Helios Towers plc (HTWS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

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.