Helios Towers Aktie

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining our Q1 2026 earnings call. And I extend my sincere thoughts for those of you caught up in the Iranian conflict. We started the year strongly, delivering a robust operational and financial performance, underpinned by continued structural demand across our markets and the strength of our business model. Today, I'll walk you through our highlights and strategic progress before handing over to Manjit for the financials. So joining me today are Manjit Dhillon, our CFO; and Chris Baker-Sams, our Head of Investor Relations. Before we get into the quarter, let me briefly reiterate what makes Helios Towers a compelling investment proposition. First, we operate a world-class platform where our focus on customer experience excellence underpins everything we do. Today, across our 15,000 sites in 9 high-growth markets, we enable connectivity to around 160 million people, and we see that growing to close to 200 million by 2030.

Second, we are positioned in a multi-decade growth opportunity. In the next 5 years alone, data consumption across our markets is expected to quadruple. And over the next 25 years, populations in most of our markets are set to double. Third, we have a robust business model, generating long-term predictable cash flows through contracts with Tier 1 mobile network operators. And finally, our approach to capital allocation remains disciplined and clearly focused. We prioritize organic growth opportunities where we see attractive returns and operate in what we see as a cash compounding sweet spot, continuing to invest in high-return growth while also delivering a robust and progressive distribution program for our shareholders.

So turning to today's agenda. I'll begin with the key highlights from the quarter, then Manjit will take you through the financial performance in detail before we open up for Q&A. So let's move to the highlights for Q1. This has been a strong start to the year, and it reinforces the strength of our business and the visibility we have into our 2026 outlook. First, structural demand remains very strong. We delivered over 1,400 tenancy additions year-to-date, including 246 new sites and expanded our tenancy ratio to 2.2, supported by an accelerating investment cycle from our customers, which I'll unpack a little more on Slide 8. This momentum is also underpinned by our consistent delivery of high-quality service and customer experience excellence, which continues to strengthen our customer relationships each and every day.

Second, we continue to deliver metronomic financial performance. EBITDA grew 14% year-on-year to $127 million with further ROIC expansion to 15%. As expected, Q1 saw some timing-related working capital impacts on recurring free cash flow, which we expect to normalize over the course of the year. Third, we have made further capital structure improvements, including reducing net leverage to 3.5x, lowering our cost of debt and continuing our share buyback program.

Now turning to guidance, reflecting both our strong Q1 performance and the visibility provided by our pipeline. We are upgrading our expectations for the full year. We now expect 3,000 to 3,500 tenancy additions, an increase from our prior guidance alongside higher EBITDA of $515 million to $530 million and recurring free cash flow of $215 million to $230 million. Importantly, while we are increasing investment to capture this growth as reflected in higher discretionary CapEx, our shareholder distribution program remains unchanged at $76 million for FY '26. This reflects the strength of our cash flow generation and our continued focus on balancing high-return growth investment with an attractive and sustainable shareholder return program. Overall, this performance continues to be underpinned by $5.3 billion worth of contracted future revenue with an average remaining life of 6.7 years.

Now this slide really highlights the consistency and resilience of our model. Over the past decade, we've delivered 24% CAGR in EBITDA, growing through multiple macroeconomic cycles and global events as we are in now. That consistency reflects not only the strength of our contracts and the essential nature of connectivity, but also our operational capability and relentless focus on customer experience excellence, which enable us to consistently deliver world-class quality for our customers. And importantly, we continue to see that momentum carry into 2026 with upgraded guidance reflecting both strong delivery and strong outlook.

Turning to demand in more detail. We're seeing powerful structural growth drivers across our markets with rapidly increasing data consumption and continued population growth. These trends are translating directly into strong growth in both subscribers and data usage, creating significant revenue growth opportunities for mobile operators. In response, our customers are accelerating their investment in network infrastructure, expanding coverage, increasing capacity and rolling out newer technologies such as 4G and 5G. For Helios Towers, this acceleration translates into increasing demand for our infrastructure, both through new site deployments and additional tenancies on existing towers. This is clearly reflected in our strong and growing tenancy pipeline, which underpins our expectation of a record year of tenancy additions now guided at 3,000 to 3,500 for the year.

And finally, a reminder of our disciplined and flexible capital allocation framework, which remains unchanged. First, we prioritize optimized organic investment, focusing on high-return opportunities that are accretive to ROIC. The pickup in tenancy demand we're seeing today is a good example of this framework in action. We expect to invest over $500 million in organic growth CapEx over this 5-year period, which is forecast to deliver at least 9% EBITDA CAGR between 2025 to '30, with these investments typically generating returns in excess of 30% ROIC on average in each of the past 3 years.

Second, we maintain a strong balance sheet with a clear commitment to operating within our target leverage range of 2.5x to 3.5x and continuing deleveraging as we go forward. And third, we deliver attractive shareholder returns through a combination of buybacks and a growing dividend with $76 million of distributions forecast in FY '26 and at least $400 million through this 5-year Impact 2030 period. This disciplined approach has already driven ROIC expansion of 4 percentage points over the previous strategic period, 2022 to 2025, taking our ROIC above WACC and generating surplus cash flow such that the business is now in that cash compounding sweet spot, where we can balance and deliver both high-returning organic growth and a robust, resilient and growing shareholder distribution plan, all against the backdrop of decades of growth runway ahead and the team's operational capability to consistently deliver for our customers.

Overall, the strength of our platform, the visibility of our growth and our disciplined capital allocation give us clear confidence in delivering attractive cash compounding returns over the long term. And with that, I'll hand over to Manjit for the financials and look forward to talking with you at the end for the wrap-up and the Q&A.

Thanks, Tom, and hello, everyone. It's great to be speaking with you today. And moving on to Slide 11. I'll be going through the financial results in more detail. One of the key parts of today's announcement is that we have upgraded our guidance by 1,000 incremental tenancies, which has been the largest and earliest increase to guidance we've done to date, indicating the real strength of our pipeline. Tom has just gone through the mobile growth drivers. And here, we are really seeing those structural mobile tailwinds in our market translate into accelerated growth, and that is what has enabled us to upgrade our target today. Of the 1,000 incremental tenancies, we expect 500 being colos, 500 being new sites. And now we're targeting a total of 3,000 to 3,500 tenancies for the year, which will be a record for the company.

We expect that the new incremental tenancies 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 $5 million. And as such, adjusted EBITDA is upgraded to $515 million to $530 million. It's worth noting that the 1,000 incremental tenancies will be expected to deliver over $15 million in annualized EBITDA in 2027 and growing thereon. We've also upgraded our recurring free cash flow to $215 million to $230 million, which was previously $210 million to $225 million, again, with $5 million in-year impact and over $15 million annualized impact. Later, I'll go through the capital allocation overview but these tenancies are exactly the types of investments we are constantly looking for and should be deploying capital on as they get fantastic compounding cash returns and drive the business forward.

We are pleased to be upticking guidance earlier than normal, which given the broader macro backdrop is really a testament to the market growth we're seeing and demonstrate the confidence we have in our pipeline for the remainder of the year and towards overall achieving our 2030 targets. Now to jump into Q1 results and moving on to Slide 12. We set out our tenancy metrics. On the far left-hand graph, you can see the strong growth we have achieved in site additions, 4% growth year-on-year with 576 added, of which 246 were delivered in Q1. We've achieved record tenancy additions with 3,276 added year-on-year with 1,406 of those being in Q1, which is a fantastic start to the year and driven by particularly strong growth in DRC, Tanzania and Oman. Given our site and tenancy additions, our tenancy ratio is at 2.2x with positive contributions across all of our markets.

Now moving on to Slide 13. The growth of our tenancies has driven strong revenue performance, increasing 12% year-on-year to $229 million. We have a strong hard currency profile with 68% of our revenues being in hard currency, which translates to 71% of our adjusted EBITDA being in hard currency. As a reminder, 4 of our markets are innately hard currency, including Oman, DRC, Senegal, and Congo Brazzaville. These are either dollarized or pegged to the euro, meaning that the revenues our customers receive are hard currency, which is also what they pay to us.

In our remaining markets, we also have a portion of revenues linked to hard currencies, adding further to the overall mix. Our earnings are further protected by contractual protections, including power and CPI escalators. The CPI escalators typically escalate in the Q1 and power price escalators, which go up or down depending on local pricing, which escalate either quarterly or annually depending on the contract. Additionally, circa 70% of our revenues come from investment-grade customers with 99% coming from blue-chip mobile network operators.

Finally, we signed long-term agreements with our customer partners with initial terms of 10 to 15 years, and they are largely noncancelable. Today, our contracted revenue is $5.3 billion and has an average remaining life of 6.7 years, which excludes auto renewals, which would increase this further. Ultimately, we have secured a minimum revenue of $5.3 billion without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earnings stream that we layer on top of further growth driven by incremental tenancy rollout.

Now moving on to Slide 14, which illustrates the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth in more detail. As with previous quarters, the key driver of our growth is tenancy additions, with our escalators working effectively to offset macro movements to protect our EBITDA on a dollar basis. 9% revenue growth from tenancy additions predominantly drove overall revenue growth of 12%, with the remainder coming through CPI escalators and FX. 12% EBITDA growth through tenancy additions mainly drove 14% overall EBITDA growth, again, with the remainder coming through CPI escalators and FX. The CPI escalators kick in, in Q1. We do see a small upside now, but this will be evened out during the course of the year. In short, the key driver of growth is through tenancy additions and operational leverage from lease-up, and we demonstrate again that the business structure continues to be robust and resilient and operating as designed.

Now moving on to Slide 15. We are laser-focused on disciplined capital allocation and ensuring we make the best investments possible. Our tightly controlled approach to capital allocation is central to how we operate and our Impact 2030 strategy. As set out at the Capital Markets Day, the most attractive form of capital investment is in investing in organic high-returning opportunities, i.e., colocations, OpEx initiatives and selected new builds. Tom mentioned the blended returns we see on these investments being over 30% return on invested capital, and it's crucial we continue to find the best opportunities and allocate capital to those. Therefore, we're very happy with the incremental investment of $70 million to support the rollout of 1,000 additional tenancies, which will drive over $15 million recurring EBITDA and recurring free cash flow.

This brings the total discretionary CapEx up to between $180 million to $210 million, all whilst importantly, we are continuing with our buyback and dividend program that we previously announced. Again, this demonstrates that we are in our cash compounding sweet spot where we see both growth through compounding investment and value through continued and growing shareholder returns.

Now to turn to Slide 16. And here, we provide an overview of our balance sheet and debt maturity, which we've managed to strengthen despite the ongoing global volatility. In late March this year, we raised $500 million in new 6.75% senior notes, which was used to repay the existing term loan facilities with the new notes maturing in 2031. The refinancing further strengthened our balance sheet, extending our average maturity by 1 year to 4 years overall and reduced our cost of debt by 40 basis points to 6.7% with no near-term maturities until 2027.

Additionally, we have just raised a $250 million term loan, which remains undrawn and was raised to manage the potential convertible bond maturity in March 2027. Through both transactions, we continue to proactively manage the balance sheet and have more than $500 million in cash and undrawn debt facilities. So we're in good shape to deliver on our medium-term ambitions. Finally, our net leverage continued to decrease, reducing by 0.5x year-on-year to 3.5x net leverage, and we should see this come down slightly during the course of the year, which takes us on to Slide 17 and a quick reminder of our upgraded full year 2026 guidance.

We're delighted with our performance this quarter and the upgrade to our 2026 guidance clearly demonstrates the confidence we have in our pipeline for the remainder of the year. Our upgraded tenancy guidance of 3,000 to 3,500 tenancies will represent 9% to 11% year-on-year growth. Our adjusted EBITDA target also increased to $515 million to $530 million, a 9% to 13% year-on-year growth. We've raised recurring free cash flow to $215 million to $230 million for a 3% to 11% year-on-year growth. To deliver this, we've also increased our discretionary CapEx guidance to $180 million to $210 million. We're also progressing with our shareholder distributions with no change to the $76 million we've guided to distribute during the course of the year. All in all, a strong start to the year with an exciting pipeline ahead, which points to another fantastic year for Helios Towers. And with that, I'll hand back to Tom to wrap up with the key takeaways.

Thanks, Manjit. So to close, let me leave you with a few key takeaways. We've delivered a strong start to the year with performance ahead of market expectations, reinforcing confidence in both our outlook and execution. At the core of this is our highly resilient and proven business model, which continues to drive sustained EBITDA growth and ROIC expansion even against a more volatile macro backdrop. Looking ahead, we have a strong FY '26 tenancy pipeline, supporting record tenancy additions, which will translate into continued EBITDA growth and expansion in recurring free cash flow.

And importantly, we remain firmly in what we describe as the sweet spot with the capacity to invest in attractive organic growth, delivering compelling returns to shareholders and further strengthening our balance sheet. Overall, the business is performing well. The outlook is strong, and we remain focused on disciplined execution and long-term value creation. I'll now hand over to the operator, and I look forward to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] We take our first question from Graham Hunt from Jefferies.

I think I've just got one question, which is really, obviously, I think the start of this year has gone -- or you're growing a lot faster than maybe you would have thought when you presented to us in London towards the end of last year at your CMD and you set out this 5-year plan, you've upgraded 2026 guidance. But how should we be thinking about the growth of the business beyond 2026 in terms of that run rate now? Is the business now just growing at a faster rate and a bigger opportunity? Or is it a bit of a phasing effect pull forward of growth? How should we think about that? And what are your customers saying to you sort of when you're having conversations with them that reflects that very strong performance year-to-date?

Thanks very much, Graham, for the question. So we're very pleased with the momentum that we've come on into this year with. And clearly, you've seen that in the numbers. When we set out our 5-year strategy, our Impact 2030 strategy, obviously, that is a plan for a 5-year period or 20 quarters. Now quarter 1 has obviously started very well and the prospects for this year are looking strong, hence, the upgrade. So we're really, really pleased with how we've started it. And as we go through, we'll be giving more updates to yourselves to the market. I think that the general environment in the sector at the moment is strong. There's accelerating subscriber growth, accelerating data consumption growth.

And what we're seeing, therefore, is the need to support that through the infrastructure, through the proliferation of the networks and the technology upgrades. Of course, this 5-year period very much is the 5G cycle for a lot of our markets. That's in very nascent stage at the moment or not even started yet in some, but that will be coming as well. So we're feeling positive and confident about the prospects for the next 5 years. But at this point, we're not changing our kind of long-term 5-year guidance at this point other than to say it's a very good start, and we'll be keeping everyone updated as we move forward.

[Operator Instructions] We will take our next question from David Wright from Bank of America.

And obviously, a really strong print there. I think the market is speaking for itself there. I think the former question is probably the key one, which is, is this phasing or a genuine kind of step-up. So my sort of second derivative question to that question is you set your longer-term guidance, the impact guidance a few months ago with your Capital Markets Day. What sort of visibility did you have of this quarter's order pipeline that has obviously come in much stronger than you expected, thus the guidance raise. And to the extent that surprised you, what were the sort of key regions? What I'm trying to just guess is what's changed here? I mean we obviously see this very healthy African and Middle Eastern environment, at least through the numbers we observe from the listed telco operators. But what's gapped up? What has changed here that has caught you out in a very positive way in just 6 months' time?

Yes. Thanks, David. So obviously, we talk with all of our customers all of the time, and there's always discussions and conversations going on in terms of planning, both for current year, but actually also future years as well. I think from an industry and regional perspective at the moment, there's a real thirst for more data consumption with the use of digital applications, everything from social media all the way through to the banking, the AI type services on the phone. Smartphones, of course, are getting way cheaper than they used to be. So in a lot of markets now, you can get certainly 4G-enabled smartphones under $30. 5G will come through on that as well. And there's a general strong good sentiment around.

Remember, most of our markets are net exporters of commodities. So the past few years, commodity prices going up, general global demand going up for those types of commodities has helped. That gives extra disposable income in the pockets of millions and millions of people who can therefore afford phones and afford more data type plans as well. And we're really seeing that coming through at the moment. Of course, we continue to work with all of our customers. And you're absolutely right to say it's generally kind of across the board and across all markets. I wouldn't sort of pick out one market or one customer as the kind of driver of it. It's a more general growth dynamic, I would say, across the region and multi-customer.

And so we're very excited about the future. I want to give a shout out to all of our teams across the business who are really stepping up on our focus on excellence, our focus on customer engagement and how we deliver that global quality experience across the board at every single one of our sites. And as we move forward, we're going to be supporting both the more coverage in areas that aren't particularly covered today, but of course, more capacity needed in areas which maybe are upgrading to 4G or upgrading to 5G at some point soon. So there's a number of different drivers for the growth. And we see this positive momentum as a great start to 2026, and we're very excited about delivering the rest of this year, but also, of course, the 5-year Impact 2030 strategic period as well.

We are now taking our next question from Emmet Kelly from Morgan Stanley.

First question, I think you just kind of touched on it there, Tom. But as I think about updating my model for '26 and beyond, are there any markets in particular that are seeing strong growth? I think you said it was pretty broad-based. But in particular, are there any markets beyond the big 3 of DRC, Tanzania and Oman? So for example, maybe Senegal seeing some outsized growth now? And the second question would be on the new site build. I assume you only build when you get expressions of firm interest or commitments from your telco clients. So as you build these new towers, should we think about these new towers starting off with 1 tenant on board, 2 tenants on board? How should we think about the ramp-up of these new sites?

And then just lastly, on the CapEx side. Clearly, your OpEx and your costs are under firm control have been for the last year, 1.5 years. But on the CapEx side, is there any sign of inflation creeping into the cost of building new towers within your footprint?

Thanks very much, Emmet, for those questions. Maybe I'll take the first one and then just step in on the build-to-suits and CapEx one. So the growth is generally broad-based. Obviously, as you pointed out, the 3 largest markets from an absolute perspective are going to see the largest in terms of absolute terms. But on a percentage basis, it's fairly consistent and certainly, over this 5-year period, whilst you might see very busy periods in a quarter or 2 in a specific market here and there, we wouldn't really pull any out as specific anomalies either up or down to the general growth. So it is largely across the board and both geographically and customer-wise.

And yes, I'll pick up the build-to-suit question. So we only ever build a new site once we have an order in place. So every site will have a minimum of 1 tenant on day 1. But actually, if you look at the recent vintages of the builds that we've been doing, we typically have that increase to 2 tenants within about 2 years, maybe just 2 to 2.5 years. So it's really showing that when we're finding those new sites and we're building for our customers, we're building in the right places and we're finding a very, very good service to our customers, but also as a testament to the fact that there's a good competitive tension in the market as well and the customers are all looking to roll out and try and address the real data demand that's coming out of that.

So certainly, with this new amount of builds that we're doing, which will be just over 1,000 we expect for this year, we're really kind of excited about those new locations. We think they'll be kind of leasing up fairly quickly as well, really in the same kind of speed and trajectory of what we've been doing recently. And then with regards to the cost base and how much the CapEx is going up. For the last few years, actually, we've been able to keep our CapEx costs pretty much the same.

And actually, since I've been in the business, our broad-based cost of the build-to-suit has been anywhere between $100,000 to $150,000 depending on the location and the type of site. And that's still the same case today. And we've been able to do that through a couple of factors. One has been due to reengineering, thinking about the site designs, really, really analyzing it in a very, very detailed and methodical manner. That's led to improvements in how we build, but also just due to the fact that we've been doing more volume and price volume negotiations with our suppliers as well. The combination of which has meant that we've been able to keep our costs broadly the same. So the expectation is that, that will stay the same as well.

We are now taking our next question from John Karidis from Deutsche Bank.

Congrats to the whole team for an excellent quarter. Long may it continue. I only have one question left, and that sort of relates to optics really. I wonder whether you can give any more sort of specific pointers help to do with the phasing of the tenancy adds during the year. Could optically, given what Manjit said earlier, the adds in Q2, for example, be down year-on-year because you said many of them will come in through the -- at the end of the year or near the end of the year.

And then secondly, just a sort of request, if possible. Manjit talked about vintages and tenancy ratios. Could you please start reporting that information again, things like what happens to the tenancy ratio depending on the vintage and what proportion of your towers have 1, 2 or 3 tenants? That would be lovely.

Thanks very much, John. And yes, I think on that last one, certainly, I think we do show from time to time, we can definitely bring that in again for sure. And then on the phasing -- Manjit, do you want...

Yes. So phasing can be lumpy and it can move up and down kind of quarter-on-quarter. So we really look at it more on a year-on-year basis. What I would say is of the incremental 1,000 that we've now guided to, that will be at the latter part of the year. In the intervening period, we should see a pretty consistent rollout period-on-period there of the remainder of that 2,000 to 2,500. But what I would say is that the pipeline is actually growing. We are seeing some really interesting conversations with our customers as well that's ongoing. So we continue to monitor that. But in short, the teams are very, very, very busy on the ground. They're all doing colocations and new site builds. So we will see still a very, very quick cadence to new site rollout and new colo rollouts as well. And yes, to Tom's point, absolutely, we'll be putting that in our half year release as well just in terms of the vintages. But there is no difference really to what we showed previously. We're still seeing that quick lease-up on our new site builds.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our next question from David Wright from Bank of America.

Hope you don't mind me coming back. Just a couple of small ones. Obviously, the whole fuel shortage scenario, 1 or 2 of your markets, I know are still a little more reliant on the fuel backup. So if you could just give us any indications of just any sort of pinch points across the businesses? And then just on the accounting and the reallocation of central cost into the regions. Just trying to understand that. Is it just to provide a kind of cleaner optic for the management teams there. When we see this sometimes, it does tend to preempt some kind of structural shift. You put the cost into the business when those businesses could be coming or going. I don't think that's the case for you guys at all. But maybe just if you could give us a little color on that, I'd appreciate those 2 answers.

Thanks, David. Yes, on the fuel, so obviously, very much monitoring the supply chain. No impact from an operational standpoint. We have a very good network of fuel supply and fuel backup across the group such that we have several months' worth of backups across all markets. I'll just remind everyone again quickly of the power source makeup of a typical 24-hour period across the Helios Power portfolio. So out of a 24-hour period, we got about 17 hours on average from grids across the portfolio. And the remaining 7 hours is split roughly half and half between solar and hybrid for about 3.5 and fuel to form generators for about another 3.5. So that's the overall mix.

And as I said, from a backup and supply chain perspective, we've got several months' worth of backups across our markets. And so as always, as Helios Towers focus on customer experience excellence is number one. And a big part of that is providing the reliable power and continuing to provide the 99.99% power uptime that we always do. Just on the second point, yes, no indication at all of markets coming or going. That's for sure. Manjit, anything else.

Yes. I'd just say this is just about kind of clean up to some extent. We've always done an element of recharges. We've just done a review, and this is now really as per transfer pricing rules. So it's just the reallocation of costs and principally because we do a lot at the corporate level for the OpCos in terms of health and digitization and other items like that. So it's just making sure that there is a better recharge matrix across the group, nothing more than that.

It appears there are no further questions. So I will hand you back to the management for any additional or closing remarks. Please go ahead, sir.

Well, thank you very much, everyone, for joining us today. And of course, please feel free to get in contact with us separately if there are any more questions that you want to follow up on. We're really excited about the business. We're really excited about delivering both this year and across our Impact 2030 strategy and all of the teams and our people, our partners are really engaged every single day across the business.

For our H1, again, actually quite -- I'll give a quick shout out now. We're going to be doing it in person in London, and there's going to be a deep dive on the multi-decade growth coming up as well as a glimpse into what future networks will look like. It will be a really interesting one. So I really encourage you, if possible, to come in person. That's July 30 in London. Otherwise, it will be live on the webcast as well. So really look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible. Have a great day, everyone, and have a great rest of the week. Talk soon. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Helios Towers FY '25 Earnings Call. I hope you and your families are doing well and staying safe, and I extend my sincere thoughts to all of you caught up in the Iranian conflict. I'm Tom Greenwood, CEO of Helios Towers. And joining me today is Manjit Dhillon, our CFO; and Chris Baker-Sams, who leads our Investor Relations.

We're really pleased to be here discussing our 2025 performance with you, a year of record operational delivery, expanding returns, accelerating recurring free cash flow, strengthening of our capital structure and launching shareholder distributions. And we're even more excited to also be laying out our FY '26 execution strategy.

This marks another important step forward in our IMPACT 2030 strategy, our 5-year framework designed to deliver disciplined and efficient capital allocation, leading to compounding return on capital and recurring free cash flow. IMPACT 2030 is built around 5 clear pillars: one, capital-efficient organic growth, two, expanding tenancy ratio and ROIC; three, accelerating recurring free cash flow; four, maintaining our balance sheet strength; and five, increasing shareholder distributions.

Our Helios Towers business model is simple. We invest our capital in high-return growth projects. That growth expands EBITDA. That EBITDA converts into recurring free cash flow. We delever, and we return surplus capital to shareholders. 2025 was a milestone year such that this model is now operating at scale, such that we can distribute surplus free cash flow to shareholders whilst maintaining the long runway of growth in our addressable markets.

So Page 3. I'll begin with the highlights and strategic progress. Manjit will then take you through the financials, and we'll open up for the usual Q&A at the end. But before diving into it, I want to frame what we're seeing structurally across our markets because it's important context for everything that follows.

We shared a slide at our Capital Markets Day in November that showed our total addressable market growth pathway to 2030 and line of sight to 2050. So an extraordinary forecast period. This is because growth in demand is predictable as well as structural. And we'll unpack that 2030 growth in a latter slide.

Today, our portfolio provides the critical connectivity for almost 160 million people. By the end of this decade, that will grow towards 200 million people with cheaper smartphones and increasing demand for data across Africa and Middle East footprint. Subscriber growth remains approximately 5% per annum, the highest in the world. Mobile penetration is at around 50% and still well below that of the 90% we see in developed markets.

Population growth continues at structurally higher levels of around 3% annually. So that means the population in our markets will be almost double by 2050. But the most powerful driver is data growth and data consumption is forecast to grow by 4x a quadrupling by 2030. And this is transformational. This growth is being driven by 4G densification, accelerating 5G rollout, streaming and digital media, fintech and digital banking penetration, enterprise digitalization and of course, increasingly in AI-enabled applications.

Mobile connectivity in our markets is not discretionary. It's foundational and critical infrastructure. And in most regions, the only infrastructure available for communications. As data demand scales, network investment must keep up. And we are seeing that investment materialize through sustained mobile industry CapEx programs across our footprint. This structural demand backdrop gives us multi-decade growth ahead.

So turning now to the highlights on Page 5. 2025 was a year of continued strong growth, expanding returns and accelerating shareholder distributions. So let me break that down for you in how that unfolded in 2025. Operationally, we delivered record 2,538 tenancy additions. That's up 9% year-over-year, of which, 421 were site additions deployed selectively based on our returns criteria, tenancy ratio expansion of 0.1x to 2.2 tenants per site. And importantly, we achieved our 2.2 tenancy target over a year ahead of plan due to our team's relentlessly disciplined execution and the structural growth and telecom sector investment that exist in our markets for decades ahead.

And this matters because tenancy ratio is the core driver of ROIC expansion and free cash flow generation. Financially, the operational growth translated directly into financial performance. EBITDA increased 12% to $471 million. Recurring free cash flow increased 40% to $208 million. Free cash flow, bottom line more than tripled to $66 million. And of course, group ROIC expanded up to 14%. This demonstrates the operating leverage inherent in our model. Co-locations deliver higher EBITDA margins and higher incremental ROIC, which now converts into high levels of cash flow generation.

On our capital structure, we further strengthened the balance sheet. Net leverage reduced to 3.4x. Our credit ratings were upgraded to Ba3, BB-. And you'll see in one of Manjit's slides later, the average credit spread we pay has collapsed from 620 basis points at the time of our IPO to 290 basis points today, a testament to Manjit's team and also the recognition that debt markets have for the strength of our business model.

We also completed a $120 million convertible tender early, removing $41 million potentially dilutive shares, so maximizing shareholder value. And by the end of 2025, we've repurchased 11 million shares for $24 million at an average price of $1.58, so this is disciplined capital allocation in action.

Now FY '26 guidance. So looking ahead, our guidance remains fully aligned with IMPACT 2030. 2,000 to 2,500 tenancy additions, $510 million to $525 million EBITDA, $210 million to $225 million recurring free cash flow, approximately $50 million in share buyback as part of our multiyear program and of course, $25 million are inaugural dividend with a progressive dividend policy. And of course, all of this is underpinned by $5.3 billion of contracted future revenues with an average rating life of 6.6 years. So we're now scaling at growth, generating cash flow, deleveraging and providing shareholder returns simultaneously.

Now Slide 6 shows what I would describe as metronomic delivery. And this is a great description of our business model, 10 consecutive years of EBITDA growth at 24% CAGR. That EBITDA growth is unbroken. And as we enter yet another year of uncertainty with the oil price and the Iranian conflict, we can reflect on that decade of track record despite upheavals, such as Brexit, COVID, Ukraine, et cetera, so really, truly metronomic.

We've taken group EBITDA from $54 million in FY '15 to $471 million in 2025 and guiding to $510 million to $525 million in 2026. This consistency reflects 3 things: one, structural market growth; two, our business model, the long-term contracted revenues with CPI and power escalators; and of course, three, our operational excellence from our teams all across the business and disciplined capital allocation. This is a truly compounding infrastructure platform business.

Turning now to Page 7. So we exceeded FY '25 guidance across all key metrics, which was driven by our disciplined operational execution by all of our teams and people across the business, our disciplined capital allocation framework and the structural growth and ongoing telecoms industry investment in our markets. Tenancies above target, EBITDA ahead of guidance, free cash flow ahead of expectations and leverage below our stated level. Our teams have been focusing on execution discipline, which is very strong across the organization.

On Page 8, we look at the long runway of growth ahead. Points of service across our markets continue expanding materially towards 2030 and of course, beyond. We retain and work closely with our customers. And in our planning and discussions, we see plans for the future around accelerated network investment, 5G rollout coming in this new 5-year cycle, rising ARPUs, increasing digital adoption. And this is truly structural usage and network expansion. Helios Towers is positioned at the center of that demand, with leading positions across 9 markets and strong multinational customer relationships.

Turning now to Slide 9. Execution matters. Our customer experience excellence offering is a key competitive differentiator. We deliver 99.99% power uptime, faster build-to-suit and colocation delivery and lower carbon emissions per tenant. We provide global quality standards at approximately 30% lower total cost of ownership for our customers. That drives trust, growth and returns. This operational discipline underpins our financial performance.

And now Slide 10 brings it all together. We're making meaningful progress towards our 2030 targets. By 2030, we're targeting adding over 10,000 new tenancies to reach over 42,000 tenancies in total by 2030, at least 9% compound annual growth in EBITDA, at least $1.3 billion cumulative recurring free cash flow and at least $400 million cumulative shareholder distributions.

And importantly, the growth CapEx we deploy each year consistently delivers around 35% incremental ROIC driven by high-margin colocations, selective new builds, meeting strict return thresholds. So that is a really powerful compounding engine, high return growth, expanding EBITDA, accelerating recurring free cash flow, declining financial leverage and rising shareholder distribution.

We are now firmly entering what I would describe as the cash compounding sweet spot of the business. Helios Towers today is a structurally growing digital infrastructure platform with high incremental returns, strong cash flow visibility, improving credit quality and increasing shareholder returns. So that is our compelling long-term infrastructure equity story to you, our shareholders.

And with that, I'll hand over to Manjit to take you through the financials in more detail and look forward to talking with you at the end for the Q&A. Thank you.

Thanks, Tom, and hello, everyone. Thank you for being here today and online. Starting on Slide #12, I'll be going through the financial details -- financial results in more detail. 2025 was another year of Helios Towers outperformance, where we exceeded expectations. As you'll see on the left-hand chart, we delivered another strong year of tenancy growth, beating our updated guidance with a record year of tenancy additions. And this has really been the key driver of our 12% year-on-year EBITDA growth, and I'll go through the usual bridge, which sets out the underlying movements in a few slides time.

We spoke to you at our Capital Markets Day about our clear growth algorithm. Strong mobile market growth drives our tenancy growth, which drives our dollar EBITDA, which drives our recurring free cash flow. And we saw this in practice again in 2025, contributing to a 40% increase in recurring free cash flow to $208 million.

As presented at the CMD and set up by Tom, we have entered our cash compounding sweet spot, which has enabled us to generate excess capital after investing in the really attractive, high-returning organic investments to now commence shareholder distributions, which we began last year with share buybacks, which we have continued during this year and will continue to execute.

Looking ahead to 2026, we have committed to delivering discretionary CapEx of $110 million to $140 million, share buybacks of $51 million and our inaugural dividend of $25 million.

Now let's jump into some of the detail and moving on to Page 13. On this slide, you can get a clear sense of the growth we're seeing in both the number of sites and tenancies. We continue to see clear progress underpinned by our leading market positions and focus on customer experience excellence. Starting on the left, we added 421 more sites. That's 3% up year-on-year to just shy of 15,000 at 14,746.

New organic builds are an important element of our strategy, and ultimately adds to the hopper to which we can then drive further colocation lease up. We are very selective in our approach to new site rollout using our analytics from our proprietary GIS platform to ensure the sites that we have, have strong day 1 ROIC and importantly, clear potential for lease-up.

We achieved record tenancy additions in the year, increasing by 2,538 in year, equating to 9% year-on-year growth. We're seeing growth across all our markets with particular large increases across DRC, Tanzania and Oman, our 3 biggest markets, 2 of which are dollarized or dollar pegged. As Tom mentioned previously, we're also delighted to achieve our 2.2 tenancy ratio target 1 year ahead of plan, underlining the growth of our markets through our focus on customer experience excellence and our capacity to capture that growth.

Now moving on to Slide 14, our revenue growth. We've seen revenue growth across all 3 of our geographic regions. Taken together, they were up 8% year-on-year to $854 million. We have a strong hard currency profile with 68% of our revenues being in hard currencies, which translates to 71% of our adjusted EBITDA being in hard currency. As a reminder, 4 of our markets are innately hard currency, including Oman, DRC, Senegal and Congo Brazzaville. These are either dollarized or pegged to the euro, meaning that the revenues our customers receive are hard currencies, and that's also what they pay to us.

In our remaining markets, we also have a portion of our revenues linked to hard currencies, adding further to the overall mix, and our earnings are further protected by contractual protections, including annual CPI escalators and annual and quarterly power escalators and de-escalators. Additionally, 70% of our revenue comes from investment-grade customers and 99% coming from blue-chip mobile network operators.

And finally, we signed long-term agreements with our customer partners, with initial terms of 10 to 15 years, and they are largely noncancelable. Today, our contracted revenue of $5.3 billion has an average remaining life of 6.6 years, which excludes auto renewals, which would increase this further. Ultimately, we have secured minimum revenues of $5.3 billion without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earnings stream that we layer on top to the further growth driven by tenancy rollout.

Now moving on to Slide 15. And here, you can see the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA in more detail. As with previous quarters, the key driver of our growth is tenancy additions with our escalators working effectively to offset macro movements to protect our EBITDA on a dollar basis. You'll see a small decrease in power related revenues across the year, and this is due to decreasing fuel prices in DRC and Tanzania, which we passed on to our customers. However, this also resulted in our own cost base reducing, and when combined with our upsides from OpEx reducing capital investments we made during the year, we saw some upsides from power when it comes to EBITDA, which you can see on the right-hand side.

Also on that bridge, you can see that the key driver of growth is through tenancy additions, and operational leverage from lease-up with 9% growth from organic rollouts, predominantly driving the 12% overall year-on-year growth in EBITDA. We demonstrate once again that our business structure continues to be robust, resilient and operating exactly as we designed it to.

Now moving on to Slide 16. And on this bridge, we detail how our growth in EBITDA flows through to recurring free cash flow. The key driver is that our EBITDA is growing faster than our cost base, resulting in a high cash flow through. We're particularly pleased that across the year, we achieved recurring free cash flow ahead of expectations growing by $60 million off the back of $50 million EBITDA growth.

Nondiscretionary CapEx, lease liabilities, taxes and interest were all broadly stable/increased marginally year-on-year, which means that, that incremental EBITDA has a high flow-through to the bottom line. And this was further assisted by working capital being ahead of expectations, supported by the timing of customer payments. All of this results in our free cash flow is tripling year-on-year to $66 million, demonstrating the cash compounding effect of our tenancy growth.

Finally, on this slide, following the launch of our new 5-year strategy, we also began our shareholder distributions with $24 million of buybacks completed in last year, and we're continuing that program well this year.

On to Slide 17. And here, we show an overview of how our well-invested platform supports our high incremental returns through disciplined CapEx deployment. Fundamentally, we are focused on disciplined capital allocation and ensuring we make the best investments possible. On the left-hand side, you can see how over the past 3 years, our investment in growth CapEx has led to high returns.

The dark blue bar shows our growth CapEx incurred, the orange bar, our incremental EBITDA, and the green bar shows incremental portfolio free cash flow, i.e., the cash generated from our tower assets, and that's a numerator for our return on invested capital calculation.

Here, we can see that our strategy over the last 3 years has consistently delivered incremental 30% plus return on invested capital on our investments, which shows that we are allocating capital to really compelling investments. And we will always ensure we fuel the compounding engine of our business, which are these types of investments. With that in mind, we are guiding to between $110 million to $140 million of discretionary growth CapEx during the quarter 2026, which is really exciting because they will drive returns and the overall pipeline of opportunities is looking incredibly strong.

Now on to Slide 18 and looking at our balance sheet and credit profile. I'm pleased to say that we've been further improvements in our credit ratings this year, Fitch, S&P and Moody's, all upgrading their ratings, most recently, Moody's upgraded us to Ba3. This really is a testament to the strength of our business. Through our diversification efforts, our consistent delivery, we've also materially improved our spread, which is now half of what it was at the time of the IPO.

All of this reflects the work we've done to drive cash flows and reduce our net leverage, which now stands at 3.4. We delever fairly quickly. And where we are today is down by 0.6 year-on-year and down by 1.7 since our temporary high in 2022 following our acquisitions.

Finally, I wanted to mention that on average, our average remaining life of our facilities is roughly 3 years with $337 million of available funds through a combination of cash on balance sheet and undrawn debt lines. So we are in a very good position to deliver on our strategy.

Which takes us to Slide 19 and our guidance we have issued to the market today. Our 2026 guidance demonstrates meaningful progress towards our Impact 2030 targets with continued strong growth, cash evolution and shareholder distributions. We are targeting to between 2,000 to 2,500 more tenancy additions for the year, this represents a 6% to 8% year-on-year growth.

For adjusted EBITDA, we are targeting a range of $510 million to $525 million, which represents an 8% to 11% year-on-year growth. Recurring free cash flow, we expect to be between $210 million to $225 million, this represents between a 1% to 8% year-on-year growth. And for discretionary CapEx, as I mentioned, we're targeting between $110 million to $114 million.

In terms of shareholder distributions, we expect roughly $76 million, which consists of a $51 million share buyback and $25 million of dividend payments.

So looking ahead to 2026, we do so with momentum and confidence with a strong balance sheet and a robust and resilient business model, which has proven time and time again that our platform has the ability to capture the phenomenal growth drivers in our market, and I'm really excited to deliver again this year.

With that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.

Thank you very much, Manjit. So in summary, 2025, we're very pleased with our progress there, delivering on all the key metrics ahead of market expectations. And most importantly, our teams across the business are focused on customer experience excellence, and that keeps getting better day by day, week by week. And that gives us a really strong momentum coming into this year. So most importantly, we're excited about 2026 and the following years after that. We've talked about the long runway of growth ahead, not just a few years, but decades ahead, driven by all of the megatrends that we've talked about.

And our business is ultimately positioned across our 9 markets to deliver on this. We've got a strong pipeline -- sales pipeline coming into this year, and we're really looking forward to updating everyone as we go through the quarters this year on the progress of the business and our delivery towards our IMPACT 2030 strategy over the next 5 years.

So thank you very much, everyone, and we'll now move to the Q&A.

Thank you, Tom and Manjit for the prepared remarks. The way we'll structure this is we'll do Q&A in the room, first of all, then go to the conference call and the questions posed on the webcast. Given John's taken the front row seat, we'll go to you first.

So first of all, congratulations to the entire team for these results. It's John Karidis from Deutsche Numis. I have 3 quick questions. Number one, when will the share buyback resume? Number two, I think you're about touching distance to the end of the first quarter. How does it compare versus a year ago, particularly in terms of tenancies? And number three, I know it's ridiculous to be asking you this question about the Middle East, given that the war started only 12 days ago, and the person that started it is unpredictable also to himself. But is there any indication that some of your customers are seeing increased power prices and that's sort of causing them to sort of rethink the rate with which they plan to roll out tenancies? That's it.

Thank you very much. Manjit, why don't you do the buyback one and I'll cover the other 2.

Sure. So on buybacks, we've actually been -- we've started during the beginning of the year. So every single day, you've seen consistent buybacks and that will continue during the course of the year as well. So we really haven't paused, it's just been a continuation. Should I pick up Q1? Or would you like to? Sorry, that was on the RNSs, sorry. So on that piece, it's just that we're now amalgamating the RNSs to be on a weekly basis I think rather than on a daily. So the buyback has continued. It's just been a change in the reporting. Apologies, yes.

Good spot.

Yes, good spot.

And yes, look, in terms sales pipeline for this year. We're seeing good strength in it at this point of the year. We actually have our Chief Commercial Officer in the room Sainesh and Allan, our Delivery Director as well. So you might be able to catch them afterwards.

But you've probably seen, in general, across the industry, there is acceleration in overall investment. A lot of this is directed at new coverage, new capacity and technological upgrades. As you know, a lot of our markets are operating under sort of 2, 3 and 4G at the moment. 4G has had a big push over the last couple of years. Some of the markets have now started 5G and the ones that haven't we expect to probably in the next 2 years.

So as we look at this 5-year 2030 -- IMPACT 2030 strategy, a big part of that is the 5G cycle for most of our markets, which we're really excited about, and we're already working with our key customers in terms of planning that and really supporting them in terms of the densification required for that.

So yes, we're feeling very good about ourselves at this point in the year, in terms of pipeline for the year. And actually, pipeline for the next year and the next year is actually growing as well because it's not always just the immediate year that we plan with our customers. So yes, we're feeling good. Yes, for sure.

And from a -- your last question, Middle East, yes. So obviously, it's something we're monitoring and to certain extent needed ensuring our people are safe. That's always the immediate focus for our business. From an operational standpoint, no impact on operations. The business is very robust and resilient. And your point on the power price is obviously something we're mentioning. You understand the way that our contracts operate with respect to that. Our primary focus always is to provide power at virtually 100% power uptime. We've got the resilience across our supply chain, whether that's diesel fuel or equipment such that we feel very resilient on that. Like we did in COVID a few years ago, to be honest, where we didn't miss the beat. So we're feeling very strong in that respect.

In terms of [indiscernible], so Airtel Africa last time around got hammered in terms of its profitability because of the sort of power prices going up. Do you sort of sense from any of your customers given that the power prices are on the rise, them thinking maybe I should roll out less fast or move to 5G less fast. I know it's only a couple of weeks since the start of the war, but anything you can say maybe extrapolate from your experience post Russia-Ukraine effects?

Yes. We're not seeing that at all. And actually, the last 3 years, we've seen our record tenancy additions each year, and we're seeing a very strong pipeline for this year as well. The power price -- the power cost is a cost, but it's in the grand scheme of things, it's a relatively smaller cost in the entire ecosystem. Obviously, the majority of our power comes from grid power, some from solar and hybrid batteries and then some from fuel as well.

So to give you a picture of a typical 24-hour period across our entire portfolio, about 17 hours comes from the grid anyway. And then of the balance of the other 7 hours, roughly half and half is diesel and then solar and hybrid batteries. So that gives you a kind of flavor of the entire ecosystem hopefully.

Graham Hunt from Jefferies. Just 2 questions on 2026 guidance. So going back to your -- the 2,000 to 2,500 tenancies you're expecting, could you just give us a sense of the split between sites and colos? In 2025, your site additions increased meaningfully. Just in terms of how that trends for '26 and what's driving that increase from your customers in terms of a bit more on the site additions?

And then as we think about that and the discretionary CapEx for '26, how do you think about making that decision with your customer to invest and build a new site terms of you mentioned internal return requirements, but how does that break down in terms of a new site? What is the business case that you have to improve there when you put a new one on the ground?

Manjit, do you want to take that one?

Yes, I can take that. So currently on the basis of the guidance we have today, it's going to be roughly around 500, a minimum of 500 we expect, but that -- we'll see how that kind of progresses during the course of the year. And these are really good investments, by the way. So whenever we have any new sites we go through the same process internally, which is GIS marketing. So we look at where that site is going to be located. We look at the population demographics, we look where the towers are. So we get a bit of a sense as to the probability of lease-up, and then we're able to kind of progress on that basis.

But these are effectively investments that day 1 go about 12% return on invested capital, but that's not why we make the investment. We're making because of that probability where we think that kind of lease-up will come. And we've come very, very good at it or a lot better certainly. We're now getting average lease-up within 2 to 3 years, which is fantastic. And from that point on, you've got cash compounding growth for pretty much a lifetime.

So when we're going through those conversations with the customers, we're trying to get early visibility of where they're looking to go. Now sometimes it's going to be expansion of the network, sometimes it would be densification of the network and more often than not it's a bit of both. And so we're working on that basis. And we have also a pretty good visibility of where the different customers hotspots are and where they might need to kind of improve as well. So we're also doing proactive marketing.

So every time we know where our site is going to go, we'll be proactively making sure that we're trying to get that lease up as quick as possible. And once we get that, and once we start to get that data come through, it goes to the capital allocation committee to which Tom and I members and everyone there as well. And we go through that kind of layers of analysis to make sure we're making the best investment possible on that piece. But we'll always have capital for really, really good build-to-suits. It's kind of -- it's the lifeblood of what we're trying to do and then leasing up there afterwards.

Any other questions in the room? Okay. We will go from Graham.

I just have a follow-up on that. Just in terms of the -- is there anything notable about the split of those 500 sites between rural, urban, just anything that you would call out in terms of how that's trending?

I'd say, typically, our portfolio is more urban dominated. So it's normally kind of just over 50% is urban/semi-urban. The semi-urban still have a very, very good population density. I'd say it's probably a little bit more on that kind of urban, suburban kind of mix and definitely coming from markets like DRC, Tanzania, they seem to be doing a good amount, supplemented by markets in Madagascar, Senegal and Malawi.

Okay. I think we'll now then go to the conference call, any questions on there as well too. Ben, over to you.

[Operator Instructions] Well, since that we don't have any questions, so I will hand back to you.

Okay. Thanks, Ben. A few questions on the webcast as well, too, one from Michael Brown at Lombard Odier. Does the 10,000 tenancy requirement up to 2030, does that include M&A in that assumption? And what does it mean for the CapEx requirements as we look forward from 2026 up to 2030?

Yes. Short answer is no, it does not. It's purely organic. And that's the primary focus of our IMPACT 2030 strategy as we think about our capital allocation, and that's driven by the demand and the financial returns available from that.

Thanks, Tom. One more question on the webcast as well. It's from Vinod Surendran from AllianceBernstein Funding plans. Any plan to issue U.S. to euro bonds this year to refinance your term loans? And question number 2 is what are your strategic priorities in the medium term, target net leverage or shareholder returns or M&A?

I can take both of those. So on the financing, that we have a very, very strong balance sheet as it stands to date, average remaining life is 3 years. But as always, we keep ourselves very, very active and ready should opportunities appear. So we'll be proactive about managing our balance sheet as we always have done. So it's certainly something that we'll be monitoring actively.

And in terms of priority rankings, I mean, the reality is we can do everything. And that was effectively the message from the Capital Markets Day. We'll be able to see organic growth, which is always going to be our primary focus in terms of where we allocate capital because of the slide I went through a few slides time, which shows the high returns on that, but we're going to be generating excess capital because of the cash compounding engine of our business. So we have excess now to give out to shareholders.

So we'll see that come through and all the while reducing our net leverage. So we're in short, able to see all, and I think to Tom's answered just a minute ago, M&A is lower down in the priority rankings. We don't need to do M&A to get growth. We have more than enough of it in our markets. We're able to get the best returns from those markets as well. So we're very, very well structured to capture all those opportunities over the next few years.

Thanks, Manjit. No more questions on the webcast. So now handing back to you, Tom, for closing remarks.

Great. Well, first of all, thank you, everyone. This is the first time we've done this in person. So thank you for everyone coming, and thanks for all the questions. Look, we're really excited about the business. You've seen the numbers in terms of what we've released today. '25 was a very strong year. But in our mind, '25 has done that. We're really excited about the future. We've got a strong and very much growing pipeline for new tenancy rollout. We're already executing -- you'll see our Q1 numbers actually in a more like a matter of weeks. So very much already looking forward to that.

And we've got a very strong line of sight ahead, both in terms of the top-down structural demand, which I think everyone knows about, but also the more granular localized customer interactions as well. So we're feeling really good about the business. We're feeling really excited. We can't wait to get the Q1 out and then the others after that and really looking forward to keeping everyone updated as we move through this year. So thanks very much, everyone, and we look forward to talking with you soon.

Thank you.

Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Helios Towers 2025 Capital Markets Day. Please promise you won't build your LEGO towers in this room, by the way. It's fantastic to see so many familiar faces in this room and actually just as many new ones here. Thank you for joining us and being part of this important moment for our business.

Our in-person attendance has more than doubled since our last event, and I'm really excited what we're going to show you guys this afternoon. What you'll hear today is that Helios Towers is entering what we call the sweet spot. Tom, Manjit and the team will show you this is a natural and exciting next part of the company's journey.

As a quick introduction, I'm Chris Baker-Sams, Head of Strategic Finance and Investor Relations. I've been with Helios for over 7 years now, and this is a phase I've really been looking forward to.

Before we begin, just a couple of housekeeping items. First, health and safety. As many of you know, world-class health and safety is central to our business excellence program. If you speak to any of our Board, local or ExCo members here today, they will tell you that health and safety is the first thing on our agenda. So in that spirit, I'd like to let you know the fire exits can be found at the very far left and to this side as well, too, and the assembly point is down by 22 Bishopsgate if needed. On exits, if anyone does need to hop out for a call or for a bathroom break, please use the back left just here or just down to my right-hand side.

As you can see on the screen behind me, our disclaimer covers the usual forward-looking information and financial statements.

So with that, let's take a look at what's ahead this afternoon. First, we'll hear from our Chair, Sir Sam Jonah, who will open today with a few reflections on our journey since IPO and the opportunity that lies ahead. Then Tom will take us through the big picture, our Impact 2030 strategy and how our platform captures the long-term structural growth. Next, Manjit will show how our model delivers consistent U.S. dollar earnings and how we think about disciplined capital allocation. We'll then take a 10-minute break and after that, return for a conversation with our commercial, operational and regional leaders to discuss questions we've received from investors in advance of this Capital Markets Day, particularly around the operational risks associated with the markets where we operate.

We'll have a dedicated Q&A section after that, then we'll head up to the 26th floor, and our team will be around to guide you up there. We'll be serving food and drink from our markets up there while enjoying some interactive deep dive presentations. We'll explore how our proprietary technology is driving tenancy growth, how we're using AI to drive customer experience excellence and returns; how over the past decade, we've built an operational moat through power management expertise; and finally, how mobile will evolve over the next 10 years and the complementary role that satellites will play.

For this final session, our team will be joined by one of our technology advisers who's already been conversing with a few investors so far today, but Marcus Weldon, former President of Nokia Bell Labs, the world-renowned innovation powerhouse that pioneered many of the digital technologies we use today, wireless communications and AI and winning 11 Nobel prizes along the way.

So it's going to be an insightful afternoon. And so to open our Capital Markets Day, please do welcome on to stage our Chair, Sir Sam Jonah.

Good afternoon. Thank you, Chris. I am Samuel Jonah, the Chairman of Helios Towers. I must say it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you to our 2025 Capital Markets Day. Today, we come together to showcase the strength and quality of our business and to share our ambitions for the next 5 years and beyond. The strategy you'll be hearing about will reflect months of thoughtful preparation and collaboration across the entire company.

Let me say you that all of us at Helios are deeply passionate about what we do. And given that all our colleagues are indeed shareholders of the company, we are fully invested in the success of this business. I know that many of our colleagues are tuning in to watch this event. And I'd like to take the opportunity to extend my heartfelt thanks for your continued hard work and dedication, which has enabled us to deliver our previous strategy ahead of plan and which underpin our future successes.

Throughout my career, I've had a great pleasure and privilege of working with many fantastic businesses and outstanding people. Yet I can say with absolute conviction that I've been genuinely blown over by the commitment, tenacity and talent of the team that we are so privileged to have at Towers. And since joining as Chairman of this company in 2019, just before the IPO, I've had the opportunity to travel across our markets and spend time with our exceptional teams on the ground. Their energy, their determination and shared sense of purpose are truly inspiring.

While the company has gone through its most recent growth -- phase of growth, the world around us has undoubtedly become more challenging in many respects. Yet through those challenges, we have proudly built together our culture, our purpose and our infrastructure, which we believe would endure and last for a very long time.

During my tenure, the targets that we have always set have always been ambitious, yet time and again, Helios has continued to execute with remarkable discipline and consistency that this metronomic delivery is part of who we are, and I have no doubt at all that it will continue. Under Tom's remarkable and distinguished leadership, supported by Manjit and the broader management team, you will see today what we are so excited about to be delivering, including for the first time in the company's history, returns to shareholders. It is a proud milestone and one that reflects both the strength of our platform and the maturity of our business model.

From my origin and my native country Ghana, Helios Towers has grown into a business that now operates across over 15,000 towers across 9 markets in Africa and the Middle East. Through these towers, we have connect nearly half of the populations in those countries, around 160 million people whose lives are touched by improved mobile connectivity. We are not standing still.

Our new strategic plan, Impact 2030 sets out how we will continue to capture growth as we enter the next phase of our journey, how we will harness the powerful long-term trends shaping our markets, and how we will maintain our relentless focus on delivering first-class service for our customers. The Board, many of whom I'm pleased to say, are here today and the management team have worked hand-in-hand to develop this strategy, and we are genuinely excited to share it with you today.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have been down for the last few days with the mother of all flus. I was asked not to come. Trust me, it is my wish, hope and desire that all of you here will leave this event strong and healthy. The last thing I want is to inflict my pain on you so to give you the excuse to revenge and a shock. So whilst I would like to stay with you and engage you, I'm delighted that my colleagues are here, the directors are here to engage you. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much, Sam, and we wish you well. So huge welcome, everyone. Good afternoon, and huge welcome to everyone in this room and everyone on the webcast. I'm Tom Greenwood, CEO of Helios Towers, and I've been here since the beginning, almost 16 years across each strategic cycle from building the platform to scaling it and now compounding cash flow and value. Today, we're a high-performing business with a culture of excellence and a relentless focus on the customer experience.

Now I note that a huge amount of our talented colleagues are watching today on the webcast. And I wanted to say everything we talk about today is because of your dedication, your commitment and your excellence. We're one team, one business here at Helios Towers, all striving towards the same goals, the same purpose and the same ambition. We're the most diversified TowerCo across Africa and the Middle East, and we deliver global levels of quality across our portfolio with revenues approaching $1 billion and double-digit growth in earnings and cash flow.

Today, we run 15,000 towers that support connectivity for almost 160 million people across the 9 markets. And that's going to grow towards 200 million over the next 5 years as the networks densify and the coverage expands. We provide the mission-critical infrastructure, often where there's no alternative form of communication. But what excites me the most is the next 5 years for this business. And 3 things converge. One, the market demand is unmistakable. This is supported by powerful structural megatrends. Two, our team's ability to execute in complex markets is proven. And three, our cash generation enters the cash compounding sweet spot, and this enables the next phase of shareholder returns. So we'll unpack each of these this afternoon. And I'll make the case to you that Helios Towers is one of the most compelling investor propositions globally today. So quite simply, this cycle is the next stage of investor return and value creation.

So this session is structured around 6 themes: our world-class platform, the growth runway in our markets, the quality of our customers, how we deliver operational excellence, our financial track record and of course, our Impact 2030 target. So think of this as the story of a platform built for decades of growth ahead with disciplined operational excellence and financial return.

Our greatest asset is our people. Our executive leadership team here brings 450 years plus of combined experience across towers, power and emerging markets. Many of the leaders you'll hear from today run operations, delivery, engineering, commercial and the regions day-to-day. And the majority of people on this slide you see here have been internally promoted to these positions. So at Helios Towers, we invest in our people. We provide bespoke training and development programs across the entire business to give everyone the support and the tools that they need to succeed.

Lean Six Sigma is the foundation of our business excellence program, and you'll see the black and the orange belts on here. Now this is not just training. This is how we make decisions. It's how we standardize processes. And it's how we continuously improve. Crucially, we invest in local leadership. We're 95% localized at country level. And this drives performance, it drives safety, and it drives sustainable economics in market. So that combination of deep domain expertise, Lean Six Sigma discipline and local leadership, this is a competitive advantage that you cannot replicate easily.

Supporting the executive is our highly experienced Board, many of whom are here today with deep Africa and EM credentials across telecoms, technology, investment. Now we operate to the highest standards, compliant with U.K. Corporate Governance code, and we're complemented by leading DFI investors across our capital structure, British International Investments, DEG from Germany, EAIF and of course, the IFC who have backed us from day one. And their presence matters. It uplifts governance. It unlocks relationships. And it supports all investors in Helios Towers across the regions in which we operate. So against these strong foundations, from 2015 through to today, we've delivered 10 consecutive years of EBITDA growth, a 24% CAGR through multiple macro cycles.

So this is the hallmark of disciplined execution and resilient contract-driven model in growing markets. And this comes from 2 places. One, the region in which we operate is the growth region with decades of demand ahead; and two, the Helios sales culture, excellence and continuous improvement. We run world-class infrastructure in developing and often challenging locations, and we do it reliably, which is why we're the trusted partner to all of the region's leading mobile operators.

So today, I will connect this track record to why now is the moment that we're compounding cash flow and returns. This next section introduces Impact 2030, our next 5-year strategy. So I'll start with why we're here today, and then I'll walk you through the journey that we've been on through the previous strategic cycles that brought us to this point.

So 4 years ago, we set a clear goal for this 2022 to 2026 cycle to reach 2.2 tenants per site by the end of 2026. We've achieved this over a year early, which is why we're launching the next phase now. So Impact 2030 focuses on capital-efficient organic growth, sector-leading lease-up, customer experience excellence and of course, ROIC continuing to expand above WACC. And this drives a highly visible route to $1.3 billion of cumulative recurring free cash flow over the next 5 years, which is the starting point for our capital allocation decisions.

And in terms of our capital allocation framework, i.e., how is this cash deployed, this is equally clear. We'll target $500 million plus in high returning organic growth CapEx over the period, and we'll return at least $400 million to investors whilst retaining further optionality to drive more growth and more returns even higher through this cycle. So we're entering the cash compounding phase of the Helios Towers story now.

And let me summarize our journey. 2019 to 2022, strengthening the platform. At IPO, we set a 12x8x5 strategy, 12,000 towers, 8 markets in 5 years. We exceeded this in 3. So that period was about expansion, acquisitions, platform growth, building a lease-up-ready portfolio. Free cash flow was negative by design as we invested to double the size of the business.

Then 2022 up until now, integration and lease-up. We pivoted to organic growth, driving tenancy ratio from 1.8 to 2.2 and improving ROIC from 10% to 14%. Operational delivery and power performance lifted efficiency and customer experience. Free cash flow inflected positive last year in 2024 and is stepping up steeply now in 2025, and this gives us more capital allocation choice.

So now Impact 2030, the cash compounding sweet spot. We continue the organic plan ahead, aiming for 2.5 tenants per site, a 15% to 20% range in the ROIC and strong recurring free cash flow, enabling material investor distributions whilst still preserving optionality for high returning selective growth. And our vision is very simple: to be the leading TowerCo in Africa and the Middle East. Our purpose connecting people and powering growth and our mission to deliver customer experience excellence through our bespoke digital business excellence platform, creating sustainable value for our people, environment, customers, communities and of course, our investors.

So I'll now go on to the platform fundamentals, where we operate, who we serve and why our long-term business structure matters. We're strategically focused on Africa and the Middle East. Now this gives investors risk-mitigated access to the fastest-growing region in the world through our disciplined operating model. We're the most diversified TowerCo across the region, 9 markets, leading market share in 7, national-wide networks and a robust base of contractual earnings. We have $5.5 billion of future contracted revenue in the bag today, which equates to an average remaining life of about 7 years. This is even before any renewals. And 71% of our EBITDA is hard currency. This reflects the portfolio mix and our contract structure.

And we operate 15,000 towers across Tanzania, DRC, Oman, Senegal, Ghana, Malawi, Madagascar, Congo, Brazzaville and South Africa. Our footprint coverage is already large and growing. 157 million people rely on our infrastructure for daily connectivity, and this is rising 20% over the next 5 years as subscribers and population continue to set the pace globally. So the key takeaway here is a really solid contracted earnings base from which to compound growth and cash flow generation for many, many years to come.

So let's whittle it down now to a single tower, a single site. Our unit business model is straightforward and powerful. We build or acquire a tower, and we provide the passive infrastructure. So that's the tower itself, and that's the power systems, the security systems, and we lease space out to multiple mobile operators. We guarantee near continuous power uptime at the site, which is mission-critical for the mobile operators. And of course, there are millions of subscribers that use these towers for their daily connectivity.

So why does this business model work so well? Well, one, the infrastructure sharing lowers total cost for our customers versus them each building their own sites. Number two, it lets mobile operators focus their capital and their operations on active network technology, while we specialize in the real estate and the power element, raising overall service quality. And three, costs are largely fixed at site level. So each additional tenant drops through with high incremental margins. And this is the key structural operating leverage in our infrastructure sharing business model.

So therefore, on returns, a new site with one tenant will have 12% ROIC on day 1. Then by adding a second tenant, we go up to the mid-20s and a third tenant to the mid-30s. And combined with the contracts of 10 to 15 years long plus renewals, this is long-duration compounding cash flow at each site. And now here, you can see the unit economics scaling through the portfolio. So in 2022, after acquisitions, the group set at 1.8 tenancy ratio, 10% ROIC. Free cash flow was negative as we absorbed the investment and doubled the platform. Then through the lease-up and the efficiency, we're now at 2.2 tenants per site, 14% ROIC and free cash flow positive.

So Impact 2030 targets to continue these trends and execution strategy to get to 2.5 tenants per site, 15% to 20% ROIC, and this all driving $1.3 billion plus of cumulative recurring free cash flow, of which we do $400 million plus of investor distributions across this period. So this here is the cash compounding sweet spot, which then continues beyond 2030 as well.

So let's look at the demand now. So why do our markets support growth, not just for the next 5 years, but for decades ahead. Three structural drivers are key. Population growth. Africa and Middle East account for the majority of population growth to 2050 with 55% increase from today over the next 25 years. In fact, 8 out of 10 people born for the rest of this century will be in Africa and the Middle East. Then mobile adoption. The region adds 800 million unique mobile subscribers by 2050. That's over 70% from today. And then smartphones are proliferating, 1.7 billion additional devices in the market by 2050. So this is more than doubling over the next 25 years. So the result of this is multi-decade requirement for more coverage and more capacity. And for a tower company, that translates to more points of service per market over time, more tenants, more equipment on site, and more densification in urban and suburban areas.

So let's now look at the nearer term, the next 5 years. And data usage in our region is set to boom. It's growing 4x over the next 5 years. This is the fastest of anywhere in the world because user behavior is changing and people across the region are demanding more and more data applications to use in their daily lives. And there are 2 catalysts for this. First, affordable smartphones. Prices are falling towards $30, and this opens up data affordability and access for millions and millions more people. Second, the technology mix is shifting. 4G and 5G become the majority of connections in our markets over the next 5 years. And these technologies require denser networks and more points of service or tenancies per area to maintain the quality. This means that sustained lease-up for existing sites is there and targeted build-to-suits in coverage gaps is what we're focusing on.

Both of these are the high-returning opportunities core in our model. And translating those drivers into our 9 markets, the total addressable market tenancies expand materially through to 2030, and the trend continues well beyond that. So our plan, Impact 2030 targets 10,000-plus additional tenancies for Helios Towers through 2030, with market growth supported by population, smartphone affordability and data intensity growth. So the key message here is this is not a one-off cycle. This is a long runway. And we have the platform, we have the customer relationships and the operating model to convert that total addressable market into ROIC and cash flow consistently and at scale.

And our growth focus remains firmly on our core product of towers, which we view as the highest earnings quality in the digital infrastructure space. And standard towers will continue to generate around 95% of revenue through this plan period. But we're also well positioned for tower-like ancillaries, supporting the next wave of connectivity, in-building systems, smart street structures and fringe edge data centers, all designed to support 4G densification and 5G rollout and all with virtually identical earnings quality to towers. These adjacent products build naturally on our existing tower and power expertise creating new revenue streams for us whilst leveraging the same operating backbone. So they're not about chasing diversification for its own sake. They're about staying ahead of customer need and ensuring that our capital is being deployed on the highest returning growth opportunities out there.

And so with that context, I'll next cover our customers, our service model and then go into execution and our financials. So our customer base comprises the leading mobile operators in the region, the likes of Airtel, Vodacom, Orange, Amantel, Axian, Viettel and MTN. Leading operators account for 99% of our revenue with roughly 70% coming from investment-grade customers. So that combination of scale and credit quality gives us real resilience. And each of these customers is investing heavily in their network expansion and growth, and they're delivering significant growth and strong financial performance themselves, which creates the right impact for our growth and capital allocation Impact 2030 strategy. And because we operate in multiple markets with the same groups, we benefit also from multi-market relationships that deepen over time.

So let's take a look at our markets. We've earned market-leading positions through over a decade of operational reliability. In 7 of our 9 markets, we're the leading #1 independent tower company, serving every mobile operator in every market. Our markets typically have 3 or 4 major mobile operators and 1 or 2 other TowerCos. And our strategy is simple: to compete on customer experience, which is why we focus relentlessly on operational excellence. And the upshot of this strategy is clear. Our tenancy ratios continue to climb. For example, Tanzania now at 2.6, DRC 2.7; Oman, 1.7 after only 3 years, and all of these are continuing to grow day in, day out. This local scale means we can deliver new sites faster and more efficiently than our competitors while providing national reach for our customers.

So it's a powerful combination that we have here, market leadership, trusted execution and, of course, proven lease-up momentum. And at the heart of our customer proposition is customer experience excellence, the first pillar in our strategy, the way we roll out and at speed and the way we deliver power uptime. We can get colocation customers live in 24 hours. We deliver 99.99% power uptime, and this is critical service because every 1% downtime would cost our customers $175 million in lost network revenue each year. So we help them focus their capital on active technology, saving roughly 30% versus self-build. And we cut diesel emissions per tenant by almost 40% through our shared infrastructure model.

So in short, we deliver global quality, operational excellence, financial value and sustainability impact, all in one package. And here is a tangible proof point. So we entered new markets 3 or 4 years ago, Senegal, Madagascar, Malawi and Oman. We acquired networks from mobile operators, and these networks had frequent power interruptions. Now through our operational excellence methodology, our engineering capability and site digitalization, we've cut average downtime on these sites by 90% plus across the 4 markets. So for the mobile operators, this isn't just about transactional financial value in these sale and leaseback acquisitions. This is about network reliability and critically improving their subscriber network experience.

So each of these improvements reinforces why operators choose Helios Towers as their preferred partner when they expand coverage or roll out new technology. And our customers recognize our performance. You can see here direct quotes from Airtel, Vodacom and Amantel, each of them highlighting what matters most to them: speed, reliability, trust. And these testimonials aren't marketing. These are earned through consistent delivery getting sites live fast, keeping them powered and responding to challenges when they arise. So this is powerful validation that Helios is not just a supplier but a strategic partner for our customers' network growth and performance.

So let's take a look under the hood now at the operational discipline and systems that enable us to deliver that level of service across some of the fastest-growing markets in the world. Operating telecom infrastructure in Africa and Middle East is, in some ways, unlike anywhere else. We're managing enormous geographies. So our 9 markets are over 6 million square kilometers. This is 50% larger than Europe, but with under 10% of the Tarmac roads. And we also operate with limited grid power. So 17 hours per day on average that we get across our portfolio. But some sites at 0, some sites at 24 and everything in between.

Now this drives the key operational difference between us and a telco, say, in Europe or the U.S. We also provide power as a service as well as the standard infrastructure and real estate services common to telcos worldwide. So these environments where logistics, weather and grid reliability are a challenge, they need to become -- they need to be overcome to operate effectively. And we've built systems and processes that overcome these complexities, combining local know-how, technology and process discipline to ensure uptime and delivery at world-class standards and service levels. So this creates a moat around our business and is a significant competitive advantage in our customer proposition.

Now next, I'll show you how we deploy that same operational discipline across the entire business through our business excellence platform. So to deliver consistency at this scale, we run the entire business through our business excellence platform. And this is built on Lean Six Sigma foundations. And this is a framework that drives database decisions, process efficiency and a continuous improvement culture. Since 2022, we've increased the proportion of our Lean Six Sigma trained colleagues from 40% to 65%. We'll be at 70% next year. And what this means is the majority of our workforce, not just the senior leaders are trained and can identify inefficiencies, can map them, can solve problems using consistent methodology across the business. And so this is the reason why our rollout speed, our uptime, our ROIC continues to improve each and every quarter.

And here's some examples of the outcome of this over the past few years. So average downtime per tower per week has dropped from well over 4 minutes in 2022 to 1 minute today. This translates to the 99.99% power uptime. And at the same time, our build-to-suit delivery speed has reduced almost 40% over this time and colocation rollout is now on average 2 days across the entire business.

So these metrics matter because they translate directly to more satisfied customers, to higher ROIC and a stronger reputation for execution excellence. And we've also embedded business excellence into our proprietary GIS system. You'll get a demo of that, upstairs, later. And this identifies, this analyzes, this predicts where new sites will deliver the best lease-up returns and the optimum performance within the network. This platform combines the geospatial data. It includes the population density, the traffic patterns and the existing network coverage to pinpoint exactly where capacity demand will emerge and therefore, where our capital is best deployed.

This has been instrumental in driving our tenancy growth across our markets through every vintage, and our system is improving. For example, towers built in 2010 to '15 have leased up with colocations of 0.2 per year, but towers built in the past 4 years have leased up twice as fast at 0.4 colos per year. So that's 2.5 years now to add a colo to a new build-to-suit, and that's arriving at the 25% ROIC that I showed you earlier on the unit economics page.

So this is a great example of the power of using data and disciplined methodology to drive growth and achieve higher returns faster. And finally, this slide shows what continuous improvement looks like day-to-day on the ground. So a few examples of some recent projects. And each of these projects was led by our people using Lean Six Sigma techniques that they've learned through our Training and Development program. So Albert in Malawi has reduced diesel costs on high load sites, saving $1.2 million. Gloria in Tanzania, integrated remote monitoring, improving the installation process for customers added $1 million revenue. And Al Walid in Oman has enhanced preventative maintenance processes, saving $1 million. All of these using Lean Six Sigma techniques through our training.

And so these are not pilots. These are embedded processes happening day in, day out across our business in every market, in every function. And it's proof that our people development program and continuous improvement culture is real. It's working, and it's compounding value day in, day out across the business. So with that operational foundation in place, let's move to what this all drives, the financial targets and performance. So everything we're discussing here today really comes together here. Through Impact 2030, we are entering the cash compounding sweet spot, not just for the next 5 years, but for decades ahead. And this is the point where the operational excellence, the disciplined capital allocation and the structural growth all converge.

So Manjit will take you through the robust business model and the growth algorithm that provides a clear route to delivering these. But in summary, we're targeting sector-leading growth. We're targeting continued returns expansion above our cost of capital, and we're deploying this in a disciplined way, compounding our cash flows, while introducing attractive distributions for investors. So when you add it all up, growth, execution capability, cash flow generation, capital discipline and returns, Helios Towers becomes one of the most compelling investor propositions globally, delivering both scale growth and yield at the same time.

And of course, underpinning all of it, a world-class platform operating in markets with decades of growth ahead, high-quality customers with long-term contracts, industry-leading operational excellence built on Lean Six Sigma discipline, the most talented teams in the markets, a clear and disciplined capital allocation framework. And that's why I say Helios Towers is entering its sweet spot phase, and we're moving into sustainable growth, cash flow generation and shareholder returns.

So as we look to 2030 and beyond, our focus is simple, keep delivering for our customers, keep compounding for investors and keep connecting people and powering growth across Africa and the Middle East. So thank you very much, everyone. I hope everyone has a great day. Through the rest of the agenda, we've got a great lineup for you. We're going to have a very short video now, and then Manjit will cover our financial performance and targets in more detail, and we look forward to lots of questions and discussions after that. So thank you very much, everyone.

[ Presentation ]

I generally really love these kind of videos and it's one of the reasons why I love working for this company. We all here today can take for granted the digitization journey we've all been on the past few decades, but the sense of excitement, optimism and the thirst for connectivity is really alive, not just in Dar and Kinshasa, but in every one of our markets. And it really echoes what Thomas has spoken about. And I really do suggest today that you all try and speak to our fantastic colleagues who are here. Some of our senior leadership have dotted around, and some of them are former MDs and can really add more color to the stories that we're providing today.

And it's really exciting and energizing to see so many people here today and dialing in and taking a real interest in our business. Now we are all incredibly excited about what we have built, where the company is today, but importantly, where it's going. And I'm pleased to speak about Impact 2030 and our financial performance and outlook. To echo both Sam and Tom, firstly, a quick thank you to our colleagues and partners who are dialing in. We present our targets and road map from a position of strength, which certainly makes our job a lot easier today. That's all due to the foundations that you've all built.

Now a quick introduction. My name is Manjit Dhillon. I'm the Group Chief Financial Officer and Oman Executive Chair. I joined Helios Towers back in 2016 and I have had the privilege of seeing this company transform from a 4-player market operator into a truly diversified Pan-African and Middle Eastern infrastructure leader. Over that time, I've helped lead more than $5 billion in capital raising and alongside Tom and the other senior leadership team here, have also worked on our acquisitions and successful IPO. I was appointed CFO 5 years ago at the beginning of 2021 and more recently took on the role of Executive Chair of Oman, one of our fastest-growing markets.

So why are we here today? Well, it's because we've hit our strategy ahead of schedule, achieving our 2.2 tenancy ratio target earlier than planned. With that milestone now reached, we're setting out our Impact 2030 strategy, the next phase of Helios Tower's journey focused on compounding growth, stronger cash flow generation and delivering sustainable shareholder returns with the simple clash being that we are now commencing shareholder distributions for the first time, a process that began this morning.

And over the next few slides, I'll be going through the building blocks of how we will deliver this in a robust and resilient manner. But to kick off, I'll touch on our highlights of our Q3 results, which we released this morning, and we've delivered another strong set of results showing continued momentum. We added 2,125 tenancies year-to-date, including 296 new sites, taking our tenancy ratio up by 0.1 to 2.2, hitting our target early. Adjusted EBITDA is up 11% year-on-year to $346 million, with free cash flow expanding by $70 million to reach $49 million, again, demonstrating the cash compounding nature of our growth.

We've also reduced net leverage by 0.6 year-on-year to 3.6. We successfully tendered $120 million of our convertible bonds below par, removing 41 million potentially dilutive shares. Today, our average remaining life on our debt is 4 years. So we're in good shape, and we continue to proactively manage the balance sheet, looking to reduce the cost of capital and enhance equity value. On the back of this great performance, we've tightened upwards our full year guidance across all metrics once again. Given the strong rollout year-to-date, we are now guiding to 2,500 tenancy additions for the full year and EBITDA of approximately $470 million, both top ends of the previously guided ranges. With free cash flow expected to exceed $60 million, whilst we continue to guide to deleveraging to roughly 3.5.

Given the high tenancies, we expect CapEx to come in between $160 million to $180 million. We're happy with the performance to date this year. We're now really focused on ensuring we end the year with momentum, driving us into this next strategic cycle. But I think these results once again demonstrate our ability to capture the growth opportunities in our markets in a robust and resilient manner, which takes me very nicely to the next section.

Now you saw this slide earlier in Tom's presentation. But when I go through how we've designed our business to be robust and resilient, the greatest proof point is performance. We've delivered 10 years of consecutive U.S. dollar EBITDA growth, despite global pandemics, oil price shocks, rising inflation, rising interest rates and increasing global volatility. The world is very different to 10 years ago, but then so is our business. Through this backdrop, we've grown our EBITDA with a CAGR of 24% from $54 million in 2015, all the way to $470 million that we're guiding to at the end of this year. The business foundations we've set to deliver this growth has not only been maintained over the last few years, but strengthened.

And this provides the basis for how we will sustainably capture all the growth that Tom has mentioned over the next decade plus. Though there are many nuances and business characteristics and positive characters within our business, these can be distilled into 4 key pillars that underpin our strength and resilience. One, a uniquely diversified portfolio across carefully chosen high-growth African and Middle Eastern markets; two, a strong hard currency earning base, driven mainly by our presence in innately hard currency markets and reinforced by contractual protections; three, partnerships with blue-chip largely investment-grade customers; and four, we sign up to long-term contracts with these customers, totaling $5.5 billion of contracted revenues, providing exceptional visibility and form the foundation for our next phase of growth.

Now I'll click into these dynamics in a bit more detail and starting with our customers and contracts. Firstly, on customers on the right-hand side of the page. Whilst we operate in high-growth markets, we're contracting with and dealing with these operators on a daily basis. They're diversified and truly the household names you would expect with many spanning multiple mobile markets -- many of our markets. And importantly, they are showing phenomenal growth themselves. For example, Orange's MENA business continues to thrive, while Vodacom and Airtel Africa are going from strength to strength with Airtel upgrading their CapEx plans last week on the back of the great results they're seeing. And we are proud partners to all of them.

We contract with these operators utilizing the U.S. TowerCo contract structure, but applying it to high-growth African and Middle Eastern markets. These contracts have a long duration, 10 to 15 years initial term, and then they have auto renewals, which will likely take them up to 40 years plus. There are minimal cancellation rights. Typically, operators can cancel about 1% of tenancies per annum, but the reality is that churn is not really an issue with this business. It's negligible. It's really about operators rolling out more tenancies, and we see this in our reported numbers. Now we charge the customers based on 3 things: the vertical space they take up on the tower; the power that they utilize; and the wind load of their equipment. And we effectively allocate a predefined bucket for each of these 3 characteristics.

In our contracts, we have amendment revenue clauses. What that means is that if an operator adds more equipment or utilizes more power than their predefined limit, then we get to charge for that. Today, roughly 15% of our tenancies are amendments, and this is driven by the fact that we are seeing technological improvements across our markets with operators adding more and more equipment to sites so they can provide 3G, 4G and now 5G connectivity. All of that means extra potential revenue for us. Today, we have $5.5 billion of contracted revenue with our customers with an average remaining life of 6.7 years. Now this number doesn't include auto renewals, so expect this number to rise in the future.

And it's these dynamics that give us fantastic revenue visibility and certainty and provide the baseline to then layer on top all the incremental growth that we will see. Finally, on this page, and importantly, we also have inflation and power price escalators in our contracts, and I'll explain that in more detail now. Now this is quite a full slide, but I'm going to take a few minutes to kind of go through it because it's a very important one, and I'll go through various mechanics. Now on the top, from left to right, you'll see our markets with the overall group being on the far right-hand side. One of our key strengths is our hard currency profile. Today, 71% of our adjusted EBITDA is in hard currency. And this is driven mainly by the 4 markets highlighted in the orange box. These are innately hard currency markets. DRC is dollarized, Oman is dollar pegged, Worth noting, DRC and Oman are 2 of our 3 biggest markets, and this is supplemented with Senegal and Congo, Brazzaville, which are euro pegged.

Not only do these markets demonstrate fantastic mobile growth, but by being innately hard currency, it means the revenues our customers receive are the hard currencies that they pay to us. In our remaining markets, we also have a portion of revenues linked to hard currencies, which you can see in the other pie charts, adding further to the overall mix. Now in all of our contracts in all markets, we have inflation and power price escalators. Inflation escalators typically kick in, in Q1 of every year and is linked to the currency of the revenue we receive. So if we receive U.S. dollars, it's U.S. CPI. If we receive Tanzanian Shilling, it's Tanzanian CPI. The inflation escalators further assist to help against protection against FX movements. And I'll show on the next page, the combination of being in these hard currency markets and having inflation escalators is a robust way of managing FX movements. We also have power price protections in all contracts, which escalate either quarterly or annually, depending on the contract with more fuel-intensive markets typically escalating quarterly, for example.

And these escalators go both up or down depending on the local pricing of power. So if the local price [indiscernible] of diesel goes up, then the escalator goes up. And conversely, if it goes down, then the escalator goes down. The escalator is set up to effectively mitigate the macro movement of an impact of pricing. So we are on the hook for what is within our control, which is volume. Therefore, if we can operate our sites more effectively by moving away from the most expensive form of powering a site, which is through diesel and connect to the grid where possible or utilize batteries and solar, then we'll make those investments because that will drive returns.

For the last few years, we have shown how these escalators work in practice every quarter to show them in action. And here, we show the high-level output of the cumulative effect of the key drivers on our business since 2021 when we first started to show this level of granularity. The key output here is that 97% of our U.S. dollar EBITDA growth has been driven by business performance, i.e., tenancy additions and operational improvements. Power, CPI and FX movements have offset one another and operating as designed so that macro movements do not dictate the company performance. We don't make a margin on the escalators and neither do we want to. We want our business performance to be driven by what we can control and how we provide our services even better and more efficiently to our customers, and that's what you see here.

Now whilst we've shown this analysis on a cumulative basis, this ultimate dynamic and conclusion is what we've shown every single quarter too. Now some of you may have seen this slide before, but this takes the prior fundamentals I've talked through and presents the correlation between our dollar, adjusted EBITDA growth and tenancy additions over the past 10 years. The dark bar is our tenancy numbers. The lighter bar is our U.S. dollar annualized EBITDA. And we have then layered on top of it the lines which depict FX movements versus the dollar for our local foreign currencies and also the movement in Brent crude. Despite the movements in some FX rates and Brent crude, as you can see, our business model has continually delivered consistent U.S. dollar EBITDA growth over that time and demonstrates an extremely high correlation to tenancy growth. R-squared, the measure of correlation of 1 is perfect. And we show here a 0.97 R-squared. So we are near enough perfectly correlated with tenancy growth with almost no correlation to movements in FX and Brent crude. This is really another way of demonstrating that our business has been effectively designed to grow the tenancy additions, which is both a function of our market growth, but also our capacity to deliver exceptional customer experience, which Tom went through.

Fundamentally, we're in the right markets with great customers who are growing and investing. We continue to be laser-focused on ensuring we push the boundaries on how we deliver for our customers. We have set rock solid foundations to be able to capture this growth into the future. In short, if we continue to do what we've been doing for a decade, then this chart will continue into the foreseeable, increasing dollar earnings, increasing cash compounding returns. And our growth algorithm is clear. Strong market growth drives our tenancy growth, which drives our dollar EBITDA, which will drive our recurring free cash flow. That's the capital available to management to deploy on discretionary growth CapEx, debt paydowns and/or shareholder distributions. We expect market growth of 6% CAGR or to put it another way, 27,000 incremental market tenancies to be rolled out by MNOs across our markets, and that is just shy of our own business size today of 31,500 tenancies.

Given our market-leading positioning and capabilities, this will drive our own annual tenancy growth of 6% plus, which effectively equates to 2,000 to 2,500 incremental tenancies per annum, which is similar to what we've been doing now for the past 3 years, of which 20% to 25% we expect of those tenancies to be new sites. Now I want to also say that this is a 5-year view. There will be peaks and troughs in terms of rollout. So some years, we may see more build-to-suits than this and some years, we may see less. Indeed, as it actually stands today, we're having really exciting customers with our customers across all markets about rollouts of new sites. So it's a very, very exciting time.

But when looking at these rollout numbers over the next 5-year period, this will broadly be the average view. And the split will be more colos to be than build-to-suits, again, consistent with history. And as a consequence, we expect our tenancy ratios to increase to 2.5 by 2030. This will not only drive 9% CAGR on our EBITDA, but high recurring free cash flow generation. On this bridge, we set out those drivers in a bit more detail. The key driver is that our EBITDA will be growing faster than our cost base, resulting in high cash flow-through. This is principally due to continued lease-up on our portfolio, which Tom referenced earlier about the cash compounding effect of this. And also because we'll be seeing site growth of 3%, which is the driver to other line items.

Non-discretionary CapEx and ground lease payments are both around $3,000 per site. So these will increase in relation to the growing site base, which is slower than the EBITDA growth rate. Cash taxes will equate to roughly 5% to 6% of revenue for the period. And with 84% of our debt being fixed, this will also be leveraged. And it's really our aim to continue to optimize our funding sources and cost of capital. Our ultimate aim is to drive return on invested capital in excess of WACC. We'll drive returns through capital-efficient investments and aim to reduce WACC through balance sheet management where possible.

The combination of all of this will lead to $1.3 billion of cumulative recurring free cash flow, which takes us now to how we allocate that capital, where discipline and returns remain at the heart of every decision. Now as management, our role is, amongst other things, to be disciplined capital allocators. Every strategic decision we make is grounded in analytical rigor. Our disciplined, but flexible capital allocation framework provides a structure for how we will make these decisions, assessing where our capital will generate the highest and most sustainable returns for shareholders, be that through reinvestment or distributions.

Our first priority is to reinvest in organic opportunities that will deliver the strongest returns, compound our growth, whilst continually improving the quality and resilience of our portfolio. We will always fuel the compounding engine of our business. To that end, we are guiding to spend over $0.5 billion in value-accretive organic opportunities between 2026 and 2030. Our compounding growth and inflection in cash flow now also means we're happy to commence investor distributions with over $400 million being earmarked over that same period with the balance of a growing dividend and a regular but flexible buyback.

Now this is a key moment for the company where we enter the sweet spot, providing both attractive growth and now returns to our investors. Looking down the priority list, is opportunistic but disciplined M&A. We are happy with the markets and the portfolios that we have. We've demonstrated there are massive growth opportunities in our existing markets, and we're well positioned to capture on those. However, we will continue to assess potential inorganic opportunities and keep our eyes open for the right opportunities. Underpinning all of this is our desire to maintain both balance sheet strength and the financial flexibility to capture further opportunities as they emerge.

The execution of our plan through Impact 2030 with over GBP 900 million firmly allocated to organic investments and investor distributions will see us naturally delever from 3.5 at the end of this year towards 2 by 2030. Now it's worth noting, however, that TowerCos generally, given the contracted revenue profile with blue-chip customer base and consistent cash flow generation, can and do operate with higher levels of leverage than this, not too dissimilar from real estate companies.

With that in mind, whilst I expect us to delever further, I see a 2.5 to 3.5 range as being one that we can comfortably operate within over the coming years. Being towards the top of the upper end of that range is likely if we see faster-than-expected organic opportunities to invest and also further capital return opportunities emerging. So exactly where we operate within that range will depend on the opportunity set in front of us and the disciplined and flexible capital allocation decisions we will make through the framework I've just laid out, so that we maintain a strong balance sheet, while maximizing returns for our investors.

I'll now go through these 3 buckets in a bit more detail. Priority one is always going to be funding our high returning organic growth. We have a weekly management capital allocation committee where we review the set menu of options we have across the board. We effectively rank these opportunities by return and allocate the capital accordingly to the highest returning investment. There are a lot of analytics that go into that list, I should add, and we test, test and retest the inputs to ensure we're maximizing our collective knowledge to drive the best return possible.

And it's this rigor that has driven innovation led to new site designs, OpEx improvements, and you'll hear about some of those in the breakout upstairs. Now internally, we have a saying we're not a TowerCo, but we're a ColoCo. At the Capital allocation Committee, the discussions on colo investments are very quick. We always approve colocations. That is the compounder of our business with ROIC over 100% with a typical cost per colo of $10,000. Next is then power investments, which save OpEx. Now we've seen good returns on these investments with roughly 33% return on invested capital. And as part of Project 100, our previously communicated commitment to invest GBP 100 million in carbon-reducing initiatives, we expect to invest roughly GBP 10 million per annum up to 2030, yielding similar returns over that period.

It's worth noting that with our business, sustainability and financial returns are directly correlated. Diesel is the most expensive form of powering a site. So if we can reduce diesel consumption, we reduce carbon emissions and also critically drive returns. And Lara will go through how we do this upstairs again in the breakout session. And finally, new site builds. Utilizing the great work completed by the GIS team in identifying the best locations and the engineering team in refining site builds, we have seen 12% day 1 return on invested capital with recent vintages leasing up within 2 to 3 years.

We're very analytical about our investment decisions with new site builds, and we will ensure we continue to invest in attractive new sites to expand our portfolio, which should then further drive lease-up as we go forward. We expect 20% to 25% of our tenancy rollout to be new builds, equating to roughly 400 to 500 new sites per annum. On the left-hand side, you will see how we've delivered this over the past 3 years and how our investment in growth CapEx has led to high returns. The dark blue bar being the growth CapEx incurred, the orange bar being the incremental EBITDA and the green bar being the incremental portfolio free cash flow, i.e., the cash generated by our tower assets and is a numerator to return on invested capital calculation.

And here, we can see that we've been generating 30% plus ROICs on our investments in growth. This provides the evidence that we are disciplined in our investments and demonstrates the best use of capital is to invest in these initiatives. And we're committed to spending over $500 million on these investments, up to 2030. This fuels a compounding engine of our business, and we will always ensure we have capital to deploy on these as needed.

Excitingly, we are and will continue to generate excess capital. And today, we've announced $400 million is earmarked for distribution to our investors. We're guiding to a minimum of GBP 250 million of share buybacks over the next 5 years, which is envisaged to be evenly spread over that period. We've initiated the buyback as of this morning, we have authorization for GBP 75 million, which effectively takes us up to the end of next year with some buffer should we see further incremental opportunities over that period. Our approach to buybacks is no different to any investment, disciplined and focused on returns, and we'll undertake share buybacks when they represent effective use of capital to enhance shareholder returns.

Additionally, we're announcing the introduction of a GBP 25 million dividend for fiscal year 2026 to be paid semiannually and growing at 10% per annum. Now the sharp pie we'll see that not all the recurring free cash flow has been allocated with GBP 400 million currently unallocated, and we maintain capital flexibility to continue to invest in the highest returning investments as they arise. We want this capital to work hard for us. So in short, that amount we reinvest in the business were allocated again to our investors.

Whilst slow down the pecking order, we do continue to monitor and review inorganic opportunities with a preference for in-market bolt-ons. This has been a tried and tested route where the initial acquisition sets the foundations for growth and then should another in-market bolt-on opportunity appear, we have the option to utilize the established setup to quickly and accretively falls in that portfolio, leveraging the team and partner group already set up in that market. We've completed a number of these over the years. And when we look at the current total opportunity set out there, there are roughly around 23,000 towers in the hands of MNOs that could potentially come to market, of which 10,000 are ones that largely match our criteria with half of that being in the medium-term pipeline, which we will continue to monitor.

Now with regards to new markets, again, further down the priority list. However, the potential opportunity set is very large with roughly 180,000 towers, high level being ones that would largely match our criteria, i.e., being in Africa and Middle East, multiple MNOs, no or limited TowerCo presence and with stable and/or pegged currencies. Now M&A has been an important tool for the company, and it's worth mentioning that we've said no to far more deals than we said yes to. We're disciplined in our assessment of new opportunities. And when we look at the integration of our new market deals we've completed over the last few years, as it stands today, as a collective, they are all performing well and ahead of plan. The aim of entering new high-growth markets, diversifying our earnings has been well executed and really gives us the springboard for our strategy today.

So to wrap up, the reason why I and all of us at Helios Towers feel so excited about this next phase of company evolution is because we are now entering a really compelling phase for the company. We've called it the sweet spot where we are able to deliver both growth and value, but the critical point being that this phase will not be short-lived, but something that we can deliver for many years ahead. Tom has gone through the numerous opportunities available to us and our capabilities in capturing those. And I've talked through how we've created a financially robust business model that has demonstrated year-on-year how we've sustainably captured those opportunities and driven financial returns.

As a shareholder in this business, as our all Helios Towers staff, we're laser-focused on delivering Impact 2030, where we will be delivering both high returning capital-efficient growth and generating truly excess capital for investor distributions for the first time. It really is a fantastic moment for the company. We're all super motivated to execute this strategy.

Thank you very much. And before we go into the fireside chat, where you hear firsthand from our colleagues on how we operate, we're going to have a short comfort break for 10 minutes. Thank you all very much.

Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining the Helios Towers H1 2025 Results Call. My name is Sami and I'll be coordinating your call today. [Operator Instructions]

I will now hand over to your host, Tom Greenwood, CEO, to begin. Please go ahead, Tom.

Thanks very much, Sami. Hi, everyone, and welcome to our H1 2025 earnings call. I'm Tom Greenwood, Helios Towers' CEO. Thanks very much for joining us today, and I hope you and your families are doing really well.

So we're pleased to report a strong set of results for the first half of the year. The business is performing very well across all of our key strategic and financial metrics. We've delivered strong tenancy growth, P&L expansion and a further step forward in free cash flow and return on invested capital.

As we reflect on yet another quarter of unbroken growth over the last 10 years and as we lead up to our Capital Markets Day in November, it's important to remind ourselves of priority 1 in our strict capital allocation policy.

Our first priority is always high returning organic growth and investing capital expenditure to capture the unique growth in the telecom towers industry in our regions. As I enter my 16th year with this company, what I can say with absolute confidence is that the runway of growth we see ahead is as strong today looking into the future as the growth we have seen over the last decade.

Furthermore, following our free cash flow inflection last year and the continued growth of cash generation already in the first half of this year, we're getting to the point of being able to balance and sustain both significant organic growth with continued deleveraging and potential shareholder return.

Most importantly, for today, we're firmly on track to meet our FY '25 guidance, and we're executing with consistency and discipline, positioning the company well for long-term value creation as we move into our next 5-year strategic cycle, which we'll be launching on November 6 at our London office in Bishopsgate at our Capital Markets Day, which we have announced today and would love for you to attend.

The big focuses here will be our enhanced capital allocation policy, focusing on investor return and value creation, what we are seeing and targeting in terms of high returning growth for the next 5 years and deeper insights from some of our wider leadership team on how we drive excellence and resilience for our customers' experience and our business.

So moving to Slide 2. Today, I'm joined by Manjit, our CFO; and Chris, our Head of IR.

On to Slide 3. As always, we'll begin with strategy, move to the financial results and close with Q&A. But first, I want to recognize the entire Helios Towers team and our partners across Africa and Middle East. Every day, our team delivers critical infrastructure and services for mobile connectivity, often in remote and complex environments, with high professionalism and global quality.

It's this execution and our relentless focus on customer experience excellence that enables our consistent delivery and ensures that the 156 million people covered by our towers today have their daily connectivity needs met, enabling their voice communications, banking, payments, health, education, AI and everything else essential for daily life in today's world. And that delivery is happening against the backdrop of strong industry fundamentals, which are megatrends not just for years ahead, but for decades ahead.

Unique mobile subscribers are forecasted to grow by almost 30% by 2030. There's a forecasted increase of 4x in data usage by 2030. And of course, there's a population boom across our footprint with around 3% annual growth. And for our 9 operating markets, population set to almost double by 2050. These are powerful long-term drivers that underpin our growth strategy, which means the top line growth and compounding cash flows have a trajectory ahead for many, many years.

Now moving to Slide 4. This image is a simple but powerful summary of our model. We build or acquire towers, lease space to mobile operators, and then drive revenue and cash flow return by increasing the number of tenancies on those towers. Going from 1 tenant to 2 and then 3, as you see here, is incredibly value accretive with small marginal incremental cost each time a new tenant is added, leading to the majority of new tenant revenue flowing through to the bottom line.

Our current strategic cycle objective of 2.2 tenants per site by 2026 goes to exactly this point. And we're proving this model out at scale with clear and consistent focus on operational delivery.

And now to Slide 5, our highlights. Looking at the highlights, the performance at half year shows that we're very much on track for our full year guidance. We've added over 1,200 tenancy additions year-to-date, including 190 new sites. Tenancy ratio, we've expanded now to 2.11, up 0.1x year-on-year and with very strong momentum towards our 2.2 by 2026 objective.

EBITDA is up 9% year-on-year. ROIC rose another percentage point to 14% and free cash flow of $30 million, which represents an upward swing of $40 million year-on-year. This reflects record H1 surplus free cash flow generation for our business. Net leverage continues to trend downwards, now at 3.8, which reflects a reduction of 0.4 year-on-year.

We also strengthened our financial position further. Moody's affirmed our B1 rating and moved us to a positive outlook. Fitch has upgraded us to BB-. And recently, we've also reduced our cost of debt from 7.2% to 6.9% through some refinancing of term loans.

Our full year guidance is reaffirmed across the board with 2,000 to 2,500 tenancy adds, $460 million to $470 million of EBITDA, $40 million to $60 million in free cash flow. That's a doubling or tripling of our free cash flow from last year. And leverage trending towards 3.5.

These results are a testament to our team and our business model. The growth is visible. The cash conversion is accelerating, and we're increasingly well positioned to deliver shareholder returns in the next phase of our capital allocation strategy.

Now moving to Slide 6. We've now achieved 10 consecutive years of double-digit adjusted EBITDA growth at around 25% average annual growth rate since 2015. Of course, this includes a very challenging period: COVID, oil price shocks, rate hikes and inflation. Yet through it all, we've delivered consistent, predictable and resilient EBITDA growth. This is a major differentiator to Helios Powers, and it's thanks to the strength of our operating model, long-term inflation-linked contracts and high-quality customer base.

Of course, this is all underpinned by the structural growth of the region and the sector with population, mobile subscribers and data consumption, all trending steeply upwards for decades, not just years, and all driving the demand for mobile infrastructure.

Our thesis is simple. By operating the business at global quality levels with the best people and disciplined capital allocation, we will continue to deliver P&L growth and the consequential compounding cash flow to create significant value for our investors, customers, partners, communities and people.

Now on to Slide 7. Our strategy of 2.2 by '26 is working. Since 2022, we've increased tenancy ratio from 1.81 to 2.11. ROIC has expanded from 10.3% to 13.6%. And free cash flow has flipped from a $721 million outflow for high investment in 2022 to a $30 million surplus so far this year in H1. This is exactly the trajectory we targeted, improving efficiency, improving capital returns and unlocking growing cash generation from our now scaled platform.

And if we move to Slide 8. Here, we see our long history of tenancy expansion, which continues to be a key driver of value. The more tenants per site, the higher returns, rising from 12% cash-on-cash ROIC for 1 tenant to 25% for 2 and up to 34% for 3. And because both CapEx and OpEx are largely fixed, this margin expansion flows straight through to cash flow.

Our operational teams are delivering this model day in, day out across 9 markets, and this underpins our strategy of tenancy ratio increase through colocation and highly attractive build-to-suit, combining high-quality platform expansion with accelerating tower utilization.

And on to Slide 9. Looking forward, the opportunity is substantial, not just for years but for decades ahead. And if we zone in on our next 5-year strategic cycle from 2025 to '30, we see 34,000 new market tenancies expected, 29% unique mobile connections growth and a 4x increase in data consumption. All of this being underpinned by 3% population growth per year with our 9 markets almost doubling in population in the next 25 years.

You will see here that the total addressable organic market from '25 to '30 of 34,000 new tenancies is close to the 31,000 tenancies we have as a group today. So the total addressable organic market is essentially the equivalent of doubling Helios Towers today. And our tenancy additions for the past couple of years have been around 2,500 each year, which is consistent with the high point of our guidance for this year.

So what this all means is that we can be confident of the demand drivers ahead, creating this addressable market new volume and be confident about our ability to deliver strong growth each year going forward. This means more volume, stronger returns from the asset base and growing compounding cash flow for years ahead.

And with leading positions in 7 out of our 9 markets and trusted operational execution capability, we're extremely well positioned to capture that demand as the mobile network proliferate and densify to satisfy the tighter wave of demand for mobile services for the decades ahead.

So on to Slide 10. I'm really, really excited to announce we'll be hosting our Capital Markets Day in London on November 6. At this event, we'll be presenting our updated 5-year strategic plan, our enhanced capital allocation framework with focus on high returning organic growth, cash flow generation and potential shareholder return.

And we'll be hosting interactive sessions with the executive team, explaining how we achieve customer experience excellence and are taking the business to the next level in terms of performance. We look forward to seeing many of you there and sharing more about the next phase of growth and value creation for Helios Towers.

So with that, I'll now hand over to Manjit, who will take you through the financials in more detail. Then we'll be back at the end for Q&A.

Thanks, Tom, and hello, everyone. Great to be speaking with you all today. Starting on Slide 12, I'll be going through the financial results. As Thomas outlined, the first half of 2025 shows continued momentum and delivery, and we are on track to deliver on our full year guidance across all metrics.

We are exactly where we want to be in terms of tenancy growth with tenancies increasing by 1,211 year-to-date, and that's a 7% year-on-year improvement. And we're progressing really well towards our 2.2 by '26 target with our tenancy ratio increasing to 2.11 at the end of the half year. This tenancy growth continues to be the key driver of our EBITDA, which has increased by 9% year-on-year to $226 million for H1 2025, with the last quarter annualized EBITDA of $458 million, which is the bar you see in the middle bar chart.

Our combination of capital-efficient growth through colo lease-up and leveraging operational improvements has also driven our return on invested capital, and that's driven up to 13.6%, up from 12.9% a year ago, and tracking really well towards our full year target of 14%.

Importantly, we continue to see our free cash flow generation accelerate, driven by EBITDA expansion and timing of discretionary capital additions, and we've delivered a $40 million increase in free cash flow year-on-year to $30 million, and we are confident of reaching our full year guidance of $40 million to $60 million.

Now let's jump into some of the detail and moving on to Page 13. Here, we set out the growth we're seeing in number of sites and tenancies. The number of sites increased by 330 year-on-year to 14,515, and that's an increase of 190 year-to-date. New organic builds are an important element of our strategy and ultimately add to the hopper to which we can then drive further colo lease-up. We're very selective in our approach to new site rollouts, utilizing analytics from our proprietary GIS platform to conduct analysis to ensure that the sites we build have a clear potential for lease-up and strong day-1 returns.

Tenancies increased by 2,043 to 30,617, and that's a 7% year-on-year increase with 1,211 added year-to-date. We're seeing growth across all markets with particularly large increases across DRC, Tanzania and Oman. And as I mentioned earlier, we saw a 0.1 tenancy ratio expansion year-on-year to 2.11. And again, we're making very good progress towards our 2.2 target.

As we continue to engage and partner with our customers on new opportunities, we are clear that we always have and will continue to deploy capital on accretive opportunities that will drive returns. And as Tom went through earlier, the growth dynamics of our markets combined with our execution capabilities of our fantastic teams mean we will continue to see and deliver on these opportunities over the coming years.

Moving on to Slide 14, our revenue growth. We've seen revenue growth of 10% year-on-year to $215 million, driven predominantly by our strong tenancy growth. Our hard currency profile remains unchanged at 67% of our revenue in hard currency, which translates to 71% of our adjusted EBITDA being in hard currency. As a reminder, 4 of our markets are innately hard currency, including DRC and Oman, 2 of our 3 biggest markets being dollarized or dollar pegged, and Senegal and Congo Bratville being pegged to the euro.

Importantly, this means that the revenues our customers receive are also hard currency, and this is also what they pay to us. In our Romanian markets, we also have portions of our revenue linked to hard currencies, adding further to the overall mix, and our earnings are further protected by contractual escalators, including CPI escalators and annual/quarterly power escalators and de-escalators. 99% of our revenue is from large blue-chip mobile network operators with no single customer accounting for more than 27% of our revenue, as you can see in the second pie chart.

And finally, we signed into long-term agreements with our customers with initial terms of 10 to 15 years and are largely noncancelable. Today, our contracted revenue of $5.3 billion has an average remaining life of just shy of 7 years. In other words, we've secured minimum revenue of $5.3 billion in total without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earnings stream that we complement with further growth driven by tenancy rollout.

And moving on to Slide 15. We present the usual analysis showing the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth in more detail. As with previous results presentations, the key driver of growth has been organic tenancy growth. You will see a decrease in power-related revenues this quarter, and that's largely due to lower fuel prices in DRC and Tanzania, which we pass on to our customers, while also seeing a corresponding decrease in our power operating expenses, hedging us well from an overall dollar perspective.

Overall, the escalator movements for power and CPI have washed through to negligible EBITDA impact despite lower power prices and inflation/FX moves. In short, the key driver of growth is through organic tenancy growth and operational leverage from lease-up, and we demonstrated again that the business structure continues to be robust and resilient and operating as designed.

Moving on to Slide 16. For the first half, we incurred total CapEx of $54 million, of which $16 million was nondiscretionary. Now CapEx can be lumpy and we continue to guide for the full year of $150 million to $180 million. We have our orders out for the remaining CapEx and consequently we'll see a higher level of CapEx in H2. But this is all good capital investments going into strong returning new builds, colocations and OpEx initiatives, and we have a busy rest of the year, which is very, very positive.

On to Slide 17, looking at our balance sheet and credit profile. We've seen continued improvement in our credit ratings with Fitch and S&P upgrading us to BB- and Moody's upgrading their outlook to positive. All of this reflects the work we've done to drive free cash flow, which is now past the inflection point and accelerating, as well as deleveraging our business. Our net leverage decreased by 0.4x year-on-year to 3.8x, and we have approximately $425 million in available cash and undrawn debt facilities.

This morning, we were also delighted to make further improvements to our balance sheet, finalizing an update to some of our loans a few hours ago, which resulted in our cost of debt reducing to 6.9% from 7.2%, which is fantastic. As a reminder, 92% of our debt continues to be at fixed rates following our bond refinance in 2024. We have no near-term maturities until 2027. And given we are free cash flow generative, this all puts us in a strong position, and we have the firepower we need to deliver on all of our targets.

On to Slide 18, looking at our recurring and bottom line free cash flow. Our 2.2 strategy supports high fall-through from adjusted EBITDA to recurring free cash flow, with $19 million year-on-year increase in our H1 EBITDA going directly to an increase of $20 million to our recurring free cash flow. This resulted in recurring free cash flow increasing by 40% year-on-year to $70 million.

Recurring free cash flow is akin to AFFO and is the cash generated from operations that management can allocate towards discretionary CapEx, debt paydowns and shareholder distributions. Bottom line free cash flow for H1 increased by $40 million year-on-year to $30 million, principally driven by adjusted EBITDA expansion and the timing of discretionary CapEx.

Following the inflection of free cash flow last year, we're really seeing now this tick on, and we expect to hit our target of $40 million to $60 million by year-end. And this takes us to Slide 19, where we reaffirm our guidance for 2025. Our target of 2,000 to 2,500 tenancies for the year remains as we continue to progress towards our 2.2 strategy.

For adjusted EBITDA, we reaffirm our target range of $460 million to $470 million. CapEx target remains between $150 million to $180 million, of which $100 million to $130 million is discretionary and $50 million is nondiscretionary. And as I said, free cash flow we expect to be between $40 million and $60 million, which, as a reminder, is more than double our 2024 levels. Finally, we expect to end 2025 at circa 3.5 net leverage.

In summary, we've delivered a strong first half performance. We are exactly where we want to be heading into a busy second half of the year. And with that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.

Thanks very much, Manjit. I'm on Page 20 now. So key takeaways. Of course, we've got strong momentum towards our 2.2 tenancy ratio target. And this is all driving the financial metrics, the P&L growth, and the free cash flow, and the ROIC, and of course, the deleveraging that's happening as well. 2025 guidance reaffirm we're very confident of continuing the delivery as we move into the next half of this year and really excited about the Capital Markets Day that's happening on November 6 here in London, where we'll talk about the next 5 years and beyond and update our capital allocation framework.

So with that, I'll hand back to Sami, and we'll do the questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Wright from Bank of America.

It's always quite tricky, isn't it? You've announced a CMD in a few months' time, and I'm sure you want to keep your powder dry, so to speak. But I think the one thing that really strikes us from these numbers and your successive delivery, very clean delivery on the back of your significant M&A is obviously how well practiced you are at integrating businesses, growing businesses thereafter.

So I guess as you sort of come to your CMD, one of the discussions you must obviously be having is to what extent you want to continue any of these sort of expansion projects or move more towards a sort of fixed geography and just continue to drive the business organically. I just wondered if you could give us any sort of early commentary around footprint, whether you're feeling more comfortable now and it would be sort of very small bolt-ons or you never really tempted to kind of go again given how well it's gone so far. Sorry if that's a slightly roundabout question. I appreciate that you might not be able to give answers just yet, but worth a try.

Thanks, David. I really appreciate the question. Look, I mean, ultimately, as always, it comes down to our capital allocation framework and where the return is best found, where the capital is best deployed. The priority order that we've laid out over the past several quarters very much continues. So that is #1, organic growth, expanding in the markets we're in, supporting our customers grow their networks in the markets we're in, and that provides the highest level of returns that we see today.

#2 is the continued cash flow generation and deleveraging, which we're very much on track on. #3 is the potential shareholder remuneration. And #4 remains today M&A. And that remains under review. But certainly for the foreseeable, I see the current status continuing. We've got great organic demand. There's a lot going on in our markets in terms of network expansion, network densification, technology upgrades. We've barely seen the effects of 5G yet across most of our footprint, which is a significant investment required in terms of rollout. So that's all very exciting. But we'll always continue to review this and be agile. But that's how we see the lay of the land today and for the foreseeable.

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

It's certainly something that is being discussed generally in the industry. There are potentially certain circumstances where mobile operators and tower cos alike see the logic of the telco or the neutral host infrastructure player doing it. It's something that we're constantly assessing. But so far, we haven't found the right opportunity for us. We very much see our core business of passive infrastructure, colocations build-to-suit, we very much see large demand for that at the moment and for the foreseeable over the next 5 years and beyond.

So we're focusing on core, which is our USP and which what delivers, as far as we can see it, the best in terms of return and long-term cash flow compounding. So we'll continue on that, but we'll always consider other products and other options to the extent they make logical sense for us and our customers.

Our next question comes from Graham Hunt from Jefferies.

I've got a couple of questions. First one, Tom, I just wanted to come back to your comments about the 15 years you spent at the company and saying that the growth outlook for the next decade or so is at least similar to the growth you've -- Helios has experienced. But I want to get you to comment on how you see the risk outlook because if you went back to when you started at the company or when the company started, I can't imagine even then you would have predicted the exceptional predictability of growth in the business. But today, when you look forward, do you think that the market is in a more mature, more predictable, lower-risk condition than perhaps a decade ago on top of that growth outlook that you're seeing?

Second question really was just a kind of update on what you're hearing from your customers at the moment. From their public comments, it sounds like the second half of the year or the year has been going very well from a growth perspective. It just would be good to get your take on what they're saying to you in terms of their plans for your key customers.

Yes. Thanks, Graham. Very interesting question, the first one. I think if you -- if we look back over the past 10 years, there's been significant global surprises, global shocks. We've had COVID. We've had inflation write down and then write up, and the rates followed. We've had various other macro shocks, oil prices going down to almost 0, then up over $100 and everything in between. So I think there's been -- and of course, currency movements through that time as well.

So there's been a lot of big macroeconomic type events or shocks over the past 10 years. And what's been very clear from Helios Towers' standpoint is our business model is very resilient. Our teams and our operational capabilities are very resilient. And therefore, we've delivered consistent growth through that time. And the chart in the presentation shows going all the way back to 2015 where we had EBITDA of $54 million. And we've grown that hugely over that time through all of those shocks, both up and down.

So what that tells me and why I'm so confident about the next 5 years and beyond is we know the demand is there. We're experiencing global megatrends at the moment, particularly across Africa and Middle East, the population growth, the telecom subscriber growth, the data consumption growth. All of that -- and the technology generation upgrades as well. All of that means that the telecoms infrastructure needs to expand, needs to develop, needs to densify over the coming years.

And it's our job to play a role in that within the industry with our key customers to ensure that we're keeping up with that demand because the mobile subscribers are demanding it. There's more and more data usage happening by the day, by the week in our markets at the moment. The price of smartphones keeps coming down. So more and more people have 4G-enabled smartphones. That's going to happen to 5G over the next couple of years as well.

And so we've got a huge responsibility to provide those levels of service and make sure that the networks don't become congested so that millions of people today and millions more people in the future can have good quality mobile service. So that's what we're focused on, and that will very much continue for the next 5 years and beyond.

And then the next part of that question is what we're hearing from our customers. We're seeing lots of activity. We're seeing investment in new coverage areas. We're seeing investment in capacity because networks are getting congested because of this data boom that's going on right now. And we're seeing technology upgrades. I think the big push over the past year or 2 in quite a lot of our markets has been 4G. The 4G is now a fairly common technology, particularly if you go to any of the large cities in our markets, it's pretty much all 4G and some are now starting 5G as well. 5G is in early stage.

But now we're planning for more 4G proliferation and starting the 5G as well, which has been a big significant rollout globally over the past few years, which you've seen in other markets. And now that's kind of coming into our markets now over the next few years. So we're expecting to be very busy, not just for the rest of this year, but for the coming 5 years and beyond. And we've already got a good pipeline building for next year as it stands.

Our next question comes from John Karidis, Deutsche Bank.

I've got 3 questions. I guess the first one is for Tom, the other 2 for Manjit.

So Tom, you noted that spending on organic growth provides the highest return on investment. I don't know whether at this stage, you can say what you think about how this return compares with buying your stock in at current levels and canceling it, given the sort of huge growth runway that you've cited.

For Manjit, please, Manjit, ROIC for established markets versus the new markets, what were those numbers? And how have they changed year-on-year? And then secondly, for Manjit, you've had 9% EBITDA growth in the first quarter, 10% in the second quarter. I don't really know what efficiency projects are going on internally, but help us assess how achievable the top end of your EBITDA guidance is, which implies 12% year-on-year growth for the full year.

Yes. Thanks very much, John. I'll take the first one, which was around the organic growth compared with buybacks. So we'll be talking a lot more about this in November. So I'll keep it for them. But suffice to say, whenever any dollar is invested at Helios Towers, be that for organic colocations, organic build-to-suits, power investment projects, other forms of efficiency, CapEx gains that we look at, versus other types of transactions, more capital in nature, suffice to say it's all about what provides the best returns for the business and therefore, for investors. So we'll talk more about that in November, John.

And Manjit, over to you.

Yes, sure. So John, I'd say there's actually been no material change that we've seen over the last couple of quarters for the returns, how they look established versus new. So really for the established, we're looking at high double digits, so nearing on close to the 20% mark, which again correlates to the fact that those more established markets have had longer periods of time as part of the group and as Tom showed earlier, have a higher lease-up.

So given the fact that you've got markets like DRC and Tanzania that are over 2x tenancy ratio, that will be a big driver of that return. Whereas your newer markets, the majority of those are still below a 2x tenancy ratio and therefore, have return on invested capital is nearing up to kind of high-single digits. But we see that as being something that will accelerate over time as well. So as those new markets have a bit more time and continue to lease up at the rates that we've seen historically.

So on the acquired portfolio itself, about 0.1x on the ones that we're building and then filling a multiple of that, so 0.4x really over the last couple of vintages. We'll see that really start to kind of catch up with the kind of more established markets. And again, this will be something that we'll present at the Capital Markets Day too and the road map for those. But in general, the combination of both those, the established and the new markets kind of coming together is really what's going to drive the group return on invested capital hitting 14% and then increasing by 0.5% to 1% per annum there afterwards.

From a perspective of how we're trending towards the full year numbers, I'd say again, as I kind of mentioned, we are exactly where we want to be. In terms of the acceleration in the second half of the year, we have a lot of rollout that's coming. And so consequently, we do expect ourselves to see some upside coming through.

One of the things that we have seen historically as well is that sometimes the first half of the year, although maybe not last year, can be a bit slower. But actually, we've seen a pretty good cadence in terms of rollout. And with some initiatives that we're doing such as solar and battery deployment in some of the markets, we'll also start to see that coming through the numbers as well. So consequently, I do think that there's probably a good road map towards hitting the top end of our consensus numbers. So that's why we held it steady for the moment, but we're obviously going towards the high end of that.

Our next question comes from Rohit Modi from Citi.

Most of them have been answered. I have just one follow-up basically on the addition of new services. And we have seen a lot of telcos in Africa are now focusing on investing into data centers. Is that something that also attracts Helios or makes sense for Helios to invest in?

Rohit, thanks very much for the question. I'll take that. I think going back to what I mentioned earlier around how we're focusing on our core business, that very much applies here as well. So we see the runway ahead for our core infrastructure and services of colos, build-to-suits, technology upgrades and amendments as very strong. We see that that's our core operational expertise. And we have our teams really set up and firing on all cylinders in driving that forward.

So that's really the vast majority of our road map ahead. Of course, we do look at other services and other forms of infrastructure. But we see the core business for Helios Towers as towers and colos. We see that with the highest quality of contract and customer, and that's our core area of expertise. So that's very much what we're focusing on at the moment and expect that that's the case as we move forward into our new strategy.

If I can ask one more question actually. Looking at the tenancy additions and Oman is now moderating or saturating, which are the other markets -- given you have similar kind of expectations for the second half, which are the markets where you think majority of the tenancy growth that's coming from?

Yes. We've got a strong pipeline for the second half. And in fact, the pipeline is growing for 2026 now as well. All markets have tenancy pipeline and we're seeing a lot of activity from multiple customers as well, not just like 1 or 2. So I would describe it as a healthy environment right now, good demand, good investment coming through across the board. And we're really excited about delivering on that as we move into the second half of this year and into next year.

So I wouldn't pull out one individual market as being standout on that. I think what we're seeing is actually pretty healthy demand across the board, and we'll see tenancy growth all over the business as we move into the second half.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Stella Cridge from Barclays.

I wondered if I could ask in 2 areas. So on this topic of performance by geography, I was seeing in the country breakdown of the EBITDA year-on-year, which you provide on an interim basis, that there was quite a bit of EBITDA growth from markets outside of your 3 core markets. So I was just wondering if you could talk about which were the countries that made the biggest contributions to that growth, perhaps year-on-year if we look on it that way.

And the second one, I was just wondering, Manjit, if you could just provide a little bit more information on these amendments to the loan instruments that you just achieved. So what loans are you referring to? And how did you manage to reduce interest cost? And was there any changes in maturity profile or anything like that as well? That would be great.

Sure. Thanks, Stella. I can take those. So just I'll start on the loan one. So on the loan piece, we can't give too many details out, but effectively we've been able to renegotiate with our existing lender group for one of our term loan facilities to reduce the cost of debt. It's something that we'd actually raised a couple of years ago. So we were able to look at efficiencies, particularly in terms of the rates given the macro has improved, and we were able to lock that in this morning.

A couple of kind of minor amendments just to terminology. But outside of that, the covenant package is identical, which is already quite favorable. And in terms of the tenure, that's remained the same as well. So really, it was quite a quick amendment once we got it all negotiated. So I think, frankly, it's a really good deal for us and something that I think gives us incremental kind of upside as we go through the coming years.

I do think there's also put to one side, any kind of macro adjustments that might happen over the kind of the short to medium term, but we do think there might be some other potential possibilities of looking at the debt package as well. So we'll continue to keep ourselves nimble to any opportunities that come about. But I think for now, we've got a very, very good financial package and something that gives us the flexibility that we need to hit on all of our targets that we have over the short to medium term.

Then in terms of kind of market growth, we don't give kind of market-by-market kind of guidance. We do it on the broad-based kind of functional areas. But what I would say is that each one of those particular areas has shown pretty good levels of growth, and it kind of aligns with what Tom was previously mentioning. I think what we're seeing is really that the markets like Tanzania and DRC, which are 2 of our biggest, continue to have huge amounts of growth coming through, a lot of opportunities in those markets as well.

But they're actually now really being supplemented by Oman last year with the rollout of Vodafone, and we're seeing that kind of come through the numbers as well. But really, on top of that, we're seeing some of our newer markets, markets like Madagascar, for example, and Malawi, really coming through as well. So I think, frankly, there's kind of pro rata growth across the markets. There's not really any others that would kind of hold out as differentiators. But each element of the business is kind of holding its position. So in that regard, that's where we're seeing the growth coming through.

And finally, the final point is that's also why you see our hard currency percentages kind of staying the same because each market is growing in a pro rata manner. It had increased a little bit last year because of the Oman growth, which is a hard currency market. But in general, that's all holding firm. So yes, feeling very positive about our position.

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

Yes, it's a very good question and certainly something that we're starting to think about. Just to remind again on the convertible bonds, we raised that a number of years ago, about 2020, and that was really to help finance some of the new markets. The idea being that you can get what was at the time, very, very attractive pricing at sub-3%, 2.875% cash cost, to help support the new markets. And if it were to convert, that's fine because you've got the equity upside of the new markets. And if it doesn't convert, you've had cheap financing. So that was the kind of simple scenario around why we raised it.

Going forward, as we look at 2027, we want to try and sit that debt for a prolonged period of time because it is quite good financing for us as a business. We do have a number of options available. I wouldn't say we've got necessarily a base case. It really does depend on how the environment is looking at the time. But certainly, we could do another convertible and refinance with the convertible, we might chunk it down into doing a little bit of high yield and a little bit of the convertible.

The positive, I think, is that we have a number of options available to ourselves with that particular refi, but we're keeping our eye on it, but I wouldn't say expect anything too soon on that. But really, really, we do keep our options open there.

We currently have no further questions. So I'd now like to hand back to Tom for some closing remarks.

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

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