micro-segmented pricing actions and AI-supported offers, we migrated a significant portion of our subscribers to higher-tier packages. As a result, mobile ARPU real growth is 5.4%. Innovative offerings, including family plans and a new loyalty platform like Tumbara, increased engagement and supported retention. As a result, our churn improved year-on-year to 2.7%. Next, please. Turning now to our fixed broadband operations. Another strong year for SuperOnline, our fixed business as well. We expanded our base with net addition of 119,000 Turkcell fiber subscribers. Total fiber subscriber base reached 2.6 million. High-speed campaigns were instrumental in driving this growth. We expanded our offers to speeds of up to 1,000 megabits per second. Today, out of all of our customers, one in five customers subscribes to speeds above 500 megabits per second. This signals a clear shift toward premium connectivity with TruXas for online only. Residential fiber output increased by 10.3% year-on-year. We expanded our fiber homepass to 6.3 million homepasses. While increasing the number of homepasses, we achieved a phenomenal performance on take-up ratio of 42%. Next, please. Our digital infrastructure strategy is central to Turkcell's long-term growth. We believe that cloud and AI infrastructure is structural, a must for every business in Turkey. The Turkish cloud market is growing at 19% annually in dollar terms, supported by increasing digitalization and rapid adoption of AI-driven workloads. Our partnership with Google Cloud marked a defining milestone. Establishing a Google Cloud region in Turkey strengthens our country's digital ecosystem and enhances our position in the infrastructure value chain. This partnership diversifies TruXell's revenue streams and reinforces our long-term growth profile. Today, we operate 15 megawatts of active data center capacity, and it will be doubled by 2032. Over the same period, we expect our data center and cloud revenues to grow at least six-fold in U.S. dollar terms. Beginning in 2026, we expect the segment to generate approximately $100 million in EBITDA. We are uniquely positioned to capture this technological breakthrough. With our scale, network assets, market leadership, and strategic partnership, we are ready to benefit from this structural growth. Next, please. Digital business services delivered solid growth, with revenues increasing by 30% to 7 billion Turkish Liras, supported by stronger hardware sales. Our system integration backlog reached 6 billion Turkish Liras. Our data center and cloud revenues increased by 32% year-on-year. This outstanding growth was driven by capacity expansion. As this new capacity establish a higher base, we expect growth rates to gradually normalize. Even so, underlying demand remains vast and continues to support for further expansion. We expect to complete the final module of Ankara Data Center in this year, reaching the full capacity, full technical capacity of our existing facilities. In the first half of 2026, Construction of our new data centers under Google Cloud Partnership will start. This will be our next phase of capacity expansion strategy. TechWin is one of our core strategic growth engines. Our TechWin business delivered solid performance in 2025, with revenues growing by 21% and once again outpacing group growth. PayCell was the main driver of this growth. In the fourth quarter, its revenues increased by 40% year-on-year, supported by post-solutions and pay-later services. PayCell increased its non-group revenue share by 18 percentage points to 77%, reflecting its ability to scale beyond the Turkcell ecosystem. On the financial side, revenues declined by 6%, mainly reflecting the lower interest rate environment. The loan portfolio continues to expand despite tight regulatory conditions. Net interest margin improved to 6.3%, primarily driven by lower funding costs, as well as disciplined risk management and better collection practices. Overall, TechFin continues to enhance the diversification and quality of our revenue growth. Next page, please. Now a few words on our renewable energy footprint. We are so proud of it. In the fourth quarter, we commissioned our largest active facility to date. Active solar capacity increased from 8 megawatts at the end of the last year to 62 megawatts in 2025. In total, we reached 164 megawatts of installed capacity across eight different cities. These investments are already delivering financial benefits. During the year, our solar energy portfolio generated 156 million Turkish Liras in OPEC savings. Stronger contribution is expected in 2026. We will continue to expand our portfolio to enhance cost efficiency, strengthening operational resilience, and support our 2050 net zero commitment. Next page, please. We exceeded our expectations in 2025. This underscores the resilience of our operating model and the consistency of our execution. Looking at the 2026, our focus remains on real profitable growth. We expect real revenue growth in the range of 5% to 7% with the strength of our core business and increasing contributions from strategic areas. We aim to deliver an EBITDA margin between 40% to 42%, reflecting ongoing operational efficiency while continuing to invest in growth. Our operational capacity intensity is expected to be around 25%, consistent with our investment cycle in 5G rollout, digital infrastructure expansion, and renewable energy projects. In our data center and cloud business, we anticipate revenue growth in the range of 18% to 20%. This reflects a normalization following the significant capacity expansions completed in 2025, while underlying demand remains healthy. Overall, we believe our guidance balances growth, continued investment, and sustainable value creation. With that, I will now hand over to our CFO, Mr. Kamil Kalyan, to walk you through our financial highlights.

Thank you very much, Alta Bey. Let me briefly walk you through our financial results. We delivered a strong performance for both the year and the quarter. Top line grew by 11% year-on-year, surpassing 241 billion TL. Quarterly growth was 7%. This performance reflects resilient execution in our core telecom business and continued scaling of our Techfin platform. Turkcell Türkiye revenue increased by 21 billion TL year-on-year. Growth was driven primarily by real ARCO expansion and sustained postpaid subscriber additions. Continued upselling and premium positioning further enhanced the quality of our revenue base. Techfin, accounted for 6% of consolidated revenues, contributed 2.4 billion TL for the year. Performance was underpinned by strong momentum in Paycell, particularly in POS solutions and Paylater. Both verticals continue to expand transaction volumes and monetization. Next slide, please. Now, EBITDA performance. Exceeding the top-line growth, EBITDA increased by 14% year-on-year to 104 billion tiers. Reflecting efficient cost management, EBITDA margin surpassed 43%. The main positive contributors were employee and energy expenses. Mobile payment expenses scaled alongside strong POS expansion pays as primary growth driver this year. Radio-related expenses reflect the acceleration of our 5G readiness and ongoing network modernization efforts. As a result, EBITDA margin expanded by 1.2 percentage points, demonstrating disciplined execution while continuing to invest for future growth. We remain focused on balancing strategic growth investments with long-term profitability. Next slide, please. Profit from continuing operations increased by 23% year-on-year to 17.8 billion TL, primarily driven by strong EBITDA growth. We maintained market leadership through solid execution and a diversified revenue mix supporting sustainable EBITDA generation. We had a larger debt position during the year. However, our proactive balance sheet management further supported bottom-line performance by 3.5 billion TL. Net finance income benefited from lower interest expenses, loan redemptions, and reduced hedging costs amid stable FX conditions. In addition, maintaining a solid TL position allowed us to benefit from attractive local currency yields. Monetary adjustments continue to reflect moderating inflation dynamics and the residual impact of the Ukraine divestment in 2024. Looking ahead, the capitalization of 5G license is expected to support normalization in this line. TOGG contributed positively this year, supported by improved pricing dynamics and the launch of the new model. We see additional long-term value creation potential as 5G-driven technological transformation accelerates. Income tax expense increased, mainly reflecting the deferral of inflation accounting application in statutory financials. Next slide, please. Let's take a closer look at our CapEx management. With a prudent CapEx approach, we closed the year at 22.6% in line with guidance. We continue to advance both mobile and fixed infrastructure. Six investments accelerated, adding 405,000 new homepaces, while base station fiberization reached 47%. Excluding strategic areas, CAPEX intensity remained stable at around 18-19% over the past three years, reflecting consistency in our investment framework. Our investment profile reflects a focus on strategic growth areas beyond traditional telecoms. Operational CapEx intensity of 25% is aligned with our strategic priorities across 5G, data centers, and renewable energy. We allocate capital with a clear focus on long-term value creation, favoring projects with strong return visibility and scalable cash generation. Next slide, please. Moving now to our balance sheet. Our balance sheet provides flexibility to execute our strategic objectives while preserving financial resilience. We closed 2025 with a cash position of 92 billion TL after dividend payments, loan repayments and the Eurobond redemption in the fourth quarter. Our solid liquidity position fully covers upcoming 5G payments and debt service obligations over the next two and a half years. Net debt was 15 billion TL. Net leverage improved to 0.1 times supported by strong EBITDA generation. We remain committed to maintaining leverage below one times while comfortably funding 5G payments and broader strategic investments. The increase in these obligations reflects the one-time accounting impact of the 15-year BOTASH infrastructure renewable agreement in the fixed size. We continue proactive debt management and actively evaluate diversified financing opportunities to support our long-term growth strategy. Next slide, please. Lastly, on foreign currency risk management. We proactively monitored market conditions and swapped a portion of our U.S. dollar holdings into Turkish lira. As a result, 56% of our cash was held in TL at year-end. This allowed us to benefit from higher local currency yields and supported net financial income. At the year-end, we have $3.4 billion in FX debt, $1.9 billion in FX denominated financial assets, and a derivatives portfolio of $600 million. Derivatives portfolio reflects our short-term FX swap transactions, with volumes increasing toward year-end and fever NDF transactions. The increase in our short-term FX position mainly reflects higher FX denominated capex in the fourth quarter and the deliberate reduction of hedging instruments to avoid higher costs. We target managing our FX position around 1.5 billion USD to support investments and 5G license obligations. We may adjust this level proactively in line with market volatility. This concludes our presentation. We are now ready to take your questions. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on their telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from the question queue, then you may press star and two. Please use your headset when asking your question for better quality. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question is from the line of Bistrova Evgenia with Barclays.

Please go ahead. Hello. Good evening. Thank you very much for the presentation and congrats on your results. I have just one question. I was kind of curious to know more about the data center's business. If you could please provide more color maybe on what are the EBITDA margins of this business, that would be very helpful. Thank you.

So thank you very much for the question. It's our growth area, and we are expanding our data centers. AI and our cloud are expected to drive 14% CAGR in data centers from 2025 to 2030, lifting global capacity from 108 gigawatts to 200 gigawatts. So overall what we can see is our results are getting better and better. AI is reshaping workloads all around the world, so there's a huge demand on the data center business. So currently our expectation is that more than two times increase in active data center capacity and six times increase in the data center cloud revenues in dollar terms as of 2032. Share of the DC cloud revenue in total revenues is expected to increase around 8% to 10%. Currently, it is around 2%. And we are expecting that no dilutive impact is expected on our EBITDA margin.

Thank you.

The next question is from the line of Dimitras Chemal with ATA Invest. Please go ahead.

Thank you for the presentation, and congratulations for the results. My first question is about the ethics position. Could you further elaborate that? If I didn't understand wrong, you mentioned that you have short position now, around 900 million dollars. I couldn't understand the justification behind that any, you know, the short position in U.S. dollars. Maybe that will be more helpful because there's another jump and you justify with some other things, I guess, investments that further elevation could be helpful. You know, the data center site. We visited one of your, you know, the data center. It was very helpful for us. Thank you once again. And you just, you know, spent time with us. And it was very helpful to know where to start going ahead. But I'm receiving questions about the size of the investments. You know, currently, it's a simple calculation. Maybe you can just give us a better color. With the size, you already have 50 megawatts. And you will add an additional 50 megawatts. But during that period, $1 billion will be invested by you, and $2 billion will be invested by Google. You know, for some, you know, just receiving that question from also investors, isn't it, you know, the small number, small megawatts as a hyperscale scaler shouldn't be expected bigger megawatt numbers? the investment side, please just help us to understand that. Or should we assume that this is the starting point going forward, this megawatt number could be much higher. That would be very helpful again.

Yes, Cemal, I will start from your first question. 957 million US dollar sizes. As you know, fourth quarter is seasonality program. The capex investments are very high in our side. Therefore, the one reason is coming from the high capex investments. The other side, as we mentioned in the presentation side, we are monitoring the market conditions very closely, and we swapped some portion of U.S. dollar holdings into Turkish lira. Therefore, we would currently our cash holdings is 56% of the cash is Turkish Lira position. We did this transaction in order to benefit from the higher local currency yields coming from the money funds, for example, in Turkey, the money market funds. Therefore, we would like to benefit from this advantage. Therefore, we swapped some portion of our US dollar into Turkish Lira. For the first question, I can say this one. For the second and third question, I will hand over to Mr. Ali.

Jami, related to this question, doesn't it mean that you are taking a position, if I understand correctly? It looks like, you know, is there the pressure on Turkish lira? Do you have any hedge for that already as a structure? is attached. I just try to understand that. Maybe it's a good strategy, possibly, but doesn't it just for the benefit, because things might change, there's a risk, and it's not the main business of the company. So maybe further justification could be helpful.

You are absolutely right. But as you know, in 2025, the FX policy of the central bank worked very well. Therefore, the hedging costs were very, very expensive in 2025. Therefore, we prefer to move a short position in the US effect side in 2025. Yes, this policy worked very well in 2025. For example, if you do not have any war in Iran or something like that, we believe that in 2026 this policy also will work. But currently we are monitoring the conditions. Current conditions are a little bit difference when you compare it with 2025. We are closely monitoring the markets and the environment right now. Therefore, we will decide how will we use this FX position. But as we mentioned in our presentation, our aim is, our policy is, we would like to keep the short position in 1.5 billion US dollar levels. We still trust the policy of the Turkish Central Bank.

Okay, let's come to the data center business. That's my favorite topic and favorite question. Let me tell you that. Let me give a brief information about Turkey. Turkey's total cloud consumption is around 150 to 200 megawatts. So if you look at the corporates, it's around 7 to 80 megawatts. So overall, what we need to do is most of the corporate domain in Turkey is still building their own data centers and they are doing internal consumption. So that's the reason that 50 megawatt number is not a huge number. The good thing about the 50 megawatt is So previously what we were doing is we were preparing the infrastructure for the collocation services. So our first 50 megawatts, most of the banks, most of the airline companies are bringing their own servers and their own hardware, and we collocate them in our data centers. But for the Google Cloud, it's going to be a full-blown system. so we are going to build a data center we are going to prepare for google cloud that infrastructure with electricity with cooling but on top of it google will bring thousands ten thousands of servers So that's the reason that the investment is high. So they're going to have a full blown system. Such a way that, and also another thing is the space, 50 megawatts is good enough because these servers are going to be used by not only one company, hundreds of companies are going to, together they're going to use it. That's the meaning of the cloud actually. So they can utilize their servers more and more. So that's the reason that 50 megawatts is a huge investment. And I'm pretty sure that our biggest target is to bring all of these companies or the industry players to move their old systems to this cloud, the state-of-the-art cloud regions.

Thank you, Ali Parve. Thank you.

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question is from the line of Nkaragos Yusuf with AK Iyatirim. Please go ahead.

I thank you for the presentation. You ended the year with a 43% EBITDA margin. For the next year, your guidance is around 40% to 42%. Do you expect any contraction in margins?

Yusuf, normally, as you said, the 2025 performance was very, very good regarding the EBITDA side, especially for the energy costs and the salary expense. Salary wage expenses does not increase over the inflation rate. It was very useful for 2025. In 2026, there are some, we make a salary increase. Average in 30 percentage levels is a little bit above the inflation side. And as you know, this is the 5G year. We will be starting from the April 1, the 5G issue. Therefore, we will be spending some money to the marketing activities and the sales activities for the 5G side. And we will closely monitor the energy prices because the current war might affect inflationary effects in the energy side and the other costs. Therefore, we would like to be a little bit conservative starting for the year for the energy. We will look forward within the year, but this year is a little bit less when you compare it with 2025.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Turkcell Management for any closing comments. Thank you.

Thank you very much for listening. Hope to see you next time. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Bye. Thank you.

Bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a pleasant evening.