Helios Towers PLC
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Helios Towers PLC
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Helios Towers Third Quarter 2021 Results Conference Call. My name is Bethany, and I'll be coordinating this call for you today. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the call over to Kash Pandya to begin. Kash, over to you when you're ready.
Thank you, Bethany. Well, good morning, everybody, and thank you for making the time to join us for us to communicate our Q3 2021 trading update. I'm going to flick through the slides. So hopefully, you've got them in front of you. Joining me on Slide 2. Today is the usual trio of Tom Greenwood, who is our Chief Operating Officer, and will be our CEO once I step down in April next year and move to a non-executive deputy chair role. And also Manjit Dhillon, who is our CFO that you've met before many times.If I go to Slide 3, this outlines the agenda for our presentation today. And as you'll note, there will be plenty of time for Q&A at the end, which will come through our conference coordinator Bethany. So let me go to the highlights. Slide 5. Well, look, we've had a strong quarter. In terms of our financial metrics, we've delivered a 10% revenue growth, bringing Q3 revenue just a little over $114 million for the quarter, and that's driven by the onboarding of the Free Senegal Tower portfolio acquisition as well as steady organic growth in the quarter. Correspondingly, our EBITDA has grown by some 6% coming in just slightly shy of $61 million for the quarter. Now margin has decreased by 2 percentage points year-over-year to 53%, but this is primarily driven by investment in SG&A that we've made consciously to support our M&A activity in the new markets that we're bringing onboard over the next few months.In terms of our portfolio of free cash flow, we've grown our portfolio free cash flow by 2%. Again, just shy of $45 million for Q3. This reflects, of course, our EBITDA growth, but slightly offset by increase in corporate income tax as well as some lease payments, which is a norm for our business. Moving on to operation and strategic update and KPIs. Well, look, it's been a really solid, strong quarter. Actually, it's our strongest quarter on tenancy growth for 6 years. We delivered 683 tenancies in the quarter, bringing our year-to-date tenancy count to 853, which is in line with our full year expectation of being in the range we've articulated every quarter this year, which is between 1,000 and 1,500 tenancies. And it reflects our -- and underpins the well-invested portfolio we've nurtured over the last few years in making sure we're ready to bring customers on to our asset base when they give us the order. In terms of tenancy guidance, I've mentioned, we're sticking to 1,000 to 1,500 tenancies for this year. And we're very excited about the strong -- not only the strong year-to-date performance, but we have a robust pipeline as we've communicated this morning, with a further investment in CapEx to support the growth we're seeing coming through next year. In terms of acquisitions and the progress we're making on M&As we've announced, well, look, our new markets team continue to progress well in closing and integrating the acquisitions we've announced. There's 5 new markets in Africa and Middle East that we're still yet to close or we're confident of closing a number of these in the -- by the year-end.And in terms of CEO transition, as you know, mid-August I announced my retirement and Tom Greenwood will be succeeding me as CEO from our AGM in April 22. That transition is going incredibly well. We're working towards our 5-year strategy that we'll articulate in Q1 of next year. And I'm looking forward to my nonexecutive role post-April next year as deputy chair. So let me hand over now to Tom, who's going to take us through the next few slides.
Thanks very much, Kash. And hi, everyone. Great to talk to you today. So I'm on Slide 6, just looking at a few charts here for tenancies, EBITDA and portfolio free cash flow. As Kash mentioned, we continue to drive tenancies upwards, both with inorganic and organic. We've added over 2,100 tenancies year-to-date, close to 1,300 being from the acquisition of Senegal and 853 year-to-date on an organic basis, and as Kash mentioned, very much, therefore, expecting to end the year within our stated range of 1,000 to 1,500, probably directionally somewhere towards the middle of that range.EBITDA continues to move upwards as would be expected, we've seen 7% growth from our 2020 full year EBITDA for our Q3 annualized being at $243 million. It's probably worth noting here that a lot of the tenancies in Q3 came on towards the end of the quarter. So you're not seeing a full quarter of revenue and EBITDA from them. But if they had or come on at the start of the quarter, July 1, we would have seen that EBITDA probably about a $9 million increase from that $243 million, thinking about $252 million. So that just gives you a sort of feel of the timing of these tenancies and what you should expect going to Q4, but also more importantly, into FY '22, next year.Again, portfolio free cash flow, as Kash mentioned, touched down slightly. This was as anticipated, driven by corporate income tax. In some of our markets where we're now cash-paying for tax, plus a bit of extra nondiscretionary CapEx in the first part of this year. Moving on now to Slide 7. And again, our sustainable business strategy update. I'm pleased to say that at the end of November, on the 25th we'll be doing our call regarding carbon, and really looking forward to talking to everyone on that to talk about how we are benefiting the market that we operate in from an environmental perspective and continuing to drive down carbon last increasing, obviously, digital inclusion and all the things we do around the mobile sectors in our market. And again, just at the bottom, a reminder, around the same time, we produce our FY '21 annual report in March next year, that will also be the usual sustainable business report similar to last year. So look out for that one. In strategic updates, moving now to Page 9, as Kash alluded to, making good progress on closing the remaining acquisitions. Obviously, Senegal now very much closed part of our operational business. We're looking forward to replicate that in the remaining 5 markets as we move forward over the next few weeks and months. So we're anticipating closing Madagascar and Malawi in the next month or so. Oman is progressing well. We are moving forward also in Gabon and Chad with the regulatory processes there.If we look now on Page 10. Here, we give a little bit more detail on some of that. At the bottom there, you can see our managing directors of each market that we have in place now. And I'm really pleased to say that Karim, Vic, Matthews and Ramsey are already driving our businesses forward in those markets. One point to put out here, for Oman we previously guided to closing by the end of this year. You can see there on the targeted closing line, we have now put in Q4/Q1. Nothing really of materiality there, just simply the timing of some of the closing processes there regarding the regulatory process. And it's possible we will still close in Q4, but it's also possible it might seep into Q1. So we just wanted to mention that here. And again, Chad and Gabon, we're still progressing there with the early stages of the regulatory processes, as previously mentioned, and also moving forward in and having the teams ready there to close.We have MDs earmarked for those 2 markets as well, albeit not formally in place yet as we're still in the launch process there. But overall, making very good progress, I'd say, across all, and as I said Senegal now very much fully operational and driving forward as a great part of our business. We've already seen some new tenancies coming through those. As you may have seen in the numbers and really anticipate more rollout coming in that market in Q4, which is really exciting to see.Moving now on to Slide 11. And here, just really a reminder, I guess, of the ongoing structural growth that we have in our market. Mobile is a really critical service sector to all the economies in our market. And there's obviously very compelling macro fundamentals that we see around population increase, urbanization and of course young population. All of this is helping to drive our own tenancy additions and I'm just reiterating there on the bottom left with the growth so far this year.We're comfortable reiterating our guidance for being between 1,000 to 1,500 tenancies on an organic basis for the year. And again, just on the bottom right-hand side there, just pointing out some external market research which says there needs to be 30,000 new points of service in our market over the next 5 or 6 years in order to meet the capacity demands from all of these numbers that you see here on the top, the population increase of 52 million across our markets really quite staggering there, mobile subscriber increase of 65 million, again, quite a staggering number as well as significant uptake -- uptick in data usage and 4G connections across our markets.Quite interestingly as well, on the middle left, you can see plus 12%, this being the revenue growth forecast for MNOs in Sub-Saharan Africa this year, which again demonstrates I think very strong upward trend in revenue, and you can see some of the comments from some of our key customers here on the page as well. So overall, sentiment is good, nothing really changed from the markets over the past few years, and we expect these trends to very much continue providing us with real structural growth in our markets, particularly given our strong positions within them.So moving on, I will hand over to Manjit now for the next section.
Thanks, Tom. Hi, everyone. It's great to be speaking with you today. I'll be going through the financial results. And starting on Slide 13. And continuing on from what Kash and Tom have mentioned earlier, we really have had a strong quarter of growth driven by organic rollouts and also driven by our new market Senegal, which has really hit the ground running. And on this slide, you'll see we have summarized the main KPIs, which I'll -- we'll be talking through in detail in the next few slides. But in general, we are seeing good growth across a number of key metrics.So jumping into the detail and moving on to Slide 14. I mean, we see really robust organic tenancy growth in Q3. We've added 683 tenancies in the quarter, which brings us up to 853 for the year-to-date and a total of 17,773 tenancies as at Q3 2021, which is an 18% increase from where we were in Q3 2020.As mentioned in previous results calls, tenancy rollouts are lumpy quarter-on-quarter. And following the performance year-to-date, which is supported by a strong tenancy pipeline, we have again reiterated our tenancy guidance of 1,000 to 1,500 incremental tenancies for the year. Our colleagues remain laser-focused on rolling out the pipeline and delivering for our customers, and we're excitingly expecting a very busy end of the year. A quick comment on tenancy ratio. With the introduction of Senegal, the group tenancy ratio reduced to 1.99 in H1 2021. And with organic rollouts during Q3, we've seen this tick up to 2.03.Excluding Senegal though, our tenancy ratio is 2.18, which is up 0.09x year-on-year on a like-for-like basis. Again, as previously mentioned, we will see tenancy ratio move around as we integrate our acquired portfolios, which come with lower tenancy ratios on day 1 than our group average. However, this is a great opportunity for us. We're growing our asset base and the number of sites to which we can develop, adding further colocations over the years, and we'll see that the tenancy ratio and other metrics will compound over the years to come.Now on to Slide 15 and looking at our revenues and adjusted EBITDA. We've seen growth year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter for both, with revenues up 10% year-on-year, 5% quarter-on-quarter and EBITDA up 6% year-on-year and 4% quarter-on-quarter. Now some of that growth is attributable to the integration of Senegal. And whilst we've seen growth organically in tenancies, we've seen revenue and EBITDA broadly flat quarter-on-quarter and those are due to couple of reasons. Firstly, the majority of our organic tenancies were rolled out predominantly in the late part of Q3. And as such we have a limited trading impact from these, but we'll see these coming through in Q4, Q1 and beyond. And secondly, in line with the guidance given, we've continued to invest in our SG&A to support our expansionary strategy, which will start to see being leveraged as we close new market shortly. But higher level, we have a well-invested platform with delivering strong organic and inorganic tenancy growth, which we see and will continue to see coming through in our revenues and EBITDAs in quarters and years to come. Now if you move on to Slide 16, you'll see the usual breakdowns provided, which are broadly consistent from previous quarterly updates. We have strong currency hedge business, which is underpinned by long-term contracts with blue-chip mobile network operators. 98% of our revenues come from international mobile network operators, comprising the likes of Airtel, MTN, Orange, Tigo, Vodacom and Free Senegal, who we purchased the Senegalese portfolio from.We have strong long-term contracts with our customers. And as at Q3 2021, we had long-term contracted revenues of $3.7 billion, with an average remaining life of 7.6 years, which has increased by $200 million quarter-on-quarter due to the increased number of tenancies we have in Q3. And this means, excluding new wins and rollout, we already have that revenue contracted and in the bag and provided a strong underlying earnings stream for the business. We also have 62% of our revenues in hard currency being either USD or euro type. As a reminder, this will increase to 68% pro forma for the announced acquisitions, which translates to 73% when looking at it at an EBITDA level, and that provides a strong and natural FX hedge for our business, which is further complemented by our annual inflation escalators, which we have with our customers in all of our contracts.Moving on to Slide 17, and we look at CapEx. And year-to-date, we deployed $272 million of the $1 billion of CapEx guided for the year. Of the $272 million, $182 million of that is related to acquisition CapEx, principally the Senegal acquisition and $70 million has been incurred in relation to growth and upgrade investments, with the rest being $20 million for nondiscretionary CapEx. As we look out for the rest of the year, we've increased our CapEx guidance by $30 million for our established markets from the range of $110 million to $140 million. That's now increasing to $140 million to $172 million. And this is due to some forward purchasing of materials for rollout in 2022, and this is supported by our strong tenancy pipeline. So effectively, we've ordered now to effectively manage our inventory so that we can roll out and deliver quickly for our customers.Outside of that increase, all other CapEx remains as is, with the majority of the CapEx, roughly 683 million, related to acquisition consideration, which we expect to be incurred in the next couple of months. As mentioned earlier, our new markets team continued to progress well with the closing of acquisitions. We do highlight that a minor acquisition could close in either Q4 or Q1. And if this acquisition does move into next year, our 2021 CapEx will decrease by that consideration of $575 million.Finally, moving on to Slide 18. And here, we show a summary of our financial debt, and our Q3 net leverage was 3.4% and continued to be below our target range of 3.5% to 4.5%. As mentioned previously, we strengthened our balance sheet over the last 12 to 18 months and continue to hold roughly around $1 billion worth of available funds comprising cash on balance sheet and undrawn debt facilities and our funds in place for the announced acquisitions and are in a strong financial position to support our growth strategy.And with that, I'll pass back to Kash to wrap up.
Thanks, Manjit. So look, I'm on Slide 19, and this is the last slide, and then we'll be moving on to Q&A. Key takeaways from this presentation, we're seeing significant momentum in our organic, inorganic and our ESG action and strategy. We've got a -- as we've heard, we've got a well-invested portfolio that's delivering our strongest quarter of organic tenancy additions in 6 years with a robust pipeline, as mentioned by Tom and Manjit a few minutes ago. Our outlook for the remainder of this year and beyond is very positive with a strong order book being processed.In terms of the acquisitions and the progress we're making, look, again, reinforcing what Tom said, we're making really good progress. We're hiring local people. We've got our MDs in each of our markets who are driving the closure process. And once these acquisitions are closed, we will be the most diverse tower company across Africa and Middle East, and that brings with itself robustness and stability and as you heard, a quite a high proportion of hard currency EBITDA at 73%. So we're very exciting about the momentum the business has currently got. And finally, we're continuing to progress on our sustainable business strategy. We're going to publish our carbon road map on the 25th of November that you will have details to log on for that. And on that note, I'm going to hand back to Bethany to help us coordinate the Q&A. Thanks, Bethany.
[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from John Karidis of Numis.
Can you hear me?
Yes, we can, John.
I've got 3 questions, please. The first one is you're spending $5 million more to hit the ground running with bolt-ons. Can I just check that in next year, that 5 number, once it annualizes, won't be more than that? And secondly, in terms of capital expenditure and the $30 million you're spending extra this year, I just want to make sure that this isn't extra expense to what the market has in forecast or [indiscernible]. So all else being equal, which of course, won't be because of the bolt-ons, would you expect as a consequence of what you're doing now the CapEx guidance for the 5 established markets next year to be $80 million to $110 million, i.e., $30 million less than usual? And then lastly, Oman, it's sort of 3 months since we last spoke. And of course, you got there in there in part because of the third player that's backed by Vodafone. Is there anything noteworthy that you can tell us that may have sort of changed since the last time we spoke about this particular third player and your interactions with them?
Thanks, John. Manjit, why don't you take the first 2? And Tom, you take the Oman point.
Yes, absolutely. So on both points, actually, SG&A, CapEx, we will be giving our 2022 guidance at -- when we release our annual results next year. But -- in advance of that. So with regards to SG&A, we would expect there'll be an increase year-on-year with inflation as normally happens. There may be a slight tick up following the integration of Chad and Gabon. But in general, we would expect that it would be normal course increases year-on-year. With regards to CapEx of $30 million, again, I wouldn't change the modeling for 2022 at this point until we give more updated guidance. But effectively, we have brought forward some of that CapEx into this year. So we would see a slight tick down in the next year.
Right. Sorry. If I may, I'm sorry, Manjit. I specifically asked for the $5 million. I just want to make sure that $5 million because at the start of the year, it was $3 million, then it became $5 million, and we're not going to [indiscernible] acquisition next year, it becomes $7 million or $8 million or $9 million. Can you comment about that?
Yes. Yes. Just to clarify, once again, I've mentioned the first half year, the $3 million was given on the basis of the announced market at that time. We updated to $5 million following the announcement of 4 markets for Airtel and Oman. So as you would expect, that should pick up as we announce more market. So that's the reason for the $3 million to $5 million, and that was mentioned at the first half year. As we go into 2022, we may see some increases related to inflation, and there might be a slight tick up following the acquisitions of Chad and Gabon. But we don't see -- don't expect anything as large as what we've had this year.
Great. And then I'll take the last one. And John, just to add a little bit of color on the $30 million spend, this is all because our pipeline is looking fairly strong for next year, and we want to have the stock in the warehouse on January 1, ready to roll out rather than ordering it on January 1 and waiting 2 or 3 months for it to come. We are typically -- and this has been the case for the last 18 months, really through COVID, but typically ordering inventory now probably between 4 to 8 weeks earlier than we used to. And again, this is just precautionary. So there's a little bit of that in there as well. But yes, it's, I guess, good news CapEx because it's linked to some good pipeline we're looking at already for next year. Just on Oman. Yes, look, I'd say progress goods, Vodafone getting ready to launch. We have been talking to them. As you would expect, we talk to all mobile operators in any new market fairly regularly between signing the deal and closing the deal with the aim to get ready and get rolling out with them as soon as possible. So yes, absolutely, with Vodafone, that's been no different to any other MNO in any of the markets, to be honest. But yes, they look -- getting ready to launch, which is great news for the country, and we'll be hoping and looking to support them in their launch. So yes, very much looking forward to that.
The next question comes from Giles Thorne at Jefferies.
I wanted to explore any upside risk related to the current run rate of POS net adds and then spending that growth CapEx now rather than the 1st of January. And I guess, really, that's my question. Does the fact that you'll have the inventory in place on the 1st of January position you, should demand be strong enough, to actually then go ahead and spend an additional $30 million, I don't know, at some point in March, such that your overall market capture or market origination or tenancy growth, whatever you want to call it, is higher than perhaps what we're thinking about today? And tying into that point about the run rate on POS net adds, obviously, the big 5 running at 670 in the quarter is exceptionally high. Is that a new floor? Or I'm just trying to probe, again, around upside risk to growth into 2022.
Go ahead, Tom.
Yes. Thanks, John. I'll take this one. Thanks for the question. Yes. Look, I think as we've said it in the past, this business is lumpy quarter-on-quarter. We have a fairly reasonable idea of what we'll roll out in a given year, but it's sometimes difficult to predict exactly which quarter that comes in. And I think this year has been a classic example of that, right, which is pretty quiet Q1 and Q2. We've got a lot of orders in those 2 quarters, but all those orders are -- most of those orders are rolling out in the second half, which is what we've now seen in Q3. So yes, look, just to sort of manage expectations, I think Q3 we've just seen is one of our highest rollout quarters ever. It's certainly our highest for 6 years. And the one 6 years ago was actually when a new mobile operator launched in one of our markets. So, it was a completely sort of fresh greenfield rollout. So, I think just -- I think we are seeing good pipeline at the moment. I think when we report Q4 you'll see another strong quarter. It won't be as high as Q3, but it will be fairly strong. And again, we aren't seeing pipeline already for next year, which is why we've bought a bunch of CapEx. Now we are buying a bunch of CapEx now. And that really is a timing point simply down to the accounting, to be honest. So when we order CapEx, there's usually a lead time of a few months. When that CapEx arrives, you recognize the new CapEx at that point, albeit we might not immediately roll it out. So it will arrive, it will sit in our warehouse for a few weeks or a few months, and then it will be rolled out into next year. So in buying that now, we're putting ourselves in a very strong position to roll out very quickly for customers with zero delay, which is absolutely what we want to do. And we're doing it because we are seeing a strong pipeline already for next year. So yes, look, so a high level Q3 was very high. It's not a sort of new run rate or a new floor. But I think generally we're seeing a pretty decent pipeline at the moment for the next few quarters.
Our next question comes from David Wright at Bank of America.
Yes, I feel like the 2 last questions on CapEx are kind of still circling around a point that's just not quite clear. If you're pre-ordering in advance, and it's just a -- it's [indiscernible], it's a working capital issue more than an increase in CapEx. So the point, I think that probably just needs to be asked a bit more directly is, if you get the $30 million basket at some point, either next year or the year after versus the original budget or original maybe street expectations? Or is this just a $30 million increase to sustain the same growth that maybe we had expected? I feel like it just needs to be asked a little bit more directly. And then I guess on the revenue per tenant, there's obviously per tenancy. There's obviously a huge amount of volatility right now with fuel costs. And I know they drop through. So the EBITDA line is the truer, the more honest read, I guess. But just to sort of ex the fuel costs, are you managing to sustain the revenue per tenant with all of this new growth? Is it fairly sort of typical tenancy additions? With these big volumes, are you managing to sort of sustain the levels close to what you might have had in recent quarters?
Yes. Manjit, why don't you take the first question?
Yes, sure. So in terms of the CapEx, to put it simply before repurchasing from rollouts next year, so what we incur now will effectively come off what we expect next year.
David, is that clear on that point?
So it's $30 million more this year, $30 million less next year, fair?
Exactly. Exactly.
And then, yes, look, revenue per tenant, look, again, we're not seeing any major change in that. So I think we are seeing good sustainability of our pricing. Of course, sometimes, we always look at for very, very large volumes, giving some volume discounts, but it's absolutely normal. It's what we do, what the industry does. But yes, no major differential versus our adjusting pricing. So we're very much sustaining at the normal levels. And I think customers are seeing the value in what we offer in terms of our value proposition at our current levels of pricing.
[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from David Burns of Berenberg.
David Burns from Berenberg. Firstly, could you remind us if there's any of your existing or new markets which have no license fees in place at the moment? And secondly, just curious, you hear about your M&A pipeline. Are you seeing the -- recently IHS announced JV in Egypt to build 6,000 towers over the next 3 years. Wondering if the market has been of interest to Helios? And how IHS' new entry affects that?
Hi David, it's Tom here. I'll take both of these. So yes, look, in terms of new markets and the license regime, most markets across our regions require some form of license, not all, but most. And so one of the work streams for any deal that we do is usually a regulatory work stream, which includes either a license application or a notification to the regulator or somewhere in between. So that's typically one of the key things that drives the timing of when the deals close as well. So if you remember back to our Senegal deal, which we closed earlier this year, that probably -- which we closed in May, that probably would have -- would have definitely closed a few months earlier, be it and not for the license taking a little bit longer. But that's -- it's no surprise, to be honest, and fairly sort of normal course. It's quite difficult to predict the exact timing of the license processes in each market. But yes, it's typically in most markets, you have some form of license process. And then, yes, on the M&A pipeline, look, we continue to see a strong M&A pipeline either happening now or anticipated to come on stream quite soon. From our point of view, we're completely focused right now on organic growth, organic rollout and closing materials we've announced. But of course, we are still very much engaged in new potential processes. We have a dedicated business development team, which does that 24/7. Yes. Look, in relation to Egypt, we saw that announcement. Great move for IHS, and we wish them very well in that, absolutely. I think Egypt looks like a strong market. It's a big market. It's not one that we've had a high point in our priorities list because we've been focusing elsewhere. But yes, I think I'm sure it will be an exciting move for them. But now we continue to monitor a number of markets around Africa, Middle East, and we are anticipating some increased pipeline coming through on the M&A side as well in the next few months. But first and foremost, we're focused on organic rollout and closing our existing deals right now.
[Operator Instructions] We have no further questions on the line. So I'll hand it back to Kash to conclude the call.
Thanks, Bethany. Well, look, thank you very much, everybody, for joining us for our Q3 update. We look forward to talking to you in the second half of March when we give our full year results. So thank you again, and have a good day. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.