Helios Towers plc (HTWS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning or good afternoon all, and welcome to the Helios Towers H1 2024 Results Call. My name is Adam, and I'll be your operator today. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the floor to Tom Greenwood to begin. So Tom, please go ahead when you are ready.

Thanks very much, Adam. And hi, everyone, and welcome to the Helios Towers H1 2024 Global Investor Call. Really excited to talk to everyone today, and I hope you and your families are all doing well. So we're looking forward to providing you with our progress through the first half of 2024 and, of course, our outlook for the rest of the year. So on Page 2, we've got our usual lineup. Myself, Tom, Manjit Dhillon and Chris Baker-Sams will cover the business, strategic and financial highlights, and then look forward to the Q&A at the end. So moving to Page 5. Very pleased to say that our business continues to deliver with the strong momentum that we started the year with in Q1, and our outlook for the year remains strong. Our key strategic equity value creation targets, including ROIC, cash flow generation and deleveraging, have all seen improvements in the quarter, the half year and the last 12 months. And we remain laser focused as a team on expanding enterprise value, reducing leverage and creating significant equity value. As 4G and 5G continue to proliferate our markets, as well as general significant coverage and capacity demand requirements growing exponentially due to subscriber and data consumption growth, we continue to partner with all key customers in helping deliver high-quality mobile services to the people across our markets. Remember that in our markets, fixed line largely has been leapfrogged. So mobile, through our infrastructure, is the only form of connectivity for most of the population, serving all of their communication needs from AI to banking to streaming to health care to social media and, of course, standard voice and text call services. Independent forecast has the Middle East Africa region's data consumption growing exponentially by 4x through to 2028, this being the fastest growth anywhere in the world and really driving the demand for the infrastructure and services that we provide. Given these dynamics, our ability to deliver service excellence to our customers and our uniquely positioned portfolio, we've delivered over 1,600 tenancy additions in H1, a record number, and seen tenancy ratio expand 0.14x to over 2 tenants per tower in the past year, seeing us continuing to move well towards our 2026 strategic target of 2.2 tenants per tower. Tenancy growth has been the key driver of our financial metrics with revenue up 11%, EBITDA and portfolio free cash flow up 19% and 14%, respectively, and ROIC up 2 percentage points. Furthermore, we continue to strengthen our balance sheet with leverage reduction of 0.2x in the quarter and 0.6x year-on-year. We've secured our debt at fixed rates for the next 5 years and also saw upgrades from Moody's, S&P and Fitch in the quarter. In terms of full year outlook and following the strong performance in H1, we're tightening our guidance up at the bottom end for tenancies and EBITDA, and continue to track well towards our targets for leverage being below 4x and the inflection point for free cash flow being neutral this year and growing higher thereafter. Now turning to Page 6 where we can see the progress year-to-date versus our guidance. And as you can see from these, we have good confidence in achieving our guidance by year-end. Tenancies are well over the halfway point at 1,649 additions year-to-date. Q2 annualized EBITDA is $416 million already, so towards the higher end of our guidance before the midyear and with a similar dynamic for portfolio free cash flow. Our teams have done a great job working collaboratively with our customers on rollout, which has delivered a very high quarter of tenancy additions in Q2 with 888 added, which, to some extent, reflects some tenancies earmarked originally for H2 accelerating into H1. Hence, we haven't shifted the top end of our guidance yet, but we will continue to monitor progress and provide a further update at our Q3 release. We've got a strong pipeline of tenancies and are currently working with all key customers on rollout plans and executing that day in, day out. And you should not infer from this strong Q2 that there is any structural change and flattening off of growth; quite the opposite, in fact, and hence, there's more upside pressure on the guidance figure, I think, when we come to Q3. Now to Page 7 where we see how our tenancy ratio expansion is driving the equity value creation financial metrics. And over the 18 months since FY '22, when we completed the last of our 4 acquisitions, our tenancy ratio has expanded from 1.81 tenants per site to 2.01 to H1 '24, and this being the key driver for ROIC increase, which has increased 260 bps to 12.9% over that period. Furthermore, our bottom line free cash flow, which you can see at the bottom of the chart in red, is well on course for inflection this year, following the previous few years of high acquisitions and growth CapEx investments now starting to pay back. And we expect the minus $10 million at H1 to be neutral at year-end and continue upwards after that. On Page 8 is a slide you've seen before. And here, all I'm doing is reiterating our disciplined approach to capital allocation and returns. We continue to be focused on accretive organic growth and deleveraging, targeting below 4x by the end of this year and around 3x by 2026, at which point we expect there to be capacity for investor distributions. M&A remains at the low end of capital allocation policy for the foreseeable. Moving to Page 9, and here I wanted to showcase the success that our Oman team has had since starting operations there in December '22. Oman, as a reminder, was the largest of our 4 acquisitions a couple of years ago and really demonstrates well the execution of our integration and growth strategy. Oman is led for us by Jadawy Al Riyamy as the MD of our market there and supported by Phil Loridon at regional level. In focusing on our people and business excellence strategic pillar, from day 1, we ensured a strong localized team with 90% -- 91% local workforce. They've now trained almost half of our team on Lean Six Sigma as well as fully rolling out all of our systems and processes and embedding the Helios Towers culture of customer focus and excellence. All of this has contributed to a 92% improvement in power performance since starting operations and a 0.36x increase in tenancy ratio, which has been the key driver in the 46% EBITDA increase. We're very pleased with how our team and partners have performed so far and worked so collaboratively with our customers and are very excited for the future performance of Helios Towers Oman. And finally, to Page 10, we take a look at our sustainability KPIs, and I'm very pleased we're making good progress here across the board. Just to pull one out from here, we're continuing to increase our power uptime performance, reaching 99.99% across the portfolio in H1, meaning that our customers' networks are improving continually, and subscribers in our communities are experiencing better and more reliable mobile use quality. Our strategy on business excellence and leveraging technology to improve performance continues as we strive towards our 2026 targets across all of these measures. And with that, I'll hand over to Manjit, and look forward to talking with everyone in the Q&A.

Thanks, Tom. Hello, everyone. Great to speak with you all again. And starting on Slide #12, I'll be going through the financial results. And following on from what Tom spoke to you earlier, we remain focused, as always, on driving organic growth and lease-up on our portfolio, in turn supporting return on invested capital growth both across our new and existing markets. And on this slide, as usual, you see we've summarized our performance in the main KPIs, and I'll be going through those in more detail over the next few slides. So moving on to Slide 13, our site and tenancy growth. From a site perspective, we saw site growing at 2% year-on-year. That represents an incremental 315 sites year-on-year and 88 sites year-to-date. Just a reminder, we are very selective in our approach to new site rollout, ensuring that the sites have clear potential for lease-up, and then we try to partner with M&As to identify and build in the most attractive locations. From a tenancy perspective, we had near record organic tenancy additions of 2,691 tenancies year-on-year. That's a 10% increase. And as Tom mentioned, that's driven by our largest markets, including Oman, Tanzania and DRC. And we're particularly pleased to see that our tenancy ratio is now above 2, tracking well to our 2.2 tenancy ratio target by 2026, and that follows a 0.14 improvement in our tenancy ratio year-on-year. Moving on to Slide #14. We've seen revenue and EBITDA growth in all our reporting segments, and that's predominantly driven by the tenancy additions and tenancy ratio expansion which we've spoken through. We've seen revenue growth of 9% and EBITDA growth of 17% year-on-year, with the Middle East and North Africa and Central and Southern Africa delivering year-on-year growth of 35% and 20% respectively. Our EBITDA margin increased by 3 percentage points to 53%, again, all driven by lease-up and operational improvements. Now on to Slide 15. Here, we present the usual analysis which shows the key drivers of revenue and EBITDA growth. As with previous results, the key driver of growth has been tenancy additions with the escalators effectively working to offset macro movements to protect our EBITDA on a dollar basis. This is shown quite clearly on both charts. If you look at the left-hand bar of both bridges, tenancy growth effectively drives the entirety of both revenue and EBITDA growth year-on-year. Now as a tower company, this is what we want, to have our growth driven by tenancy, which comes down to our ability to identify attractive markets, enter them through buy-and-build opportunities and then partner with M&As to proactively lease up our space and drive operational improvements. This is exactly what we do and what we're focused on every day. Just as a reminder, though, we have escalators present in all customer contracts in one form or another. For example, for power, roughly 50% of our contracts have quarterly power escalators and 50% of annual power escalators. And these escalators go up and down depending on the local pricing of fuel and electricity. So if the local prices go up, then the escalator goes up; and if the prices go down, then the escalators go down. And for CPI, we have annual CPI escalators, and they typically kick in between December and February. I won't go through all the movements on the bridges in detail, but you can see here, similar to prior results analysis, that the net effect of the escalators is to broadly offset and protect the business from the impact of FX and power price movements, with the key driver of EBITDA growth being tenancy additions and operational improvements. In short, our business structure continues to be robust and resilient. On to Slide #16, and this focuses on our drivers of free cash flow. Our strong EBITDA performance has supported a portfolio free cash flow growth of 14% year-on-year. Our leveraged portfolio free cash flow increased roughly in line by 60% to $50 million, and that demonstrates our operational and financial leverage on a largely fixed interest cost base. We continue to follow a disciplined approach to capital deployment and only invest in projects that exceed our target ROIC thresholds, which Tom spoke to you earlier. Importantly, now over 90% of our debt is fixed. And with leverage set to reduce further, we expect to see our levered portfolio free cash flow grow over the coming years, especially as we expect capital-efficient EBITDA growth being leveraged on broadly fixed interest costs. And for H1, we started to see this effect with free cash flow improving to an outflow of $10 million compared to around negative $40 million outflow in the same period last year, with Q2 having generated a positive free cash flow of plus $18 million, and that represents the best organic performance we've seen since we doubled the size of the company. We continue to expect free cash flow to be neutral this year and growing there afterwards, and we reiterate that today. Moving on to Slide 17. CapEx has and continues to be tightly controlled. And in the first half of 2024, we incurred total CapEx of $80 million, which is primarily made up of $38 million of growth CapEx, and that reflects the strong tenancy growth that we've seen; and also $23 million of nondiscretionary CapEx. In terms of guidance, we've tightened our tenancy guidance upwards, as Tom mentioned, and we've marginally updated our guidance on CapEx from $150 million to $190 million to $155 million to $190 million accordingly. $45 million of nondiscretionary CapEx, which we spend on regular maintenance of our towers to keep them to high operational standards, that will remain consistent from the guidance we gave at the beginning of the year. Now on to Slide 18. I wanted to touch on our successful bond refinance we executed in May. As a summary, we raised an $850 million, 5-year bond at 7.5% coupon to repay our $650 million note, which was expiring in December '25, with the remainder of the proceeds repaying our local facilities in Senegal and partially the floating component of our group term loan, both of which carried higher interest costs compared to the new bond rate. As you can see on the chart on the right-hand side, with the bond refinanced, we have successfully pushed out our average remaining life of our debt from 2 years to 5 years. The transaction is leveraged neutral. And despite increases in U.S. treasuries we've seen over the past few years, our blended cost of debt has now remained broadly static at 7.3%. And in the call-out, you can see that the spread versus U.S. treasuries has reduced substantially when compared to when we listed. I think this transaction really reflects the improved credit profile of the company, having diversified into new markets, continue to grow organically and drive free cash flow and deleveraging, and the strong operational and financial performance we've delivered over the past few years. This was also reflected in the recent upgrades we received from Moody's and S&P to B1 equivalent as well as the positive outlook change by Fitch. I would also take a moment to thank our debt investors for their continued support. And excitingly, we have the capital and capital structure we need to deliver our growth ambitions over the coming years. And whilst there may be further macro volatility, we are fairly well insulated from that through the combination of this transaction and also our robust business model. On to Slide #19, just again touching on our leverage and debt. Our net leverage at the end of H1 has decreased by another 0.2x to 4.2, and that's 0.6 reduction year-on-year. There is no change to what we announced earlier this year, and we're committing to getting net leverage down to below 4x by the end of 2024. We have approximately $255 million of undrawn facilities at both group and opco levels and, together with circa $145 million of cash on balance sheet, means we have $400 million of available funds available to us. About 50% of the cash on balance sheet is held at group, with the remainder spread amongst the opcos for CapEx and working capital purposes. And as we've mentioned earlier, more than 90% of our debt is at fixed rate as we use the bond proceeds to repay the floating rate portion of our existing liabilities. And this now gives us a clear fixed cost base which we can leverage our growth on. And finally, moving to Slide 20. We've tightened upwards our 2024 guidance for tenancies, EBITDA, portfolio free cash flow and CapEx. We guide now to 1,900 to 2,100 on tenancy additions compared to 1,600 to 2,100 previously. For adjusted EBITDA, we expect to be in the range of $410 million to $420 million and portfolio free cash flow in the range of $280 million to $290 million, both tightened upwards by $5 million, at the low end of the previous guidance. With the expectation of higher tenancy growth, we expect CapEx to be in the range of $155 million to $190 million, which I went through a few slides ago. All of these changes will support reducing our net leverage to below 4x and free cash flows to become neutral. It's been a busy and strong start to the year. We're tracking well towards our full year guidance. And with that, I'll pass back to Tom to wrap up.

Thanks very much, Manjit. So just on Page 21 now for the key takeaways. As you can see, we've had a very strong start to the year in terms of supporting our customers' rollout with record tenancy additions. That's fed through to a strong double-digit EBITDA growth and, of course, the ROIC expansion, deleveraging continuing, and well on track for our full year targets with guidance being tightened upwards and really continued focus on organic growth, capital efficiency, ROIC expansion and deleveraging for the full year and beyond. So thank you, everyone, for listening, and we'll now open up to the Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question today comes from David Wright from Bank of America.

I guess just back to the guidance a little, you've obviously done -- had a very, very strong H1 in terms of the tenancy adds. And if we take the midpoint of new guidance at, say, 2,000 and you've pretty well -- you've done over 1,600 in the first half, why such a change in pace implied in H2, effectively falling around sort of 3 quarters? Why is that? And then I guess with the very, very strong sort of tenancy momentum, I guess the question is, why is that maybe not dropping through towards a slightly more positive view on the EBITDA line? I appreciate you brought up the low end, but not maybe gapping up the higher end by a similar amount. It's a difficult question to ask, but is there a quality of tenancy adds effect here where maybe they're coming in at a sort of lower revenue? Or is it a phasing effect? Did they only come in at the end of the quarter? I'm just trying to sort of piece this together. It just feels like the tenancy guidance is so very, very cautious, unless there are other dynamics at work. So just appreciate any color you guys can give on that.

Yes, thanks, David. Tom here. I'll start off and, Manjit, chip in as well. So I guess a couple of things there, David. Yes, just the first one, just on your last point on the timing effect of tenancies, absolutely, yes, there is always a timing effect of tenancies. The tenancy number reported is the tenancies achieved by the last day of any quarter. And so therefore, unless all of the tenancies in that quarter come in on the first day of that quarter, which obviously never really happens, you don't see the full effect financially in the given quarter. But obviously, all of these tenancies coming on stream are all standard tenancies with us at typically 10- to 15-year minimum terms and then renewals thereafter. So from a future annuity point of view, the tenants are now on, they're paying, and that's there for many, many years ahead. So that's why the financials in the quarter don't always quite sync up with the actual tenancy numbers, but very, very pleased with the performance of the teams. And yes, look, I think just in terms of the sort of overall guidance, I guess the sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation that you did, yes, look, it's midyear, we felt that it was right to slightly tighten things. We'll give more update in Q3. You should not infer that there's any kind of major slowdown happening or anything like that. We're very, very busy with rollouts. We're busy with all our major customers, and we'll certainly be giving a lot more color on that at the Q3 update.

But I guess, just if I may jump in, Tom, I don't know whether Manjit was about to add, but when you mentioned you shouldn't infer a major slowdown, but the guidance tells us there's a major slowdown in tenancy adds, right? It's basically falling by 75% in the second half. So we shouldn't infer it, but it's kind of presented in the guidance. So what's the missing part there?

Well, we're being cautiously optimistic at the midyear. We've outperformed in H1, so I think it's very important to make the point. The Q2 tenancy addition was a huge effort by the team. That was certainly an outperformance. The full year guidance remains. In fact, we've tightened the lower end, as we have done with the key financial metrics. And I think the Q2 outperformance should not be seen as a negative. If anything, it should be seen as a positive. And as more tenancies come in over the coming months, we'll be monitoring as to what guidance we give at Q3, which, as I mentioned earlier, I suspect there's more upwards pressure on that than downwards pressure. But we've got more work to do to secure them and roll out as we move through the year. But we're very, very confident of doing that, as the performance in H1 has demonstrated, and we'll certainly be giving further updates on that.

Yes. And I'll just add as well. Look, tenancies are never evenly spread throughout any year. That's never been the case for our company history. Typically, H2 is actually a bigger phasing than H1, except for the last 2 years. Now as Tom mentioned, the tenancies are positioned at the end of the period. But what you want to try and do is lock in those tenancies as quickly as possible because they will give you typically lifelong cash flow, so you want to try and get that into the business quickly. So what you're seeing at the moment is Q3 tenancies being bought in into the H1, so we can start to earn that income as it goes through the end of the year. Now as we know from our tenancy pipeline as it stands today, it looks a little bit more back-end loaded because we've already bought some of those Q3s into H1. The rest will probably come in more broadly in Q4. But still, standing back, and we look at this from a year-on-year basis, we're still guiding to about 10% growth in tenancies year-on-year organically and also growing in really quality markets. Just to remind you, we're growing in markets like DRC and Oman, dollarized markets, which give further strength to the business, all of those things are really, really important, as well as Tanzania which has a multi-payer market. So we're feeling very confident. We're feeling very happy about the operational delivery in terms of getting these in. And I think this is actually all positive moves for the year more generally.

If I might just add, Manjit, and hopefully I'm not going to monopolize too much longer, but when you say bringing them in earlier, what's kind of changed in the execution of colo to, all of a sudden, bring in such a kind of structural shift of tenancies into Q2? Has there been any kind of new process, any innovation? Or is it the learning curve in Oman, perhaps? Has there been any sort of specific change that means you've been able to bring these guys on earlier?

Yes, I would say it's a bit anything kind of structural as such in terms of anything revolutionary happening. It's just the teams are really, really improving on a day-to-day basis. And we're utilizing all the Lean Six Sigma training that we have and we've implemented, particularly in new markets like Oman. And you've seen the fruits of that, and that's why we want to do that deep dive in the overall presentation. And so it really is just operational excellence. It's also the fact that we do have our sites upgraded in the main so that they are colo ready. So when those orders are coming through, we're really pushing to try and get colo orders rolled out as quickly as possible and, where possible, within 24 hours in certain instances. So that's kind of what we're doing, and you're starting to see some of the benefits of that come through the numbers.

The next question is from Graham Hunt from Jefferies.

I think 2 questions and then maybe just one technical one. First, just staying on the guidance. I don't know if there's any color you can give us on the quantum of tenancies that were brought forward from Q3 into Q2 that could sort of get us -- give us a sense of the normalized run rate. And then thank you for sort of confirming they are what you'd see as standard contracts. Should we, therefore, infer that actually, because you brought them on a little bit earlier, that now your second half EBITDA and cash flow is probably ticking up a bit higher than you maybe first thought it would do at the beginning of the year? And then second question, just on the investment environment, I hear you when you say you remain laser-focused on deleveraging. But just wondering, as we're starting to see bond yields tick down a little bit, is there anything in the pipeline that you're seeing that if we were to see another 100 basis points lower, that perhaps some investment opportunities would start to come or start to look attractive on your cost of capital basis? And then last, very last one, technical on tax, in the quarter, that was a little bit higher than we were expecting. Could you just -- do you have any guidance for the full year cash tax payment?

Yes. Thanks very much, Graham. I'll take the first couple, and then Manjit can take the tax one. Yes, look, I mean if you look at the sort of trend of recent quarters, you can probably say a couple of hundred or so extra were in Q2 and sort of brought forward. That would align roughly with previous quarters or previous recent quarters at least. Just on the M&A, we're really just focused on in-market organic growth. We're very focused on continuing to delever. We're very focused on accreting ROIC and driving equity shareholder return. And we're not looking at large M&A expansion plans for the foreseeable. So no, if rates move down 100 bps, something like that is not going to tempt us to move off this course. We're very disciplined and see it continuing for the foreseeable.

Sure, I'll take the tax point. So yes, so look, it's all about timing when it comes to tax, and sometimes it can be lumpy. So typically, you do see tax payments happening in the first half of the year. We will expect to see a few more kind of eking through to the second half as well though. So one of the guidances we give is that to model anywhere between 4% to 5% of revenue as taxes. So I'd have that in the model and keep that steady. But otherwise, nothing more to add on the taxes, it's all BAU really.

The next question comes from John Karidis from Deutsche Bank.

I'd just like to ask the question on guidance a little bit differently. It would be really useful if you went through the sort of top 3 markets individually. You tell us at the end how many competitors are there, but we can't really get a flavor for what the competitive intensity is there. Just to give us some confidence that mobile operators are not pulling back from capital expenditure because a couple of your customers and, among them, your biggest customer is talking about sort of counting the pennies a bit more intensely, not just in one market, but in multiple markets. So if you can sort of give some assurance there, that would be good, please. And then very -- my second question is super simple. Any update on the Oman bolt-on opportunity in terms of timing and if you could remind us what the number is in terms of your investment there if you make it?

Yes, thanks, John. Yes, so I'll take that one. For the 3 major markets or 3 largest markets, Tanzania, DRC and Oman, I guess Tanzania and DRC are similar in mobile operator dynamic for major mobile operators in each market and sort of reasonably evenly spread market share. And these are all large multinational mobile operators with whom we've worked with for many, many years. And then Oman is a 3-player market, which obviously we've been operating in for a little over 18 months, but doing business with all the operators there. I think it's worth just remembering, for DRC and Tanzania, mobile subscriber penetration on a unique basis is still quite substantially below 50% with very high growth year-on-year, high single digits or low double digits. Of course, data growth is exponential in those markets as well. And what we're seeing is basically continued need to closing both coverage and capacity gaps in the networks as well as 4G and 5G upgrades happening at the same time. Now as we all know, rollout comes a little bit in fits and bursts in this industry, which is natural when mobile operators are choosing to do large rollouts. And if you remember, in 2023, we saw a real kind of outperformance in DRC, particularly with a number of the mobile operators were all doing large rollouts, and we took a very large part of that. And we're very proud of our role in supporting the rollout there. DRC has been a little bit quieter in the first half of this year, which you'd naturally expect after really the biggest-ever rollout year last year, albeit that is actually now picking up a bit more now in the second half. And Tanzania and Oman have both had very significant rollouts in the first half of this year, which is continuing. So we're very happy with our progress in all those markets. We're very close to all our customers in those markets, continuing to work with all of them on rollouts as we speak and plans for the remainder of this year and into next year. And I think the dynamics in the markets are very, very strong. Of course, we are the leading tower operator by a long way in all 3 of those markets as well. So we have a substantial portfolio that we're able to sell for colocation. And of course, we do build-to-suits as well for all major customers.

I don't know, just before we go to the Oman point, can I ask again? The mobile operators keep talking about renegotiating, not just with TowerCos, but with sort of pretty much all their suppliers, given the mess they're in with FX and inflation. So can you give us some assurance that these type of discussions, the pricing discussions are not exceptionally intense now versus before? Is it business as usual or not?

Yes, absolutely, business as usual. I think what you're referring to is heavily focused on one market, to be honest, where we do not operate, and that being Nigeria where there has been FX challenges that are quite publicly known about. And I think that we continue business as usual. We're working with all our major customers as we speak. We're rolling out probably, as I'm talking, for most of them today, and we're not seeing any out-of-ordinary pricing pressures that's unusual for any business. Remember, I guess a lot of our markets are innately hard currency. So if you think of Oman, which is hard-pegged to the dollar, DRC which is dollarized, so everything there has to be in dollars; Senegal, Congo B, which are hard euro-pegged. And within our other markets, we have mixes of the hard currency and local currency contracts with power price escalators mixed in, which also provide a degree of dollarization, given power is driven by the price of oil, which is itself dollar-denominated. So we've got a very good portfolio mix, both from a country perspective, a customer perspective and also a currency perspective. Over 70% of our EBITDA is hard currency. And the local currency portion is all power prices and CPI-linked escalators. So we've got a robust position on that, and that's how we do our business, and that's how we'll continue to do our business.

Great, Tom. If it's possible to get an answer on Oman, that would be lovely, please.

Yes. So yes, no timing confirmation on that as yet. We'll continue to monitor that and see what happens, if it happens. And the rough amounts are a little over $50 million total, which HT would provide 70% of. But yes, the timings are not certain at all yet, so no update on that as of now.

The next question comes from Rohit Modi from Citi.

Most of my questions have been answered. Just a follow-up on a mix of all the questions, particularly the interest from mobile operators. Given site additions have been slowing down, and I believe site additions bring a more sustainable, long-term, better-quality revenue than colocations, I understand there has been a focus on collocations, but declining in site additions. Is this something that you have -- that was part of your guidance you were expecting? And is there any kind of a major slowdown that you're seeing from the operator side? If you can give a bit of color around that. Second, just to confirm the decline -- the $53 million FX impact you have on the P&L, is that particularly related to this decline? And the change in your policy around the debt where you have moved some of the amortized cost, is that going to P&L?

It's Tom. Let me take the first question, and Manjit can take the second question. So just on colos versus build-to-suits, for sure, the major rollout focus has been on colos. That's been, in part, our strategy to focus on lower capital intensity growth, and colos being the lowest capital intensity products that we have; and partly what mobile operators are looking for in terms of increased capacity, increased coverage where we have site locations already and, therefore, don't need to build a new site and technology upgrades. So all of that has driven a much higher percentage of colos versus new site builds or build-to-suits, as we call them. Just a slight correction there in terms of your mention on the financial quality of new sites being better. The financial quality is the same. These colos and build-to-suits operate under the same contracts, same terms, everything. So the financial quality of the revenue streams coming in are identical, whether that's a colo or a build-to-suit. The build-to-suit requires us building a new site, which has a higher CapEx amount than a colo does, which is just putting a tenant on an existing site, so it has minimal CapEx. And that's just really the only difference between them. And then, Manjit, do you want to just take the second question?

Yes, sure. Rohit, sorry, I was slightly struggling to hear you, but I think it was in relation to FX. So there's 2 component parts to this. So one is part of the bridge that we walked through where you see a bit of an FX decline as a consequence of revenue impact. And that had a minus 6% year-on-year, but that's kind of compensated by the CPI escalators. So from that perspective, it's kind of net-net. I think I heard you also mentioned P&L. So I'm assuming you're also referring to some of the FX pieces that may be going to finance costs. Yes, that's still in relation to predominantly some of the movements that we've seen in FX rates across the markets. In particular, you've got some historical elements related to shareholder loan reclassifications, although that is changing as an accounting policy at Helios. So that will be going through other comprehensive income in due course, so you see that decline period-on-period. But really, this is where we do operational transactions across the group in the first half of the year. So those are the few impacts there of FX. But in general, as a business, we're pretty well covered by all of these. And from a cash perspective, FX is well covered by all of the tenancy ratio movements that we have and all the escalators that we have going through the group. So then you might see an accounting impact, but from a cash flow perspective, they're very much under control.

The next question is from Maurice Patrick from Barclays.

Maurice here from Barclays. Just a couple from me, please. The first one just, I guess, a bigger-picture question. I mean you've talked about some of the growth you're seeing from your clients being capacity and coverage. But just, what is that split in terms of urban and rural in terms of your tenancy adds, but also in new sites? Is it majority sort of urban capacity? Or is there a majority coming from more sort of rural coverage build-outs? And then just related to that, is it safe to assume that the vast majority, if not all, of your tenancy growth is coming from your core MNOs as opposed to growth coming from other verticals or new entrants? And then just one sort of small one, given the IHS, MTN news flow yesterday around the restructuring of that contract in Nigeria. Are you seeing calls from your customers to change the structure to have more local FX elements? I think you've touched about it in the past, but any updates on that thinking would be very welcome.

Yes, thanks, Maurice. Let me start. I mean, first of all, on the urban versus rural, yes, like majority urban or suburban. That's where we're seeing most of it. We did do some rural sites as well. But we're seeing quite a lot of coverage and capacity needs in urban and suburban areas, and that's where our customers are focusing, albeit still doing some rural as well. Just on the IHS contract point, yes, look, I won't comment on another company's contract. But in respect of our contract, it's fairly normal to do renewals of tenancy master lease agreements from time to time. We have a kind of very diverse spread of customers across the group. And so, therefore, the sort of percentage contribution from a single customer's contract for Helios is relatively low. So perhaps it wouldn't hit the headlines in the way that it did yesterday. But yes, we continue to work with all of our customers. And when ones come up for renew, there are certain terms in there that are important to us, and we ensure that we maintain those ones where needed. And sorry, Maurice, can you just remind me of your second question? I just...

Yes, it was just to understand -- I'm assuming the majority, if not all of your tenants, are coming from your major customers, your major MNOs. Just making sure there's nothing coming from sort of new entrants or other third parties or different types of tenancies would be helpful.

Yes, absolutely. All of -- vast, vast, vast majority, virtually 100% from core MNOs, absolutely.

[Operator Instructions] As we have no further questions, I'll hand the call back to Tom for some concluding remarks.

Brilliant. Well, thank you, everyone. Thanks for your questions. Thanks for listening in today, really appreciate it. And as always, we're available for calls or meetings, so please do get in touch if you'd like any follow-up. And we really look forward to speaking with you again at Q3 for further updates, and look forward to completing another successful year at Helios Towers. So have a great day, everyone, and we'll talk soon. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. Thank you very much for your attendance. You may now disconnect your lines.