Helios Towers Stock

Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to the Helios Towers H1 2026 Earnings Call. I hope you and your families are doing well, and thank you very much for being here with us today.

Today, we're going to cover two topics. Firstly, our H1 earnings and outlook, where we've delivered another very strong performance, operational and financial performance. This has been driven by record tenancy growth, disciplined capital allocation, and operational excellence across the business.

Secondly, we'll spend some time looking beyond today's earnings at the 15-year organic total addressable market through to 2040, which is one of the most important aspects of the Helios Towers investment case: the long-term structural growth opportunity across Africa and the Middle East for mobile infrastructure.

Over the past few years, we've talked extensively about the strength of current demand.

Today, we'd like to take a step back and examine what the next 15 years looks like, how mobile networks will need to evolve to support rapidly increasing data consumption, and why this creates decades of opportunity for tower infrastructure.

This deep dive covers one of the key pillars of our investment thesis, and we expect to cover more of these pillars in similar deep dives from time to time going forward.

So with that, let's move on.

I'll begin with the H1 highlights. Manjit will take you through the financial details. Then I'll return to introduce our multi-decade growth runway before handing over to Marcus and Alan, who will explain how networks need to evolve to meet future data demand, including the future architecture of terrestrial networks and how satellites fit into that picture.

Sunesh will then bring it back to the commercial opportunity across Africa and the Middle East before we conclude with Q&A.

Before we move to the H1 performance, I wanted to briefly frame today's presentation around the four components of the Helios Towers investment thesis.

First, we operate in markets with a multi-decade structural growth opportunity.

Second, we've built a world-class operating platform and team with leading positions across high-growth markets and a strong track record of delivery.

Third, we have a robust business model underpinned by long-term contracts with top-tier customers and inflation and power-price protections.

And fourth, we have a disciplined and flexible capital allocation framework, enabling us to invest in high-return growth capex, strengthen the balance sheet, and increasingly return capital to shareholders.

Today's earnings demonstrate the strength of each of these elements coming through. In the second half, we'll show why the long-term growth opportunity extends well beyond the current Impact 2030 period.

Turning now to the first-half highlights, there are four key messages I'd like you to take away from this slide. First, our customer demand continues to accelerate.

We delivered a record of more than 2,500 new tenancy additions in the first half alone, including over 500 new sites. This drove a further 0.2x increase in our tenancy ratio year-on-year, taking it to 2.3 tenants per site today.

Our customer order pipeline also continues to strengthen, with demand already building for 2027. This reflects accelerating investment by our customers as they add coverage, capacity, and new technologies to their networks to satisfy growing end-user demand.

Second, this demand is translating directly into strong financial performance, with EBITDA increasing 14% year-on-year, recurring free cash flow increasing 52%, and ROIC increasing by a further 0.8 percentage points, demonstrating both the quality of the opportunities we're investing in and the discipline with which we are deploying our capital.

Third, our capital structure continues to improve. Leverage reduced by 0.4x year-on-year to 3.4x, and we completed $34 million of share buybacks so far this year. We have now returned $58 million cumulatively through buybacks since the program was launched last November.

Today, we're also announcing our inaugural interim dividend of 0.6 pence per share, equivalent to $8 million, with a $25 million dividend expected in total for FY'26.

This is another important milestone as we continue executing our Impact 2030 capital allocation framework, combining growth investments, balance sheet improvement, and increasing shareholder distributions.

Finally, given the strength of customer demand, we're once again upgrading our guidance for this year.

We now expect between 3,500 and 4,000 new tenancy additions while increasing EBITDA guidance between $520 million and $535 million, re-increasing recurring free cash flow to between $220 million and $235 million, and then increasing discretionary capex of $215 million to $245 million to support the additional growth opportunities we're seeing.

Importantly, our planned $76 million of shareholder distributions remain unchanged at the same time that we're accelerating our growth investment.

Stepping back from this, perhaps the most important point is that none of this is being driven by one-off events. It reflects structural demand from customers investing to meet rapidly increasing subscriber numbers and mobile data consumption across our markets.

That growth, of course, is underpinned by a record $5.9 billion of contracted future revenues, with an average remaining initial contract life of 6.5 years.

One of the characteristics that has defined Helios Towers over the past decade is consistency. In 2015, our EBITDA was around $50 million. Since then, we've grown it by approximately 10x, to more than $0.5 billion today.

We've achieved this through multiple periods of global volatility, including oil price shocks, Brexit, the U.S.-China trade dispute, COVID-19, global inflation, rising interest rates, tariffs, and, more recently, geopolitical conflict.

Throughout that period, however, one thing has remained constant. Mobile connectivity has become increasingly essential to consumers, businesses, and governments. And as connectivity has become more important, demand for mobile infrastructure has continued to grow.

But market demand alone does not create value. It is our operational excellence, our capability to deliver consistently across our markets, combined with our disciplined capital allocation framework, that enables us to turn that demand into growth for our customers, improved connectivity for the communities we serve, and returns and growth for our investors.

We've built strong local operating platforms with great people, digital processes, supply chains and technical capability required to deploy infrastructure at scale and then operate it reliably over the long term.

So that combination of structural demand and operational excellence has delivered more than 10 consecutive years of EBITDA growth. And today's upgraded guidance continues that trend.

Before handing over to Manjit, I wanted to briefly remind everyone of the framework we've been following since launching Impact 2030 last November.

Our approach to capital allocation is simple. Our first priority is investing in high-return organic growth opportunities. We expect to deploy more than $500 million in organic growth CapEx over the Impact 2030 period.

And these investments are capital efficient, accretive to ROIC, and continue to generate incremental returns above 30%. That investment supports our target of more than 9% EBITDA compound annual growth between 2025 and 2030.

Second, we continue to strengthen the balance sheet. Leverage has a clear downward trajectory, and we intend to operate within our target range of 2.5 to 3.5x. A stronger balance sheet increases resilience and gives us the flexibility to continue investing when attractive growth opportunities arise.

Finally, as cash generation continues to grow, we're returning increasing amounts of capital to shareholders through a combination of buybacks and a growing dividend.

Our target remains to deliver more than $400 million of shareholder distributions through to 2030. The important point here is that these priorities are mutually reinforcing.

Strong operating cash generation enables us to continue investing for growth while simultaneously strengthening the balance sheet and increasing our shareholder returns.

So that is the cash compounding sweet spot at the heart of Impact 2030.

And I'll now hand over to Manjit, who will take you through the financials in more detail.

Thanks, Tom, and hello, everyone. It's great to be with you here today. And moving on to Slide #9. I'll be going through the financial results in a bit more detail.

We are really pleased with the strong set of financial results we put out today, where we've taken the strong momentum from Q1 into Q2. And it's that momentum that continues to build our robust pipeline and has allowed us to upgrade our full year guidance today by a further 500 tenancies.

That means we're now targeting a record of 3,500 to 4,000 tenancy additions for FY '26. Last year, when we delivered organic tenancies of 2,538, that was a record for the company, and we broadly hit that number already at the half-year.

So we're on course for a very strong year for growth and investments. I'll extend a big thank you to our committed and talented colleagues and partners who are working in the field right now and rolling out for our customers as we speak.

Now later in the presentation, we'll be doing a deep dive into the multi-decade growth runway. But in short, the combination of population growth and lower smartphone costs is driving phenomenal data growth, which is driving demand for mobile and therefore, demand for mobile infrastructure.

And we are seeing that demand and printing results that echo that consistently in our numbers now for many years. The tenancy increase of 500 upgraded targets will be split evenly between 250 new sites and 250 colocations.

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.

As such, adjusted EBITDA has been upgraded to $520 million to $535 million. It's worth noting that the 500 tenancies will be expected to deliver over $10 million of annualized EBITDA, which we'll see come through fully in 2027 and onwards.

We've also upgraded our recurring free cash flow to GBP 220 million to GBP 235 million, which is previously GBP 215 million to GBP 230 million, again, with GBP 5 million in-year impact and over GBP 10 million of 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 give fantastic cash compounding returns and really drive the business forward.

So we're really very pleased to be up-tickling guidance again today is really a testament to the market growth we're seeing and demonstrates the confidence we have in our pipeline for the remainder of the year, which will set a fantastic foundation for achieving our overall 2030 targets.

Now to jump into the H1 results. On this slide, we set out our tenancy metrics.

The graph on the left-hand side shows the growth we have achieved in our total sites, increasing by 5% with 755 new sites added year-on-year, of which 524 were in the first half of the year.

We've achieved record tenancy additions with 3,838 added year-on-year, with 2,511 of those in the first 6 months of the year, with DRC, Tanzania and Oman once again showing strong growth.

Given our sites and tenancy additions, our tenancy ratio has increased to 2.3%, with particularly fast lease-up in DRC, Congo B, South Africa and Tanzania.

Now moving to Slide 11, and you can see how the growth in tenancies has really translated into strong revenue performance, increasing 11% year-on-year to GBP 237 million.

Our hard currency profile remains strong; 69% of revenue and 71% of adjusted EBITDA are in hard currency. Our markets are inherently hard currency: DRC is dollarized, Oman is dollar-pegged, and Senegal and Congo Grazeville are both pegged to the euro.

In our remaining markets, we also have a portion of revenues linked to U.S. dollars, adding further to the overall mix. Our earnings are further protected by contractual protections, including power and CPI escalators, with CPI escalators typically escalating in Q1 and power price escalators, which go up or down depending on local pricing, and these escalate either quarterly or annually depending on the contract.

Around 70% of our revenue comes from investment-grade customers, and all revenue comes from blue-chip mobile network operators. Our customer contracts typically have an initial term of 10 to 15 years and are largely non-cancelable.

And today, our contracted revenue of $5.9 billion has an average remaining life of 6.5 years, which excludes auto renewals, which would increase this further.

Ultimately, we have secured a minimum revenue stream of $5.9 billion without pursuing any new business, providing a strong underlying earnings stream that we layer the growth driven by incremental tenancies on top.

Now on Slide 12. This illustrates the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth in a bit more detail. Now many of you will recognize this analysis, and consistent with previous quarters, tenancy additions remain the principal growth driver, while our escalators help to offset macro movements and protect U.S. dollar earnings.

Tenancy additions contributed 7 percentage points of the 11% revenue growth, with CPI escalators and FX contributing the balance.

At the EBITDA level, tenancy additions contributed 12 percentage points to the overall 13% growth as CPI and power price-related movements largely offset the corresponding revenue increase.

In a few slides, we'll walk through the total addressable market out to 2040. And I'd encourage you to keep this analysis in mind because the opportunity becomes even more compelling in that context.

We've already demonstrated that the business can consistently convert tenancy growth into U.S. dollar revenue growth and attractive U.S. dollar returns.

What will then show is that the underlying market provides a multi-decade runway for tenancy growth. Importantly, this extends the duration of the proven value creation engine, reinforcing the opportunity for sustained long-term U.S. dollar returns, which is ultimately what we find so compelling about the business.

Turning to Slide 13, disciplined capital allocation remains central to Impact 2030. As set out in the Capital Markets Day, our priority is high-returning organic investments, i.e., colocations, OpEx initiatives and selective new builds.

These investments deliver blended returns of more than 30% on invested capital, and we will continue to allocate capital where returns are the most attractive.

Our overall CapEx for H1 was GBP 115 million, with discretionary CapEx being GBP 102 million, which resulted in an additional 2,511 tenancies.

The continuing strength of this demand and its carry-through into our pipeline means we've upgraded our guidance by GBP 35 million to reflect the additional 500 tenancies.

Nondiscretionary CapEx remains unchanged at GBP 50 million, as do planned shareholder distributions of GBP 76 million for the year.

Now the revised discretionary CapEx range of GBP 215 million to GBP 245 million represents a meaningful portion of our IMPACT 2030 guidance of GBP 500 million plus to be spent on discretionary growth investments.

This reflects the strength of customer demand and the opportunity to reinvest now in high-returning sites and tenancies.

At the CMD, we kept over $400 million of our cumulative $1.3 billion of recurring free cash flow unallocated. This gives us the flexibility to capitalize on growth opportunities when they land, which supports, in turn, higher recurring free cash flow generation in the future.

All of this while continuing the shareholder distributions already announced.

Now we're only 2 quarters into a 5-year Impact 2030 program. So for now, we are not upgrading the broader targets, but we are extremely encouraged by the performance to date, and we'll continue to monitor our medium-term trajectory and provide updates as we get better visibility.

On to Slide 14, which demonstrates that despite the ongoing global volatility, we have continued to strengthen both our balance sheet and our debt maturity profile.

Through proactive balance sheet management, we have reduced our blended cost of debt to 6.7% while maintaining an average debt maturity of approximately 4 years.

In addition, we've recently secured a $250 million term loan, which remains undrawn and provides us with flexibility to manage the potential maturity of the convertible bond in March 2027.

Following these transactions, we now have more than $500 million of available liquidity through cash on balance sheet and undrawn debt facilities.

Our net leverage also continues to decline, reduced by 0.4x year-on-year to 3.4x. Overall, this provides us with a strong financial platform from which to execute our medium-term strategy, which takes us on to Slide 15 and a quick reminder of our upgraded full year 2026 guidance.

We delivered record site in tenancy growth in H1, and the strength of demand across our markets gives us confidence to upgrade once again.

We now expect 3,500 to 4,000 tenancy additions, representing 10% to 12% year-on-year growth. Adjusted EBITDA is now $520 million to $535 million, representing 10% to 13% year-on-year growth.

Recurring free cash flow guidance is now $220 million to $235 million, representing 6% to 11% year-on-year growth, and discretionary CapEx guidance increased to $215 million to $245 million to fund the additional organic growth.

We're also progressing with shareholder distributions as planned.

We've invested $58 million through the buyback program since it began last year. And today, we're also announcing our inaugural interim dividend of $8 million, which reflects the intended 1/3, 2/3 phasing with the final dividend in respect of FY '26 expected to be paid in H1 2027, subject to the usual approvals.

Overall, this is a very strong start to Impact 2030. We're converting structural mobile demand into tenancy growth, cash generation and attractive compounding returns while maintaining balance sheet discipline.

And with that, we'll now do a deep dive on the multi-decade runway and why we feel incredibly excited and confident about our markets and our future growth opportunities within them. Tom, back to you.

Thanks very much, Manjit. So now for the second half of our presentation, which moves into the deep dive, and this is a really key strategic discussion for investors today.

We often receive questions around how long the growth opportunity for telecom towers in Africa and the Middle East will continue. Well, the answer in our view is decades, and we'll lay out why here.

We also received another frequent question from investors around how satellites will play a role in mobile networks of the future. And rather than discussing these topics only at a high level, we've examined the underlying physics, the engineering, and the market dynamics that will shape mobile networks for the coming decades.

Look, the conclusion is clear. Data demand is set to grow significantly. The overwhelming majority of that demand will continue to be carried through terrestrial networks, and satellite technology will play an important and complementary role in expanding that coverage, that connectivity.

So there are really 3 conclusions from this. First, mobile data demand is still at the early stages of its growth journey. Data consumption in our markets has increased by 6x over the past 5 years. And this is really what we're seeing in the business on the ground today, with record tenancy rollout in each of the past 3 years and expecting a fourth record year this year, as we've guided to, all in support of the data consumption demand growth.

Forecasts show that data consumption will increase by a further 12x by 2040, well ahead of the 7x increase expected globally.

Second, the overwhelming majority of that demand will continue to be served by terrestrial networks, with 97% of all data demand to be carried by terrestrial infrastructure in 2040.

Supporting that volume of traffic will require sustained investment in denser networks, greater capacity and successive generations of mobile technology.

This obviously underpins the long-term investment thesis of Helios Towers and provides growth opportunities for decades ahead. And third, satellite technology should be viewed as complementary to terrestrial.

Satellites will extend coverage into locations that have previously been uneconomic, impractical or impossible to connect. And they're also opening up new locations where terrestrial sites can now be built using satellite backhaul. And these locations were not previously possible for cell towers.

Later in the presentation, we'll actually show you a live example from Madagascar, where this is already happening today. So satellite extends the reach of the overall communications ecosystem, while terrestrial networks continue to provide the capacity to serve large numbers of users.

Bringing these factors together, we estimate that the total addressable organic market for our 9 markets is approximately 72,000 additional tenancies by 2040. Now that is around twice the size of the Helios Towers footprint today.

The reason for this long-term growth opportunity starts with the demographics. Africa and the Middle East are expected to see decades of outsized population and mobile growth relative to the rest of the world.

Here, you see that between 2025 and 2040, the population of Africa and the Middle East is expected to grow by around 600 million people. That represents growth of around 33% compared with 5% across the rest of the world.

Unique mobile subscribers, so people getting phones for the first time, are expected to increase by around 800 million across the region, growth of 43% compared to 12% elsewhere. And smartphone devices are expected to increase by approximately 1 billion across the region, which is a growth of 80% compared with just 20% across the rest of the world.

So these numbers are clearly very significant. Quite simply, more people, more mobile subscribers and greater smartphone adoption will drive the increasing demand for digital services.

As more people use more data-intensive services, operators will continue to have attractive investing opportunities for new subscribers and increased data, adding to the coverage and capacity requirements of the networks.

This creates a powerful and sustained demand environment for shared mobile infrastructure as well as the whole mobile industry at large.

Ultimately, as I've said, everything comes back to one number: it's data consumption. Data is the currency of our industry. And globally, total data consumption is expected to increase by around 7x by 2040.

Across the Helios Powers market, data consumption is expected to increase by around twice over that same period. So our markets are expected to grow at almost twice the global rate, and that's an extraordinary level of demand growth. And it's being driven by a number of structural factors working together.

As I said, population is increasing, mobile penetration is rising, and smartphones are becoming more affordable. Users are migrating from 2G and 3G towards 4G and 5G and over time, 6G.

Customers are more and more using mobile networks for video, social media, financial services, education, commerce, and health care.

The list goes on, and AI-enabled applications are increasingly as well. And therefore, the key question is not whether demand exists. The key question is how networks evolve to support it. And that's exactly what this next section addresses.

So let me briefly introduce the 3 colleagues who will take us through the next section. Marcus Weldon is our Senior Technical Adviser at Helios Towers and the former President of Nokia Bell Labs, one of the world's leading innovation institutions.

Marcus will set out how future networks need to evolve, including the role of spectrum, network density, satellite and AI. Allan Fairbairn is our Chief Technology and Digital Officer and the Executive Director of PRC.

Allan brings deep operational experience across Africa and the Middle East and will translate the technology into the practical infrastructure required to deliver it.

Sainesh Vallabh is our Chief Commercial Officer, with more than 2 decades of experience across African telecoms. Sunesh will bring the discussion back to the customer demand, the market growth and the commercial opportunity for Helios Towers.

So they'll take us through the underlying technology, the infrastructure required, and right through to the customer and growth opportunity. So Marcus, over to you.

Thanks, Tom. It's really a pleasure to be here. And my role at Bell Labs, that famous institution, was understanding the fundamental limits of technology and where they apply and therefore, how networks would evolve and what innovations were required to drive that evolution.

So I'm going to share some of that with you today. And yes, you're going to get a live demo of satellite and terrestrial technologies. You can't believe it, but it's true. So wait for that.

So I thought I would start with what you all want to understand, which is the propagation of the electromagnetic spectrum. You are all here to understand that today, and you're going to understand it very shortly.

So the figure on the left here is the electromagnetic spectrum across the entire spectrum. And I want you to focus in on the part called cellular, and then I'll talk also about microwave and satellite.

Cellular spectrum is actually quite a narrow band. It's about 1 gigahertz wide, and that has to be shared between many different technologies. You see them advertised there. And it's narrow because it has unique propagation characteristics.

We'd like it to be much wider, but it actually has to propagate through the Earth's atmosphere. It has to deal with cluttered environments, meaning buildings and objects and trees, has to be received by the small antenna in your phone, and it has to have enough capacity to provide all the data you need.

And meeting all those criteria is just in that narrow band. So keep that in mind: it's a narrow band, and it's priceless. Above that is a slightly higher frequency microwave and satellite band.

It's wider bandwidth, so that's attractive. Bandwidth means capacity, but it's actually much harder to propagate. What you see from the criteria is that it actually gets absorbed by the air.

It gets absorbed by the air; it gets scattered by buildings. It actually can't be transmitted indoors. So it's a much harder propagation environment.

So it's really complementary. I think of cellular as primary spectrum and satellite and microwave as secondary spectrum. But what you're beginning to see is they start overlapping, and that's what you've seen in the media.

But there's a question about what's the role of satellite-type spectrum versus cellular-type spectrum, and I'm going to address that today. All right. So let's do that a little bit. And here we go. This is a terrestrial network today. It actually is a series of technologies.

The lowest frequency spectrum in that cellular band is actually the best propagating. But it's the narrowest bandwidth. Generally, spectrum as you go up in bandwidth has more bandwidth available.

So you start here, and you can think of these as the technology generations: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. So low frequency was the best at propagating. That was the original mobile network.

As you go through the generations, you go to higher frequencies, but they don't propagate as far. You can see the cell radii. So it becomes more challenging, but you get more capacity.

It's a case where if you don't get something, but nothing, you get that capacity, but a smaller cell radius, which means towers have to come closer together. It's something that Allan is going to talk about.

But now let's talk about the satellite part. Here's the satellite. It actually uses some of those same high frequencies that you're beginning to see in 5G, and you'll see even more in 6G. But it's much further away. And this is going to be the absolutely critical point and the point of my demo.

So using those same frequencies that are hard to propagate, but you put them much further away. And when you do that, that signal is going to attenuate massively, but it also spreads out because it's further away. I'm going to show you how beams spread out.

So although in a cellular network, you can keep it quite tightly focused at those high frequencies, in a satellite network, it's going to spread out. And you see a stated beamwidth there because satellites tend to be 300 kilometers to 2,000 or even 30,000 kilometers above the Earth.

If you're wondering what the terminology here is, LEO is low Earth orbit satellite. It's the type of satellite that gets deployed for communications networks, for example, by Starlink, 300 kilometers away.

By the time the beam has spread out, it's 8 kilometers of beamwidth on the Earth's surface compared to something much smaller for terrestrial networks.

So, in fact, the takeaway here is terrestrial networks use a combination of frequencies. Some give you lower capacity but very good coverage. Some give you higher capacity, less coverage.

Satellite doesn't have a problem with coverage because it makes very nice large spots, but has a capacity problem because the beam or the signal is so far away.

That's what I want to dive into now, and you're going to get the demo. Hopefully, you'll understand that there are intrinsic limitations of the two technologies, but they are inherently complementary.

So here we go. And you're going to see the live demo. So here's my torch. You see the torch creates a beam, and it has a beam angle. And that beam angle, no matter how much you try to focus it, will always spread. And that's because there's a diffraction limit, those of you who remember your physics and diffraction.

If you try to tightly focus a beam beyond a certain point, it actually becomes a broader beam, oddly enough. So there's a limit to how much you can focus a beam. And then when it goes forward, when it propagates, it gets wider and wider and wider.

So let's take the example of a satellite. So a satellite at 350 kilometers away from its origin- the satellite sits 350 kilometers above the Earth. By the time it's gone 350 kilometers, the beamwidth on the Earth's surface is 14 kilometers.

In fact, this is the published number in Starlink's IPO for typical beamwidth. They actually talk about 160 square kilometers of beam area.

Now, if we compare that to the 1-kilometer case, much more like a cellular network, think of turning that flashlight on its side and doing a cellular terrestrial network, much smaller beam areas on the order of kilometers.

So that fundamentally means-and again, I've not talked about anyone's technology or any particular operator-fundamentally means when you're that far away, because of the physics, you cannot focus the beam as much.

It's going to be a large beam covering a large area. Large areas, good coverage, but the capacity gets diluted because that capacity is shared over that entire area. When you've got a tight beam, that capacity is focused in that beam.

So time for the demo, you think? Okay. This is very high tech. We invested a lot of money, I think, in this. Yes, we did. So here it is. Here's the demo.

[Demonstration]

So here we go. This is a cellular network. You see, I'm very close to my subscriber. My subscriber is sitting here on the wall. Nice tight beam, high intensity. All that radio energy is in a very small area, and I get a very good signal. You see how bright and tight it is.

Now here's a satellite. It's just a fact of the propagation physics. It's a much wider beam area with all that intensity shared over all those subscribers.

So here, it's just this simple. And nothing here has to do with anyone's innovation or technologies. It's just the physics of propagation of any electromagnetic spectrum, cellular or satellite.

And all the energy from the bulb is shared over a much larger area here. And here, it's shared over a much smaller area. Area equals subscribers.

So here, the subscribers, smaller number with a much higher intensity signal. Here, larger potential number of subscribers, much lower intensity signal.

So the net effect is that they are entirely complementary technologies. And we thought we'd do a little demonstration here in terms of London.

So if we took a satellite service, the LEO service at about 350 kilometers away, and mapped it to London, you could have 14 of those large beams covering the area of London. That sounds fantastic.

Only 14 beams required. But the problem is all that spectral intensity is shared over those large beams. So it's spread out. That's the way to think about it.

So as a result, and by the way, beams cannot overlap because they would interfere, so you can't double up on the amount of capacity in those beams without using more spectrum; you'd have 14 beams trying to serve the 13 million people in London.

The net effect is, basically, at the numbers that Starlink says they could serve, which is sort of about 512 users, they say you could offer service within a given beam; you could serve actually 7,000 of the 13 million people in London could have a reasonable service, so fantastic, the privileged few.

On the other hand, if you look at the cellular network where we've created about 11,000 towers in the London footprint, each of those 13 million people could have that service because we've subdivided that spectrum into small little pockets.

Same amount of capacity, but over a much smaller area, so everyone gets a brilliant service. So you see that there's intrinsically no way that a satellite, because its footprint is so much larger than a terrestrial network, can actually compete with terrestrial.

What it does instead is complement terrestrial. As Tom said, two ways it complements terrestrial.

It goes beyond where terrestrial can get because you couldn't get to a certain site with a piece of fiber or with a microwave link. You can now use satellite for backhaul, and Allan is going to show you that.

The other thing it does is it can go direct-to-device using a limited amount of spectrum in those same areas using your cell phone because now the satellites use some of the cell phone frequencies, and that's why I said that the overlap is beginning to happen.

So you can use some of the cell phone frequencies to go direct-to-device, or you can use them to provide backhaul services, entirely complementary to what we see in our terrestrial network infrastructure.

And that's going to be the case into the future. Nothing will change because of what I've said.

Sorry, it's David from Bank of America. If we stood together and we had two torches far apart, we would get overlapping.

But my understanding is the V3 satellites. I really enjoyed your white paper. I felt it was a little bit V2-focused. Is that a reasonable critique?

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

So when V3 overlaps the actual signal, you can then get increased capacity because you can have multiple beams. It can coordinate the beams across users.

So is that a bit simplistic when we're thinking about V3 coming on?

The only way that can be true is if you use different spectrum in V3 than they're using in V2, which I think is part of their plan.

It's hard to know exactly what spectrum they're going to use in each of the generations. The only way you can overlap beams, obviously, is you can do beam steering a little bit, but then again, that's subdividing. Because now you're moving the beam to be a different subarea of the overall beam.

The only other way you can do it is to use different spectrum, which is why you see them talking about acquiring spectrum, et cetera. With more spectrum, yes.

But here's the limit. They can never own more spectrum going to your device than the terrestrial operators already own. That's because the terrestrial operators basically own everything available on the ground, and they have to use that same spectrum for a couple of reasons.

It's propagating in the same area, but it's also going to a device that's designed for terrestrial spectrum.

And in fact, you could say, "Okay, well, perhaps I could make this good for microwave spectrum." So we've talked about this. This then would become a backhaul mobile phone.

To receive satellite or microwave spectrum, you'd need a parabolic antenna. So then you'd take this from being a small device with a tiny antenna to having a backpack with an antenna on it.

So it's like the old satellite phones in some ways, but even bigger antennas. So they can only have the same spectrum in an ideal case as a terrestrial operator, and their footprint will always be that much larger.

You see what I mean?

Sorry, from the V3 is the DISH broadband as well. So the V2 is direct-to-device, the V3 is the DISH.

Exactly right. And if they did try to use it for a direct-to-device, what I said would be fundamentally the case.

Thank you, Marcus. And as Tom has explained, data consumption will grow 12x by 2040, and that data is the true currency of our industry. And Marcus has explained excellently how the physics behind the networks are designed.

Over the next few slides, I will show you how networks need to evolve to meet the demand across our markets and the solutions we at Helios Towers are achieving to support this.

On this slide, you will show how networks will evolve over the next 15 years, with terrestrial networks running 97% of the infrastructure across the entire ecosystem, with satellites helping to extend coverage in remote and hard-to-reach places.

Over the next decade, towers will be more densely populated than ever before, as you see on the left-hand side of this slide. This will mean more colocations, more street furniture and more in-building solutions, all to deliver the speed, capacity and low latency that customers expect and need on the ground.

In deep rural areas where we continue to see strong build-to-suit demand and alongside that, satellite technologies create an exciting opportunity to extend our networks even further.

But let's dive deeper into technology on the next slide. Why are we so excited about the opportunity ahead?

Well, we're still in the very early stages of the technology evolution. And today, only around 5% of the population across our markets is connected to 5G, meaning the vast majority of the investment cycle is still ahead of us.

As operators continue expanding 4G and 5G and eventually deploy 6G, we see decades of infrastructure investment still to come. This technology evolution benefits Helios towers in 2 ways. First is network densification.

As operators move through the technology generations, they deploy progressively higher frequency spectrum. And higher frequencies deliver much greater capacity but over shorter distances, as Marcus clearly explained earlier.

This means tower spacing roughly halves from one generation to the next. So to maintain coverage and meet growing data demand, operators need significantly more tower sites.

Second, every new generation adds more equipment to each site. Rather than replacing existing infrastructure, new technologies are layered into it, requiring additional radios, antennas, and power capacity.

That's why we've invested heavily in developing highly efficient hybrid power systems that deliver this increasing energy demand. Moving on to Slide 29.

As Marcus explained earlier, using London as an example, satellites are great for expanding coverage in the total addressable market. And this slide aims to show where satellite technology does create new opportunities.

The left-hand side of the chart illustrates where direct-to-device services can be realistically deployed, and that's typically in remote areas with fewer than 5 people per square kilometer.

In these areas, satellites deliver around 2 megabits per second, equivalent to a 3G download experience. And this unlocks communities that have traditionally been uneconomic or impossible to connect.

As population density increases, satellite capacity is shared between those users, making direct-to-device much less practical, again, as we discussed.

But instead, satellites are better used to provide backhaul connection, connecting mobile towers into the wider mobile network where fiber or microwave isn't available. And this creates 2 opportunities.

First, it expands the addressable market by connecting communities that previously couldn't be reached. Second, it drives incremental power demand in locations that were not commercially viable previously.

Satellites expand the market and enable more tower deployments. And this isn't just a future concept. So let me show you a short video showing how we're already doing this in Madagascar today.

So this is a remote site in Madagascar, where fiber or microwave backhaul simply wasn't practical. And instead, the satellite antenna you see at the base of the tower provides the backhaul connection, linking the site into the operator's wider mobile network.

The tower then does what terrestrial networks do best, providing high-quality radio coverage and capacity to the surrounding communities through the mobile antennas situated at the top of the tower.

Satellites connected tower, the tower connects to the customer, giving connectivity to people who have never been connected. The capacity delivered to subscribers is still ultimately determined by the backhaul connection.

Fiber remains the highest capacity solution, followed by microwave, with satellite providing an effective alternative when neither of those is practical. But this doesn't fundamentally change the network architecture or the infrastructure ecosystem.

Rather, it opens up new tower opportunities in locations that previously couldn't be connected. In addition to this, we are deploying satellite backhaul on a small number of sites across the group this year.

It's another example of how satellites and existing terrestrial networks are complementary. This final slide brings everything together. And as our customer networks evolve, so does our infrastructure portfolio; whether it's 100-meter lattice towers providing wide-area coverage or 10-meter rooftop towers with bespoke designs, we provide the right infrastructure for every deployment.

Alongside our towers, we deliver ultra-efficient hybrid power systems that keep every site operating 24/7. We're also expanding our digital network solutions, ensuring we continue to meet our customers' needs both now and in the future.

The key message is simple. Whatever our customers need to deploy, we have the infrastructure and operational capability to deliver it.

And I'll now hand over to Sainesh, who's going to take us through the opportunity ahead.

Thanks, Allan, and good morning to everyone. You've heard today about the multi-decade growth runway outlook. But what is perhaps most encouraging is that these are not just trends for the future. They are already visible today.

Across our markets, digital adoption is accelerating at a pace well ahead of many developed economies. Let's put that into perspective. Social media adoption has grown by 18% year-on-year across our footprint versus only 4% in the rest of the world.

Video traffic in Africa and the Middle East has increased by 14% versus 10% in the rest of the world. And there are over 2x more mobile money transactions being executed in the region as compared to the rest of the world. This means users in the region are consuming more and richer digital services, meaning that every new user spends more time online and generates more traffic than the last.

These services and more are supporting sustained rather than occasional or temporary traffic growth. That creates structural demand for additional capacity, supporting and accelerating the need for denser and wider networks.

For operators, increasing demand has a very predictable consequence. They have to invest. Subscriber growth expands the customer base and higher ARPU drives investment.

Operators increasing capital expenditure demonstrates they are already responding. Since 2023, mobile subscribers have grown 14%. Over that same period, average revenue per user increased by 34%. This reflects both higher data consumption, yes, but also a continued migration toward higher-value services.

The major mobile operators across our footprint have responded very swiftly. They have collectively increased capital expenditure by more than 33% during the same period.

In fact, just this week, Vodacom Group announced accelerating growth in CapEx in the region. Airtel noted continued acceleration in investment into the network and other digital solutions. Orange disclosed a record number of new data subscribers across Africa and the Middle East.

This is exactly what we expect to see.

When I speak to customers, they're all saying the same thing: the need to invest more into their networks to address growing demand and an expanding consumer base.

Most importantly, for Helios Towers, that translates directly not only into additional build-to-suit sites, but also more colocations, more equipment on each tower, and increasing demand for power and digital network solutions.

Our confidence that this continues for decades is based on reinforcing structural trends.

First, smartphones continue to become dramatically more affordable. As handset prices decline, hundreds of millions of additional consumers gain access to the digital economy. In our markets, mobile is overwhelmingly the primary way people access the internet.

Second, technology evolution drives network densification, as you've heard from Marcus and Allan, which means more sites and more equipment are needed as operators move from 4G to 5G and beyond.

This introduces new antennas, new radios, and new power requirements. It means more towers, but it also means existing towers become more valuable because they support more equipment, more antennas, and increasingly sophisticated services.

Finally, almost all future traffic growth continues to come through mobile. AI, video, cloud computing, enterprise applications, and connected devices all require higher bandwidth and lower latency.

You heard Tom speak about the projected 12x growth in data consumption. Ninety-seven percent of that traffic will be carried over terrestrial infrastructure.

When we bring these trends together, a long-term opportunity becomes clear. Population growth adds around 600 million people by 2040, supported by one of the youngest populations globally, with 65% under the age of 30.

Rising GDP supports increasing consumer spending, enterprise investment, and digital inclusion. Overlay those trends with around 800 million new mobile connections.

Let that sink in. 800 million new mobile connections. That's more than the population of the whole of Europe, and more than 2x the population of the United States, coming online over the next 15 years.

That combination underpins an estimated 72,000 additional addressable tenancies by 2040, which is about double the size of our existing portfolio, as you've heard Tom mention.

Importantly, this is not based on cyclical assumptions. It is supported by long-term demographic, economic, and technological trends that are already underway.

There are decades of growth still to come. Our structural growth creates the opportunity, but execution determines how the value is created.

Helios Towers is uniquely positioned because of its operational excellence and financial value proposition, underpinned by our customer experience excellence strategy.

We deliver 99.99% power uptime because reliability directly impacts our customers' revenue. That makes resilient infrastructure critical. We can also bring colocation customers online within 24 hours, enabling operators to address traffic hotspots as they emerge.

Financially, our shared infrastructure model lowers operators' total cost of ownership by around 30%, allowing them to focus their capital on their core business rather than passive infrastructure.

As networks become denser, that capital efficiency becomes increasingly valuable. To close out, I'd like to leave you with a simple message.

There is a lot of growth for a long time to come, and we are exceptionally, uniquely positioned to capture a disproportionate share of that opportunity.

Thank you very much. Tom, back to you.

Thanks very much, Sainesh, and Marcus and Allan. I look forward to your questions. I'll just wrap up quickly, and let me start by bringing it back to our investment case.

First, our business continues to demonstrate very strong momentum. Record tenancy growth has translated into another period of strong financial delivery and another upgrade to guidance.

We delivered more than 2,500 tenancy additions in the first half. EBITDA increased by 14%, recurring free cash flow by 52%, and ROIC continues to improve.

Our pipeline remains very strong, and demand is already building for 2027.

Second, that performance is enabling us to continue executing our disciplined capital allocation framework for Impact 2030. We're investing in high-return growth opportunities.

Leverage is on a downward trajectory, and we're increasingly returning capital to shareholders through both buybacks and dividends, with our inaugural interim dividend announced today.

Third, the long-term outlook remains highly compelling. Data consumption across our markets has already increased sixfold over the past five years and is forecast to grow by another 12x by 2040, almost twice the global rate.

That level of demand requires sustained investment in terrestrial mobile infrastructure. Terrestrial networks will continue to carry the vast majority of mobile data because they provide the density, capacity, and indoor coverage needed to serve large populations.

Satellite technologies will also play an increasingly important role. They will extend coverage, open up new locations, and provide backhaul to terrestrial sites that previously could not be connected.

Taken together, we see a long runway of structural growth, underpinned by an estimated 72,000 additional addressable tenancies in our markets over the next 15 years.

That's around twice the size of Helios Towers' footprint today. Helios Towers is therefore very well positioned to deliver on this opportunity.

We have leading market positions, a world-class operating platform and team, strong customer relationships, and a disciplined capital allocation framework that enables us to turn this market demand into growth for our customers, improve connectivity for the communities we serve, and deliver attractive growth and returns for our investors.

So with that, thank you very much for joining us today, and we're now very much looking forward to taking your questions. Thank you, everyone.

For the Q&A, we will start in the room, then we'll go to the conference line, and thereafter, we'll do any questions tapped in via the webcast as well. So I think, as he had his hand raised earlier, we'll start with James for the Q&A, if you will.

It's James Lockyer here from Peel Hunt. A question for Marcus. As I understand it, Starlink uses RF today for its direct devices, which is what you were talking about. But it does use lasers to communicate between its devices.

While smartphones obviously require standard microwave signals, is it logical to think that over time, satellites could use lasers to the ground towers, which then handle the final local RF communications?

To clarify for Starlink, satellite-to-satellite communications laser line of sight laser, lasers do actually scatter. And yes, there have been attempts to do ground station-to-satellite laser technology.

Obviously, you wouldn't do that to a phone. And fundamentally, it's that last part to the phone that is the constraint because, as we talked about, there are lots of ways to get good backhaul, of which line-of-sight laser is one: fiber, microwave. That's got lots of bandwidth because light has the biggest amount of spectrum, actually.

It's terahertz of spectrum. So if you can use light, you're going to get terahertz of backhaul, but it doesn't solve that last-mile problem where you've got to communicate with the mobile.

And fundamentally, that's related to having a small antenna in your phone, a few millimeters, and there are many of them actually for the different frequency bands.

With a small antenna in the phone, you have to use spectrum that can propagate well without having to be focused on your laser would have to track you like this.

And it obviously doesn't go through objects; light doesn't go through objects. So RF or that cellular band that has this great combination of properties of it pretty much goes through objects. Obviously, it gets attenuated, but it does.

It can scatter off buildings or be reflective of buildings, so it finds you something called multipath. It can be received by a small antenna that you can make in a small device with low power. And it's got enough bandwidth to deliver these incredible services.

So if you think about trying to solve for all those things, really, you can only do that in that frequency band, and that is the fundamental constraint, not the backhaul constraint. Does that help?

So my question was, could lasers be going to the ground station? If they can, then you use RF. So actually, there's more opportunity for maybe faster or more towers in different areas that could use lasers as well to get the backhaul, which then uses the RF to the device?

Yes, but my point is actually the backhaul isn't really the constraint. So you could do that.

But if you've got the constraint being you just can't generate enough bandwidth, why would you put a laser that has terahertz of bandwidth when in my radio network, I've only got gigahertz.

You see, it's off by a factor of 1,000. So it's just not worth doing. But yes, you could, and some technologies exist to do exactly that.

And second question, just on the rest of the year. So you've done about the same number of tenancies in the first half as you did last year.

If we double that, we don't get to what your guidance is, obviously. Can you talk about the cadence of the next couple of quarters and whether or not there's the ability and what would get you to the top end of that range? And is there more to come potentially as well?

Yes. So I think overall, we're seeing very strong sentiment in terms of investment. And these tenancies are doing a number of things.

Some of them are for coverage, new sites, some of them are for capacity, and some of them are upgrades for either 4G or 5G, which we're starting to see come into a number of markets now, which is really just starting.

And over the coming quarters, we essentially see a continuation of this, obviously down to the exact quarter-on-quarter. It comes down to a few things, including exactly when the rollouts happen and whatnot.

So we feel good and confident about delivering on the rest of the year in terms of the guidance, the upgraded guidance we've given today.

We're already planning for next year, though as well. So as well as just planning for these 2 quarters, 2027 is getting a lot of attention at the moment, which gives us confidence in the medium and long term as well.

So we'll keep everyone updated as we move forward, but great momentum at the moment.

If I can add, actually. So far year-to-date, we've done just over 500 new sites. For the guidance that we've given, that will be over 1,250. So, a big bulk of sites coming in the back end of the year.

And that can be lumpy. It can shift from period to period. So that's in part why it's quite difficult to know the exact cadence. On a year-on-year basis, it's never even.

In fact, for many years, it was actually H2 driven rather than H1. So to have it more in the H1 period is actually fantastic because it's a run-rate business.

So the moment you want to try and get that in as quickly as possible. So we may see a bit of an even-ish cadence in the second half, but it really is dependent on when those new sites are rolled out. And that's a little bit outside of our control from time to time.

It's Graham Hunt from Jefferies. Just 2 questions. First, on the site rollout. I think when we started this year, we were thinking closer to 500 sites, and now I think it's north of 1,000 in the guidance.

Just wondering what it is that you're hearing from your customers? Maybe shed some color on where those sites are going? Is that in urban areas? Is it on rooftops? Is it when we're talking about the growth, and we talk about satellite and Starlink, I think a lot of people think about rural.

But when we talk about those 1,000-plus sites that are coming, where are they actually going to be?

Then second question, on my numbers, with the upgraded EBITDA and cash numbers, you still have a comfortable EUR 800 million plus in your 5-year runway despite the additional CapEx you've spent this year.

What's the plan with that money? Could we see a little bit more returns to shareholders? Just an update on your thinking there, please?

Thanks very much. Why don't I take the first and Manjit can talk about capital allocation.

The new site builds, so look, it's really great that we're seeing this uptick in site builds. Ultimately, it comes down to a number of factors, and these are both for extra capacity for new technologies and some more coverage.

The majority are for suburban areas, infill. In terms of when 5G gets rolled out in a city, you sometimes need smaller infill sites in between the larger macro ones because that density needs to increase each time, like one of those slides that we showed.

One of the big phenomena that we're seeing in Africa and the Middle East, particularly in Africa, is urbanization. Urbanization in Africa is the fastest in the world, and that will continue to be the case for the coming decades.

You have cities like Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa that, in 10 to 15 years' time, will be 50% to 100% larger in population. So they'll be one-and-a-half to two times the size they are today.

That means the cities are expanding at a phenomenal rate. When that happens, there clearly needs to be more mobile infrastructure in those locations.

That's a significant part of the rollout we're seeing. That's where the coverage and capacity are needed, and there are huge revenue opportunities for mobile operators in those locations.

So that's the main part of it. And then on capital allocation--

Yes, absolutely. I think your calculation is taking into account a little bit of debt capacity as well.

If you think about the upgrades that we've given to recurring free cash flow in Q1 and now, it's about GBP 25 million on a run-rate basis. So you're right. The capex that we're deploying doesn't actually dent the GBP 400 million. We're actually going to end up with broadly the same amount.

Now, the way the model works is that at the back end, the last few years, you really start to accrete that cash flow. As we get to that period, we'll provide more guidance, but this is a really good place to be.

It means we have the flexibility either to invest in those high-growth opportunities or return it to shareholders. And we're all shareholders, so we're also very keen to see how that progresses.

But for now, just assume the same shareholder distribution profile, and we'll update that in due course.

David from Bank of America. A couple of questions. The first one might possibly be for Manjit, or actually it might be for you. What is the technological difference between microwave backhaul and satellite backhaul?

What is the difference in terms of the capacity you can achieve using basic microwave versus satellite?

Secondly, what are the economics? How much does each cost? What are the relative economics of deploying microwave backhaul compared with what you might pay for satellite?

That's question one.

Question two is that the growth profile you guys have outlined is very evident.

We've seen just this week announcements from Vodacom and Orange. In fact, Vodacom is now generating more cash flow from emerging markets than from developed markets, which is remarkable.

This is an organic business plan. You guys were phenomenally successful with the inorganic growth of Helios through acquisitions and M&A.

Is there not another opportunity to go again here with all of this growth potential and seek out some different markets?

It just feels like the time is now. You've got an amazing track record of integration and execution. You've got a good balance sheet and a good financial position.

Are you not tempted to go again?

Okay, let's start with the backhaul technologies.

So, fiber backhaul is going to be around 10 to 40 gigabits per second. You know this from terrestrial networks, you have lasers running at very high frequencies, and so you get around 10 to 40 gigabits per second on fiber.

On microwave links, the ones that go between towers, it's a couple of gigabits per second, about 20 times less. Obviously, it depends exactly how you deploy them, but broadly that's right.

Then LEO satellite is about 300 megabits per second at the moment, so roughly another tenfold lower again. All of those are sufficient to handle a rural site.

But you can see that if you're serving a dense urban site, satellite becomes much more questionable. Not only that, but that 300 megabits per second has to be shared across the entire beam area.

A single backhaul connection would effectively consume the capacity of that beam. So it's excellent where you can't generate more than 300 megabits per second, which is typical of rural locations.

But in an urban environment, you're going to want gigabits per second, or even 10 gigabits per second, to backhaul those very dense sites.

Tom, do you want to talk about the relative costs?

Yes. For fiber, it depends on whether fiber already exists in the area. Obviously, the cost of deploying fiber depends heavily on the distance involved.

To lay fiber out to a remote site like the one we showed in Madagascar is effectively cost-prohibitive. On the other hand, if you're in a city and there are fiber rings nearby, running fiber 100 meters to a site isn't particularly expensive.

Across our markets, microwave is probably the most common form of backhaul. That's partly because it's relatively straightforward to install microwave equipment at the same time as the rest of the equipment on the tower when there isn't fiber already in the ground.

For microwave, the maximum practical distance is about 20 miles to the next site, and you need a clear line of sight. If something obstructs that line of sight, performance will be affected.

Quite often, the network architecture includes multiple microwave links to different sites, providing redundancy if one connection goes down.

For LEO satellite backhaul, the equipment is probably the cheapest option.

But, as always, you get what you pay for. You receive lower bandwidth at a lower price. Microwave sits in the middle in terms of both cost and performance.

Fiber offers the highest performance, but if you need to install the fiber, you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars per kilometer for trenching.

The optical equipment itself is relatively inexpensive. It's the civil engineering required to install the fiber that's costly.

On the M&A question, our primary focus remains organic growth. As you've seen today, our organic growth opportunity is already keeping us very busy.

Ultimately, it's a capital allocation decision. Our priorities are investing in high-return organic growth, strengthening the balance sheet, and returning capital to shareholders.

At present, all of those provide better returns than net and M&A.

Fundamentally, the reason we presented the total addressable market analysis is to demonstrate that the organic growth profile is already very substantial.

We've already invested in the teams and the operating platform. Now it's really about execution.

That's why we're so excited about the organic opportunity and why we don't necessarily need to pursue M&A.

It's Emmet from Morgan Stanley.

I wanted to ask about the behavior of your telco customers and demand from those customers. Over the last week, we've seen Orange Middle East and Africa report around 16% to 17% EBITDA growth.

Vodacom also increased its guidance, driven by emerging markets. Have you seen a significant change in the way telcos are thinking about investing in their networks, given how well they're performing on both revenue and EBITDA levels?

Secondly, a question I've asked before. Your business remains heavily weighted toward your three largest markets, so DRC, Tanzania and Oman.

Is there another market that's really beginning to build momentum where you see significant potential over the next few years?

Thanks, Emmet. From the customer perspective, we're seeing strong demand.

That's exactly what's coming through in the tenancy rollout numbers and in our upgraded guidance. At the moment, there is a real revenue growth opportunity across the region for mobile operators.

Disposable income is increasing. A significant portion of that is being spent on SIM cards and data plans.

There's also a strong shift toward digital services, particularly video streaming, which wasn't nearly as common in many of our markets just a few years ago.

That behavioral change, combined with increasing disposable income, is creating an opportunity for mobile operators to invest, grow revenues and expand earnings.

You're seeing that very clearly in their financial results. We're supporting that growth from the infrastructure side.

That's the momentum we're seeing today. And as I mentioned earlier, planning for 2027 has already begun, and the pipeline is continuing to build.

I'll take the question on markets. Yes, our three largest markets continue to grow. The reality is that growth is broadly proportional across the portfolio.

The DRC posted very good results, with strong lease-up. We're particularly pleased with that because it's a dollarized market with three investment-grade customers, the same operators whose results you've just been referring to.

We're also seeing good rollout activity in Madagascar, with a significant amount of site construction, which you'll probably have noticed in the numbers.

What tends to happen is that one market may outperform during a particular period, but over time it evens out. Overall, we expect the relative contribution from each market to remain broadly unchanged because they're all growing at similar rates.

Coming back to the Impact 2030 strategy and the $400 million of additional capital allocation capacity.

The returns on the organic opportunities you've presented look very attractive. At the same time, as you execute the planned capex programme, I assume that also increases recurring free cash flow beyond the guidance you've already provided.

Shouldn't you therefore allocate more of that $400 million toward organic growth opportunities? And just as a follow-up, you spoke earlier about increased tower densification with 4G and 5G.

Do those towers generate returns comparable to what you're seeing today? If they do, wouldn't that be another reason to invest even more?

Yes, absolutely. The more we invest and arguably, the earlier we invest, the higher the recurring free cash flow and cumulative earnings become because you're bringing those cash flows forward.

So absolutely. When we think about our investment waterfall, we're always prioritizing the highest-return opportunities. That starts with carefully selected new builds and then moves through the other investment opportunities after that.

Ultimately, it depends on the volume of opportunities available. The really important point is that we have the flexibility to deploy capital.

Having invested so early in the cycle, we're still expecting broadly the same GBP 400 million of available capacity. Don't forget that we're also growing EBITDA.

As EBITDA increases, our debt capacity also increases should an exceptional opportunity arise. Those are the different factors we're balancing.

As we move forward, we don't expect capital to constrain us from pursuing the best opportunities. We'll have the financial capacity to do so. Now it's really about harvesting those opportunities as they emerge.

Any final questions in the room? There are none. We also have no further questions on the conference line or the webcast.

Tom, I'll hand back to you for closing remarks.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, everyone, for joining us here in the room. It's been great to meet in person and to see everyone again.

And thank you to everyone joining us on the webcam. I hope you've enjoyed today's presentation.

We've had a great morning. As you can tell, the business is firing on all cylinders. We have very strong momentum across the business.

I'd like to give a huge thank you to all of our teams across the company who do a fantastic job every day delivering for our customers and for the communities we serve.

Those communities already include millions of people across our markets, and that number will only continue to grow.

Our ambition is to provide every end user with world-class mobile connectivity, to connect people to the internet, connect them to the world, and enhance life daily.

Thank you very much. Have a fantastic day, and we look forward to speaking with you again soon.

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.