MTN Group Limited (MTN) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to Day 2 of our Capital Markets Day. My name is Thato Motlanthe. I'm the Head of Investor Relations at MTN Group. I just want to take a couple of minutes to outline a couple of things this morning. And those of you who joined us yesterday, welcome back, another dinner. I trust it was informative. I mean really just some context as to how we've put together this Capital Markets Day. You have seen we've got a CMD Day, and at the risk of sort of rehashing some of the things that all of you are kind of now deep in on a daily basis. We do have a broad range of stakeholders who might not be familiar with the markets that we're in and the conditions that we're facing. I think second to that, a lot of the conversations that we've had as we've tripped around engaging with some of you guys. Has that been -- it has been a macro story before we could get into the company. And we thought instead of being -- pretending to be economists and quoting financial journals, let's bring the guys in who are on the ground, give you a little bit of color. So we hope that was useful. And you would have seen that as much as we're facing challenges, there's a lot of opportunity in our markets. And that's really how we position as MTN. I think the second thing is that we -- you may not have seen the microsite that we've set up. It has a lot of useful information. We've got the list of presenters. We've got the detailed agenda. And we've now uploaded the presentation that you'll see this morning. I do flag the podcast tab for another reason. Then there is a lot of useful information about some of the other businesses and functions that are driving Ambition 2025. I think the second thing is that we do have a good story to tell, and I wouldn't dare steal Ralph and sort of his thunder by unpacking that. But we do have a good story to tell. And you would have seen some of our posters that our theme for the CMD is realizing Ambition 2025, progress -- let me get this right: progress, prospects and priorities. So I think it really captures what we're trying to get to you today. And I hope that as we go through the presentations, it will come through quite clearly. The third thing and quite importantly is just really just thank all of the MTNers and the groups and teams that have helped us put this together. From the event, the content that I've just talked about, the presentations that you'll see, I think it has been a massive collaborative effort. We've worked -- it's been a massive effort under a lot of pressure, very short time frames, and we're happy to present it to you today. So those are really the 3 points that I wanted to get across. I saw a more dynamic MC will carry us through the day. And with that, thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming. It is the first big in-person or hybrid in-person event that we're doing, and we thank you very much for coming in. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Thato. Thank you very much for that, and indeed, welcome, everybody, for the Part 2 or Day 2 of our Capital Markets Day. Special welcome to everybody that's here in person at the MTN Innovation Centre. And a warm welcome to everybody that's joining us online. As you all know, we are broadcasting online via our webcast platform. That will allow everybody that's joining us virtually to also be able to participate through the Q&A that we'll be having throughout the day. On this specific day being Day 2, we're going to spend the day unpacking MTN's Ambition 2025 strategy, as Thato has already said. We're going to talk about what the business is focused on. We're going to also focus on the platform businesses, very exciting indeed, that are causing a shift, of course, in MTN's business portfolio. But before we kick off, just some housekeeping rules. First of all, safety first. There are 2 emergency exits: 1 on the top left here, as you probably likely to have used it most of you guys, and there's another 1 down here as well on my right. So please make sure you know which one is closest to us should there be an emergency. In terms of bathrooms, there are restrooms in both exits as well. If you use the top exit next to the tech bar reception, you'll find the bathrooms. And here on this side, the bathrooms are just next door to the elevators. For the WiFi, there is free WiFi. It is MTN after all. And you can just use the QR code that's going to be on screen. There's a couple of posters around the room that also have the QR code. And for those that are going to be using the username and password, you'll see them there as well. You can also do that. For those that are going to be participating on social media, Twitter or any other platform, you may use the hashtag MTNCMD23, MTNCMD23. The hashtag is -- that's what we'll be using for the day. And if you want to follow us on Twitter or quote us on Twitter, the Twitter handle is @MTNGroup. Of course, we've made all the provisions in case there is any load shedding throughout the day. The facility here at MTN has uninterrupted power supply. So you should probably not even know it is load shedding. But if, for whatever reason, this is what God has planned as life tends to sometimes, I'll make sure that get on stage and help you deal with that for a few minutes as the lines get back. Right, I also have a disclaimer to share with you, the standard disclaimer that is very, very detailed. It would have been communicated to you when you RSVP'd. Just in terms of the information that is shared, as you know, we are a publicly listed company, and we want to make sure that you received all the information, noting the disclaimer that applies to all the MTN speakers and their presentations today. Yesterday, for those who were here, they would know that in our tea breaks and our lunches, we had the little drum to indicate that you must come back. It did not work, okay? So it's -- because most of you were just standing there and dancing to the music. So what I'm going to do today is that if you hear my voice, I ask you to please make your way back in. That essentially signals that we probably are 60 seconds away from kicking off in the next session. So please enjoy your lunch, enjoy your tea, but look out for this coarse voice. When I call you back, please make your way back into the room. And if you need any help, indeed, Natasha is our resident model. Anybody that's dressed like her with that black and MTN shirt with the wonderful African print, anyone who's wearing that shirt can help you around. You can ask for anything around the building. You get lost, you don't know where the bathrooms are, feel free to ask anybody that you see. We're now going to get into Day 2. And up next, we will be hearing from our Group President and CEO, Ralph Mupita. He will be providing an overview of Ambition 2025, the strategy that was, of course, introduced back in 2021 with the intent of leading digital solutions for Africa's progress. Along with him will be our Group CFO, Tsholo Molefe, who is going to take us through MTN's all important financial and capital allocation framework, which I'm pretty sure you guys are all interested in and also explain how the strong balance sheet that MTN has will position it to well absorb the shocks that are rising through very tough economic environment in most of the markets. But first up, let me hand over to Ralph.

Andile, thanks very much, and very good morning from me. I trust that you all enjoyed Day 1 yesterday, those who joined us physically at Innovation Centre and those virtually. I think those who joined us physically and enjoyed the dinner, you'd well remember some of the key phrases that came out yesterday. I'm remembering the one that says, "It takes one with vested interest to catch another one with vested interest." And then I think we've got a bit of rivalry here between speedboats and tankers. And I think the speedboat says they will take the tanker of Nigeria. So I trust that you enjoyed the framework we had yesterday and managed to also engage with our management teams. We get a lot of feedback from time to time that we want to see more than just Tsholo and Ralph, and I trust that the 2 days gives you a sense of the depth of the management that we have and the executives who are actually prosecuting the strategy that we have. So I trust that also, that the macro backdrop set of issues were well articulated yesterday. And listening to those who would argue are probably more authoritative than us. And so today, we will focus a lot more on the strategy itself and how we are progressing. As Thato has mentioned, the real emphasis for us kind of almost at the half year point of a 5-year strategy is to talk about the progress we've made. Progress is not always linear and smooth. So we'll be upfront and honest about the things that we're dealing with and the challenges. So that's the part of the progress. And obviously, the priorities, there are some priorities in the near term that we will cover to give you a sense of how we're thinking about navigating the conditions that we have. And also the prospects that we see over the medium to longer term. So we'll cover all of that. Just coming through, you guys are very familiar with the framing of MTN and all our numbers and data. And as Thato mentioned, obviously, we also have investors who are less familiar with the story and trying to get up to speed, but I won't spend too much time on that. When we had our last Capital Markets Day, we had service revenue for the company of about ZAR 117 billion. We're pretty much at the end of last year, not too far from the ZAR 200 billion. So added close on to ZAR 30 billion of service revenue. We've also added an additional 20 million active data subscribers. We added 22 million of fintech subscribers. So decent progress against some of the headwinds that we spoke about and the teams will cover. We've also been able, in that time, to maintain an attractive margin profile for the business, but we also executed on what we said we would do about focusing on a Pan-African strategy. We were 21 markets the last time we spoke. We're down to 19 markets. We're out of Syria. We're out of Yemen. And obviously, you're aware of our progress of getting out of Afghanistan. It hasn't been super easy, but we've stayed true to the course of what we said we would do, which is to really focus on the markets that we think we can have impact. I'm also very proud of the fact that as a business, we've maintained the most valuable brand position, the most admired African brand. And pretty much last week, we also were given the shout-out in terms of the work we're doing in Africa on planet and people. So really, really powerful brand that gives us the ability to deliver in challenging markets and also obviously work with the nation states, and we had a bit of that dialogue yesterday. I mean I always like to talk to investors, particularly investors who are fairly new to the company about the portfolio of the business, and we're running the business predominantly on a geographic basis. That's how we have kind of our operating model with South Africa, Nigeria and markets. And I think to stay at pretty much a 30,000-foot view, you'll see the way we try and think about it, South Africa, obviously, more advanced in terms of the technology trends. It's much more stable. It's highly cash generative for us, enables to upstream to the group, helps us to service kind of the group interest on the debt, our finances, the center and obviously helps with the dividend. We've said to investors that the current dividend policy actually is underpinned by SA cash flows. So South Africa has a portfolio role really to anchor pretty much the group. Nigeria, as you can see, is where the kind of earnings growth and momentum is. The last time we spoke to you at the Capital Markets Day, what you see there in the chart is 46% kind of EBITDA. That was 39%. So notwithstanding the headwinds that Karl and team have faced, we've actually seen the business kind of power through and continue to grow strongly, whether it was SIM registration and the issues that we faced. And then markets, when you think about it from a portfolio perspective, actually, that's where the success story of fintech, mobile money has been, 75% actually of our subscriber base actually coming from the markets, and I'll explain the market structure. So obviously, a lot of detail there, and you guys will be familiar with the numbers. And the way we are managing the business, there have been a few tweaks to how we're managing the business to support the strategy and how we're executing 4 key points I'd raise. Firstly, we've put the market structure, where Ebenezer will come on stage -- will talk about their priorities, to actually look at, in particular, how we share best practice across the regions but also, importantly, the work we're doing to do the structural separation for fintech and fiber. We've got to do this in a way that we don't lose value. I often have a discussion with investors. They say, "Why aren't you moving so much quicker? Why haven't you completely demerged?" There's a lot of value that is [indiscernible] that I sometimes talk to my teams and say, it's kind of invisible value. So you've got to do the structural separation of fiber and fintech, and Ebenezer's role and one of his important roles is to make sure that decoupling is done in a sensible manner so that we preserve the value and end up at the end state that we're looking at. And Ebenezer works very closely with Yolanda and Ismail within that journey. And he's also looking to work through these orderly exits of the Middle East. The exits are simple to exit on a corporate finance basis, but there's a lot of tidying up that Ebenezer and Ismail still need to do. So the market structure is part of what helps us make sure that we're able to execute our strategy. And internally, we talk a lot about performing and transforming the company at the same time. That requires a very delicate balance, and that's the responsibility that Ebenezer will have. The other change we made is to bring legal and regulatory together under Lele. We saw a lot of efficiencies in bringing the legal and regulatory. Often, the regulatory issues have got deep legal issues, and Lele and the team are giving us a whole bunch of efficiencies running there. We've elevated our strategy and transformation, again, to manage the portfolio of change very carefully and sequentially so that we don't drop anything in between the execution. As I said, this is about perform and transform at the same time. And Chika helps us to navigate the change programs, looking at what -- how we sequence, and we are always dynamically looking at what do we allocate resources to, et cetera. And obviously, we've also brought to the top table sustainability. And on Nompilo and their team, and kudos to her and actually Mazen and Paul, for all the stuff that we -- I'll talk a little bit later around sustainability that we've progressed. So that's the team that actually executes, and Tsholo and I have the pleasure to talk about the work that they do. But there's been a logic to the tweaks and the changes that we've made to support that -- the strategy so that nothing falls through the cracks as we look to do what I said, which is really perform and transform at the same time. Before I get into the strategy, just a little bit of a context, and I won't spend too much time on this. The last 2 years, there's a whole range of macro issues we've had to deal with. And not to spend time and go back to what was covered yesterday, obviously, a lot of geopolitical and social issues and macro. Some of them will be covered later, such as load shedding in SA by Charles. I won't steal his thunder. But what we had to do is navigate quite a lot of complexity on the regulatory front, and we've come through in good shape. On the SIM registrations, you will remember the issues around NIN-SIM registration, and also in Ghana, we've been communicating how we deal with that, how we focus on the regulatory issues and our disciplines around risk management. Nigeria and Ghana probably have been the most material, and we've managed to progress through and actually come out actually much stronger on the other side of the SIM registration issues that we've had to deal. Spectrum has been a big issue across our markets. South Africa, we successfully got through. Nigeria, 100 megahertz of 3,500 that's allowing us to push ahead. The tank is pushing ahead with 5G, and you'll hear from Karl a little bit later. And we've had to deal with a whole bunch of tax issues. And our approach to tax compliance is really about kind of a zero tolerance to noncompliance issue. We have a -- I mean there is no point in [ denuding ] nation states that we say we want to partner by being too clever around tax, and we've dealt with the issues that come our way. And obviously, we've had to deal with a lot of license renewals away. So these challenges, for sure, are in our markets, but we've arranged ourselves to be able to work through and emerge on the other side, largely in the shape that we've wanted to be. I'll leave my colleagues to talk more in detail. We've developed a framework since last year where we really stood back and said, "As we look at the macro headwinds that are impacting us, how do we navigate this company through these headwinds and ideally come out the other end stronger?" So we've developed what we call internally the 8-point plan. And today, you'll hear specifics from each of the executives who will speak, which is basically how do we think about the commercial agenda, how do we think about supply chain networks and financial resilience. I think the big topic often we hear with the investors is really around the commercial agenda. How is inflation impacting our business? And how are we thinking about pricing? Again, not to steal the thunders of those will present later, CVM, price optimization is a big topic in our organization, where we drill down to the level of granularity of how we think about above-the-line pricing and below-the-line pricing. And the bottom line is a lot of work is happening around below-the-line pricing. I mean Jens is here and the colleagues. And we are working through systematically across the businesses to ensure that we bring back and restore our financial formula, which Tsholo will talk about, which is, over time, when service revenue growing above blended inflation across our markets. Again, we'll talk to that in the context of today. If I jump to network, obviously, the big issues are TowerCo contracts. We have ATC, we have IHS across our portfolio. We've been engaging with ATC in Ghana and in Uganda, IHS in many markets such as Nigeria here in SA, Côte d'Ivoire to name a few. We've been going through a process of looking at those contracts, working with the parties. I mean there's a big component of IHS towers that the lease ends end of 2024. So we're in that process of reviewing. And we do that independently. Yes, we are a shareholder in IHS, but when we look at that portfolio for Karl that comes in 2024, I mean, we exercised the disciplines of saying, Karl and the team will put forward what is the best deal. And obviously, in due course, when you complete that, we'll come and update you where we are. A lot of work that you have been familiar with are on financial resilience. We took the steps, pre the pandemic and into some of the polycrisis issues we faced last year to look at our expense base and benchmark ourselves across all expense categories. And we've used the A.T. Kearney approach, which is really about benchmarking ourselves against a comparable group on a top quartile basis, all the way through cost of sales and OpEx schedule. So it's a very detailed and granular program. And obviously, Tsholo has been updating how we're progressing. That work continues, and that's helped us actually in the last year to get through with a decent financial profile. EBITDA margin is fairly resilient. And we focused also a lot on the debt. Now our Board sometimes say, "Ralph, you and Tsholo talk too much about holdco leverage." Because when you look at the group leverage, actually, there really isn't an issue. But we focused on the holdco level because we think it's important to deal with the mismatch between the dollar bonds that we have, particularly the 2024 and 2026. And hence, we've developed the capital allocation framework that is really focused on saying, for now, when we say, we're putting the bulk of our capital in taking advantage of the opportunity, the next in [ betting ] order is the faster deleveraging. And once we've delivered on that, obviously, we have to review and reflect, is the capital allocation framework still appropriate. We'd like to think that, that is ultimately a nice problem to have. So we have this program, and you're hear later from our colleagues around how we're implementing. I won't spend too much time on how we've achieved, not to pat ourselves in the back. It's for you guys to tell us as you buy the shares and so forth. But I would like to think that over the last couple of years, from a progress point of view, we've basically delivered financially, in aggregate, what we said we would do. We built out our networks, we're growing subscribers, picking up market share, and we're seeing the financial profile improve. When I joined, I was really worried about our return on equity in our segment. We're delivering a return on equity that's below the cost of equity. And you could argue maybe we should have another metric like ROIC. But this is just a measure of how we've progressed 10 percentage points improvement and really having a focus on ensuring that there's enough headroom between the cost of equity and the actual return that we deliver. And again, the message on deleveraging has been one where we've been kind of razor-sharp focus. As I said, sometimes, some of our Board members say, "Ralph, you should talk about the group leverage because actually, you don't really have a gearing problem." But let's have that conversation once we've dealt with the Eurobonds in time. So this is just a little bit of a snapshot of what we've done, and for many of you, this is a familiar territory. On Ambition 2025, just data that you guys are very familiar with, we're calling out that the case for digital and financial inclusion across our markets remains strong and compelling. We remain highly convicted of that story. When you see the level of mobile internet penetration or people who have bank accounts, the cash economies we're still dealing with, there's enormous opportunity, and we are arranging ourselves to be able to take advantage of. That is the underlying thesis of our strategy, as you well know. I mean this is one of my charts, and Thato always says, "Ralph, this chart, I think you overdo it." And I said, look, I mean it's a way of thinking about the demand side in our markets. And really, the things that are core to our investment case, as we've presented to you is, are we going to be able to see data growing strongly? Are we going to be able to see fintech growing strongly? And are we going to be able to monetize that adoption and the growth, obviously, is an important point. And I think the data speaks for itself that even post COVID and even into this polycrisis period, we find ourselves, the story is resilient and, obviously, always trying to balance adoption and monetization on both the drivers of growth going into the future. The strategy, you'd all be familiar with, and I won't talk to all the elements. You can -- by now, you probably can say, it's kind of off by heart, 4 pillars to the strategy: the platforms, the industry-leading connectivity. Internally, our conversations with the team is the battle to win the right to do other things is that we must have lead -- industry-leading connectivity operations. That's where we make 90% of our money. And therefore, we must never lose focus on that. The creating shared value is an important part of our strategy, as you know. And then obviously, the portfolio work we're doing. The one thing that's new here, and I'd like to call out Paul Norman, who's head -- Group HR Head and the broader leadership team, we've worked a lot on our values. The MTN values that we've had up to the time the Board adopted the new values this year, end of quarter 1, have sustained this and been -- have underpinned the culture and how we do things around at MTN. But we thought we need to review, and we spent actually a year working with the business going up and down through the organizing to say, what has been good about our past and what are more aspirational values. And so we went through a very organic process. And I know for investors, sometimes, it seems like this is the [ holy ] stuff. I would argue that this is the stuff that creates the foundation for the right culture in the company that then delivers the results. If you get that wrong, you'll end up not getting your results. So we've done a lot of work, and these are values that we're busy embedding and entrenching and have a group-wide program to engage all our OpCos because if we at group have these well embedded, we can sleep kind of easy at not knowing that we have the right people prosecuting the strategy that we have. I just want to take a view on how we are -- how we've kind of marked our own homework in terms of progressing on some of the KPIs that underpin the strategy as we're progressing. And you can probably argue with the colors. But I think it is helpful to have a conversation with capital holders around how we're progressing. And as Thato has mentioned, there's -- the strategy has got many components. And today, I won't cover many of them. We're not going to talk about the progress that we covered under ayoba and other areas. And we'll be very selective on the ones that we want to update where we think it's important for the investors to understand how we're thinking about priorities and where there may be well some shifts. So this is how we see -- and I would argue that on the platform side, largely in progress. On the MoMo, 69 million subs, getting to 100 million, we'll get there. We feel pretty confident you will hear from Karl and Eli Hini how we're thinking about the Nigeria PSB opportunity and how we think we can scale relatively quickly all the way up to 2025 with the opportunity and the license that we have there in Nigeria. Active data, that's the core engine, 137 million out of 200 million. For those who do the quick maths, it means we've got to do 20 million a year to get to 200 million. So we've got to push. And I'll talk a little bit about how we see the CHASE framework and driving kind of the data growth. Other areas, home, 2.4 million. And Jens -- we market as [ Amber ], but Jens will cover why we believe we'll still get to the 10 million, given where we are. In Nigeria, just to give you a little bit of a highlight, Karl will tell you that actually, we're moving pretty quickly with 5G and fixed wireless access in Nigeria. And some of those movements are giving us the confidence that even though you end up at 2.4 million, 10 million is still achievable. Let me not take Karl and Jens' thunder. And also to pick up on some of the areas in terms of localizations, we market as [ Amber ] because we took an active decision not to progress with further localization in Nigeria. Mindful of elections coming through, mindful that we saw liquidity challenges, it didn't make sense to us to say, we've done 3.3% of a sell-down in Nigeria. We'll do another, and we'll get stuck with a bunch of nairas that we actually can't get in the -- and hence, we took a decision actively and with the Board to say, we pause on further localization until post elections. So we are actually well arranging ourselves to say, depending on market conditions, FX availability, we should be -- and all those things we're working on. In H2, we could move very quickly. But obviously, market conditions are going to be super important. So Nigeria was the one that we took an active decision and say, we want to do it, but we're going to pause until the conditions are right. I'll come to ARP and structural separations in a bit more detail in my presentation. Coming back to data, as I said, we're not going to spend an enormous amount of data. We do cover the data in the SA, Nigeria markets and in Jens' presentation. And in Jens', there's a big focus on the home. But I don't want us to lose the point that actually the near-term economics of the business are really driven by data. Voice is one of the areas that I -- we aren't covering in a lot of detail, but voice has surprised us on the upside. When we are putting in our plans, we thought voice by now would be closer to maybe 1%. You guys have seen that voice actually has remained fairly resilient, supported by price floors in some key markets. But actually, as you look at smartphone adoption, we still have many voice-centric markets that are still going through the transition. But data is the engine that's going to drive the company forward. And it's going to be approximately 50% of service revenue, and Tsholo will cover that in a while. The CHASE framework has really been what's driven our agenda across markets around driving data adoption. The one constraint, and I think it's not a constraint only on MTN, it's one for emerging markets more broadly, is handsets. Cost of handsets still too high. We really need those handsets at $30 price points and below. Now if you look at data sets between 4G and 5G, depending on markets, you'll see handsets 3G, $40 to $50 in some markets, 4G $70-plus. So we still got to bring the handsets down. And obviously, we play a role in device financing, et cetera. But that's been the constraint to foster data adoption. In our view, affordability has been improved. Service bundling, it's there, and the education is there. So it's the age that is a bit of a constraint, but we're doing quite a lot of work with OEMs and device financing there. So I mean that's just a bit of a snapshot. On ESG, again, not to spend too much time. You guys are aware, we have a very comprehensive program. We're currently focusing just on 3 main areas to communicate to investors. [ We're going to ] have 2 years to 3 years of momentum, and then we'll continue to unpack the other areas. First one is really around our decarbonization journey, highly committed to that. Challenging for us last year was obviously the load shedding issue. And we're working through Charles' program, which we'll talk about and will communicate in time, how that might affect our near-term objectives. We remain committed to the 2030 and 2040. But obviously, with the load shedding that's actually affected materially, what we'll have in Scope 1 and 2, given that we are driving some of the power going forward, we'll drive on a multipronged approach with ATC and IHS, and Charles and Jens will drive the other elements. Charles will talk about that. Broadband coverage, doing well. I think in time, we'll be cooperating and partnering with the LEO satellite operators. We see this as an opportunity into the future of collaboration rather than competition. And Mazen is here. In the break, if you want to talk to Mazen about our thought processes, and Lele is also here, about how do we engage with those and how we see nonterrestrial and terrestrial networks working together in the future. And we've done a lot of work in diversity and inclusion. We put out what we thought were stretch targets. We've moved much quicker on diversity and inclusion, and we're challenging ourselves actually to upgrade our targets, and we'll communicate those in due course. We've made good progress in women in senior management. And now we look at these -- the 2025 targets, and we say, you've hit 40% and you have 41% as a target, you have to kind of upgrade the target, but we'll come back to that. So we feel that we are making good progress in that area. As I said, we appreciate all the accolades that we've received so far. Asset on realization, as you know, we've monetized ZAR 19 billion out of ZAR 25 billion. When we started this program, the main anchors around ARP were really further localization in Nigeria and IHS. Now with IHS, obviously, with where the share price is, for us, it's not a monetization opportunity. And when we reflect on where rates have moved and where tower companies are trading, we are not in a rush to look to monetize. And I think it's fair to say to our capital holders that our view is that in the near to medium term, I don't think you should anticipate a sell-down of our 26% share in IHS. We don't have to do it because the balance sheet is in a good position. So for those of you who are calculating and looking at IHS and say, these guys will sell the next 1 or 2 years, I mean, obviously, you must make your own investment views, but our view is that we're kind of in a hold position with IHS. It's not responsible for us to try and sell any of those. Let's see what happens to rates -- rate markets over time. Let's see how they -- and I think international investors look at IHS and say it's a 70% Nigeria company. So there is also a proximity to -- or at least a view on what's happening in Nigeria with IHS. So we are not looking in the near term to be selling that down. But if things happen in the future, we'll have that discussion. As I mentioned, Nigeria, the plan is it remains. We've committed this to the stakeholders that we want to see the company more localized. We need to wait for market conditions. And when those market conditions are improved, we will act. Kholekile and his team have done all the work. We know what we need to do and meeting the regulators. But we're not going to pull that plug until we think it's fair value, and we can get the cash. Nigeria, we have a further 5%. Cameroon, we have a 20%. We've always had this belief that we need to do another 10%. That's what we had agreed initially with broadband, with our partners that we would do a follow-on. So this is one that will probably be new to you. But we're looking to execute that kind of in the medium term. We're not going to say it's going to be in the next 6 months, but again, when conditions are conducive. And we obviously announced when we talk about portfolio transformation, the main net news since Q1 is we are looking at an orderly exit. If we can agree terms really around Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, and we're having that discussion with Axian as you well know. On the strategic rationale for the separations and again to set our store, we believe that the best way to run the company in the medium to longer term is have a core connectivity business that has a couple of platforms that are adjacent, but these have relative independence. They have their own assets. They have their own financial profile, and the best way to run them is to run them in the medium term as separate to the core connectivity. That's our strategic positioning. And we are, as I said, in the progress, particularly on fintech and fiber to make that progress. We also think that, that rationale is the right one because the regulatory environment in our analysis is going to end us there in the medium term. So we better do it ourselves before the regulators do. And so when we look at fintech in some markets, they're really asking for the structural separation. So we're saying, let's lean into this and make most of that. And even on fiber, I think that same regulatory push will happen in markets. So the rationale is really about enabling acceleration in scale. And these businesses also operate quite differently, have a different capital profile and return profile. And I think what's very interesting for us as we run the business is when you start separating the accounts, you start seeing things that you wouldn't see when you have these businesses merged. So it also is helping us to really understand where the opportunity for optimizing and improving the financial and operational performance of the businesses. So the rationale is really driven about the growth. It's also driven by seeking partnerships that can help us accelerate the growth. And where it makes sense, we must use partners' capital to improve our own return profile but only where it makes sense. So we've spoken to the markets that we are looking at bringing minority investments to the FinCo, [ Tako ]. That's in progress, and we gave a time line that we're pushing ourselves to the end of H1. We're working with that time line. And also on the fiber side, we did announce and Dr. Fred, Jens and the team have worked super hard in this for the east to west. We're bringing in Africa50, and we're talking to others about other areas of building the fiber platform. My colleagues, Jens and Serigne will cover that in a bit more detail. So we think that this is really the best and appropriate way to run our businesses going to the future. And happy to take questions that you may have. Again, before I hand over to Tsholo to give us the financial framework and I'll come back a little bit later, I mean our store is really about the uniqueness of the growth engines. We have a core connectivity business where there's ample opportunity on the African continent. For sure, they're headwinds, but we think we have good assets that allow us to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. And the platforms are giving us legs for growth, medium to longer term. I won't go through all of them. But as we discussed, we're not going to be covering areas such as digital. If you go on the microsite, again, our teams will give you a context of how we're thinking about some of these platforms. But we think that unique engine really is the underpin of the investment case. And our investment case is really one around growth. The demographics, the scale position, we really believe that you've got to be #1 or #2. It's too hard to do this job as #3 and #4, and we see it across the markets. And we generally -- in fact, not generally, we're always #1 or #2. And that gives us the ability to be able to withstand a shock but also to be able to take advantage of opportunities. Our financial profile is very strong. Tsholo will talk about it, and we've got a very attractive return profile, and we'd be able to evidence that within our -- the results we've delivered. So as you leave today, I really would like to believe that you'll take 5 key takeouts. Is MTN well positioned to capture a compelling and unique growth opportunity in Africa? And we'll say we are. There are challenges in the near term. We have a plan, we'll navigate through them, and we'll come out the other side much stronger. And obviously, the team will talk to that. I mean there are medium-term value unlock opportunities. For sure, we focus on that, but we've also got to make sure that we run the core business well. But fintech, fiber and, ultimately, IHS over time enable us to reveal the value that's inherent in the company. The capital allocation framework, I think by now, it's almost like [ death ] by PowerPoint. We are religious about it. But obviously, when we have done the work around, the Eurobonds, I think we'll have time for reflection on what the batting order is between that and other capital priorities. Tsholo will talk about that. And I think the most important thing really about the MTN team, and I'm humbled and proud to lead such a team, is we have people who are passionate about this continent. This is our home. This is the only place we know. We can't go to another market and retrench. It's the continent we love, and we have an executive and a leadership team and staff who really believe in this thing of driving digital financial inclusion across Africa, real passion about it. And I think you guys will appreciate the feedback that you will hear from the teams, from Karl and others that we are focused on the passion for the continent but also focused on ensuring that we deliver value creation for stakeholders. So ladies and gentlemen, let me pause there and pass on to Tsholo, and I'll come back for Q&A. Thank you very much.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Today, I've actually been with the company now 2 years and 2 months exactly, which is around the same time that we actually unpacked the Ambition 2025 back in 2021, as Ralph indicated. So I provide you today with an opportunity to update the group financial framework as well as the capital allocation framework, having been entrenched in the company now for some time and having obviously seen the significant performance of the business. So if I just go on to the financial framework itself, at our last Capital Markets Day 2 years ago, we shared with you our well-developed financial framework, which really underpinned our strong financial performance to date as well as the execution of our strategy. So with this financial framework in place, we have been able to demonstrate the strong financial performance over the last 3 years specifically. Firstly, as you can see with service revenue growing at mid-teens being achieved at 15% and on average 15% over the period. We've also been able to improve our earnings, with our expense efficiency program yielding ZAR 6.4 billion in cost savings of the 2020 base, which was really in line with our target to the market of ZAR 5 billion. This resulted in us being able to expand margins as well as adjusted headline earnings per share and now growing at 31% over the period. And CapEx intensity at 17.4% with about ZAR 95 billion spent over the year. And thus, this has been able to help us to deliver on attractive free cash flows resulting in cash upstreaming to group of about ZAR 56 billion. And also reducing the holdco leverage now at 0.8x by the end of 2022 financial year. But as we navigate the tough economic environment that we've been talking about with elevated inflation levels as well as ForEx devaluation across the markets, we -- across the market, this financial formula that we have within this framework actually remains relevant. So our focus over the medium term, as you can see on the right-hand side is, firstly, to grow revenue ahead of inflation with continued focus on protecting voice as well as growing voice, doubling data, including winning the home as well as accelerating our fintech businesses. And some of our fintech services, some of my colleagues will be coming later on to share with you the details of our plans. We will endeavor to grow OpEx below inflation, thus expanding our margins and earnings through a robust efficiency -- cost efficiency initiatives, including mitigating the impact of ForEx on our cost structures. We will also continue with our disciplined allocation to capital -- of capital, continuously reevaluating our capital expenditure on an ongoing basis for prioritization of revenue generating as well as faster-growing areas. This will, obviously, as indicated, enable attractive free cash flows with higher cash balances as well as improved leverage. Maintaining strong liquidity is also very important to us, particularly under these tough economic -- under this tough economic environment, and we believe it's absolutely imperative to preserve cash. So just to deep dive into our framework, I will start off by looking at our service revenue bearers and then move on to the contribution by operating companies in our region. As you can see on the left-hand side, we have made progress in doubling data. As we indicated to you that by 2025, we want to double data. You can see that data revenue now contributes almost 40% to group service revenue from about 25% in 2019. And while voice contribution started declining from 58% in 2019 to now 44%, albeit still continuing to grow solidly. Although fintech has shown some moderate growth than was anticipated over the past 3 years. And as we know, it was largely impacted by the introduction of MoMo taxes in some key fintech markets and competitive pressures. We still expect an acceleration of fintech revenue with the evolution of basic services to more advanced services as well as we start accelerating our MoMo PSB in Nigeria. So looking at the graph now on the right-hand side, you will notice that Nigeria has increased its contribution to group service revenue over the period, and this was done through the acceleration of data services as well as solid growth from voice. The WECA region, which was particularly impacted by the introduction of these MoMo taxes I indicated as well as some competitive pressure in markets like Côte d'Ivoire has largely remained flat. The contribution of WECA to group is expected to increase, however, over the medium term as a result, for instance, of the reduction of the e-levy that is now reduced to 1% from 1.5% where it started. And we're starting to also see competition subsiding in markets like Côte d'Ivoire. We did see a recovery from the -- in the last quarter of 2022. South Africa's service revenue, as you can see, has declined from 26% to 21%, largely as a result of the competitive environment, a sluggish economy you heard yesterday from the Deputy Reserve Bank Governor as well as the impact of load shedding. We do expect that the execution of our network resilience plan, which Charles will be sharing with you later on, we will see a steady improvement of SA's contribution to group over time, particularly starting in the second half of the year. So to deliver on service revenue growth ahead of inflation, we will continue to drive selective headline pricing in markets as well as pricing optimization through our CVM initiatives. And both Charles and Karl will be talking to you about that in a bit more detail. So moving on to the next slide, really about how we have been able to deliver on our expense efficiency program and plans that we have in place. You can see, as I indicated, we've delivered now ZAR 6.4 billion, and this was off a 2020 base. The bulk of our savings were mainly from network and IT, where we actually decommissioned legacy IT, followed by sales, distribution and marketing as well as general and administration expenses. You will notice that 2/3 of these savings came from Nigeria and South Africa, followed by the WECA markets at 17%. We will continue with our laser focus on cost reduction to expand our margins over the medium term given the expected headwinds. We are refreshing now our global cost benchmarking exercise, which we conducted in 2019 to identify additional sustainable cost-saving initiatives over the medium term. To identify these savings and will -- then this will culminate into an expense efficiency program, which we will call EEP 2.0. But in the meantime, we've identified some low-hanging fruits and quick wins to be implemented in the short term, and we're targeting about ZAR 1.5 billion in this financial year. These include terminating noncritical and support maintenance contracts, as I indicated, on IT legacy as well as IT as well as networks; renegotiation of terms with our major vendors, and that work is ongoing; optimizing our distribution channels; reviewing our commission structures, a lot of good work happening in South Africa at the moment; as well as the acceleration of our energy efficiency initiatives. Moving on to our working capital and cash release initiatives, which is very important for us, particularly as we grow the business. Since our last Capital Markets Day, we have made substantial progress in our working capital through a review of some of our policies that we have in place and implementing working capital framework and some KPIs across the group. These were really focused around the ability to gain visibility into the OpCo inventories, payment terms as well as compliance but also focusing efforts around cash conversion cycles from days inventory payments as well as sales outstanding. We also benefited from South Africa's cash release initiatives, which yielded close to about ZAR 3 billion -- just over ZAR 3 billion in 2024 (sic) [ 2022 ]. Looking forward, we are aiming for additional cash release initiatives of between ZAR 1.5 to ZAR 2 billion, which will really be garnered from an additional supply chain financing solutions, device receivables solutions as well, as well as specifically looking at credit collection, data book and also just the supply chain, ForEx and ForEx exchange mitigation. If I can move on to our capital expenditure. Ralph talked about how we continue from a strategy perspective to continue to invest in our networks but also building the largest platforms. So while our CapEx intensity has trended upwards ending at 18.5% in 2022, we focused on investing in faster-growing areas as we structurally see higher demand for data in our platform services. We will continue to invest to support the growth that we are seeing. And this is, if you recall, priority #1 on our capital allocation framework. Although we will make sure that we maintain our targeted range of 15% to 18% and we do expect that we will see a marginally muted intensity going forward relative to what we saw in 2022, the focus will continue to be on a more broad-based coverage, including rapid rollout program as well as improvement in the speed of our networks and the growth of our platforms but, very importantly, supporting the network resilience in South Africa to deal with the impact of load shedding. So as we roll out our capital expenditure, the emphasis will be on unit cost reduction and spectrum efficiencies to maximize the value of our capital expenditure -- of our capital expenditure investments. So given the growth opportunity and the challenges at hand, the larger proportion, as you will see from our capital expenditure, will come from Nigeria at 36% and South Africa at 23%. If I can move on to the holdco leverage as well as the liquidity profile. I am pleased at the progress that we have been -- we have made so far in ensuring our balance sheet is flexible and can withstand the market volatility whilst, at the same time, enabling us to take advantage of market opportunities that are aligned with our Ambition 2024 (sic) [ Ambition 2025 ] strategy. So as at the end of 2022, the holdco leverage was down to 0.8, although it did come up by the end of this -- the first quarter of this year to 0.9x while the group leverage was down 0.3x -- was down to 0.3x from 0.8 in 2022. Our focus will continue to maintain the holdco leverage below 1.5x through the improvement in our cash upstreaming over the medium term, including additional ARP initiatives, as Ralph indicated earlier on. And also exploring liability management for our Eurobonds to reduce the dollar -- U.S. dollar debt exposure that we have. So given the high interest rate environment, we'll also continue to flatten our debt maturity profile that you see on the right-hand side to mitigate the refinancing risk. And we reduced our Eurobond 2024, if you recall, from $750 million, which is now at $450 million remaining. And we have plans to continue to early settle subject to market conditions, assisting us to be able to improve our ZAR to non-ZAR debt mix, which is now sitting at over 63% in terms of ZAR debt. And we also upsized our DMTN program to ZAR 35 billion to be able to provide us with alternative sources of liquidity and be able to utilize it where we can from a strategic perspective. And we also issued notes in the DMTN in the 3- to 7-year maturity window during 2022. So from a group consolidated debt expense perspective as well, we will continue to, as much as possible, ensure that we have local currency funding in our markets to mitigate the ForEx exposure. Nigeria, I think, currently has about 90% of debt in local currency. And I think in Ghana has no very little foreign debt, if any, on the balance sheet, which actually bodes well for mitigating that risk. How we've created shareholder value over the period. I'm confident that as a business, we have set ourselves a solid foundation that will see us through the trading environment. Our track record is clear from the continued momentum of operational execution despite the challenges that we have experienced. We have continued to deliver value to our shareholders with compound average growth rate of 31% on our adjusted headline earnings per share since 2019 and our ROE improvement of 10 percentage points since 2019. The work that we have done so far has ensured that we have a strong cash position to fund the future growth of our business. And this is coupled with the efficiency program that will assist us to protect margin erosion that I indicated. Our disciplined capital allocation, we cannot emphasize that enough. We will ensure that we generate a reasonable return for our shareholders. And so in a nutshell, not only have we have -- do we have a back -- a business backbone to drive growth but have the balance sheet to support the delivery of our strategy. So I'm comfortable that the financial framework that we have in place supports our investment case and that we have sufficient headroom over the medium term to be able to support the growth portfolios and, ultimately, drive shareholder returns. So moving on to capital allocation framework, which has really guided our financial discipline and remains relevant in guiding our priorities. It has yielded positive results for our business for a number of reasons. Firstly, as indicated, it's important for us that we continue to invest for growth. So we do invest organically through investments in our network as well as platforms. Secondly, as Ralph and I have been emphasizing, we are deleveraging the holdco balance sheet faster and are focused on reducing the non-ZAR-denominated debt over the medium term. Returning cash to shareholders is a key component of our capital allocation framework through ordinary dividend, which we have committed as a minimum of ZAR 3.30 per share for the financial year 2023. Selective M&A remains the fourth priority, which is aligned to the objectives of Ambition 2024 -- 2025. However, this is subject to very strict risk and financial assessment criteria. And we will continue to consider share repurchases and special dividends, if possible, from surplus cash once all the capital allocation priorities that I talked about have been made. So in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, we are making good progress from a financial perspective, and I want to leave you with a few key points. Number one, we have built a very strong foundation that will help us navigate the tough trading environment. Our future growth is well funded with a financial formula that supports the profitability of the company benefiting from the efficiencies as well. Our disciplined capital allocation remains relevant, with emphasis on reducing dollar exposure through liability management whilst our well development -- developed, sorry, financial framework supports Ambition 2025. And lastly and most importantly, we are driving shareholder value through the growth -- through growth, cash flows and dividends. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes my presentation. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Tsholo. Ralph, can you join us, please? Thank you. And Tsholo, I see you bought me 2 minutes. Thank you very much. All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to now just do a Q&A. I'm pretty sure many of you present here physically and also online have many questions for the CEO and the CFO. For those who are joining via webcast, just pop your questions on to the Q&A tab just below the screen, and I get all those questions here, and I'll make sure that I put as many as possible to the 2. And then, of course, in the room, you just raise your hands. I just have 1 or 2 for these 2 guys, in fact, 1 each, just to give you guys more time. Ralph, let me start with you, and let's put the elephant in the room, and that's the Telkom rumors. There was a time you were engaging Telkom quite robustly. It was well reported. And that seemed to not have worked out as planned. And I think it was a week ago. We saw a consortium led by the former CEO there Telkom also talking about potentially making an acquisition. Any comments on Telkom so far? Where is MTN-Telkom discussion right now?

Yes. I mean, you're right that last year, we spent a bunch of time looking to engage Telkom and their Board around what we thought would be a deal that is value-accretive for both companies and both shareholders in a topco-level deal and, obviously, navigating it through a particular window. These things are complex. So the window also matters. So I mean we're very disciplined about how we wanted. And when we engaged to the point where that discipline wasn't going to be there, so we pulled away. So I mean I come back to the point of the rationale that we made at the stage, which we -- I think there are a couple of points. One is we said that consolidation in South Africa is inevitable. We see that this trend will happen. And we thought that there was a combination of the assets. And it's not only a story about Openserve, which we often hear from people. Now it's -- MTN is only interested in the fiber. I think there's a combination of frequencies that is powerful. I think there are use cases in other geographies where you see a combination of frequency creating an advantage. The U.S., I think, is a good example. So I think our strategic positioning for the medium term remains that there's a sensible deal that could be had. But the deals are complex. As I said, you have to be very disciplined on both sides that this is the only thing you want to do. And when you reach that stage, then you can progress, and obviously, valuation and everything else and other things do matter. So to your point around the news, I mean we obviously listened to the news, and we opined. We are a disciplined organization. We don't get driven by headlines. And so I mean if ever there was a deal at the topco level, we don't like the asset-level deal. It's just way too complicated. It sounds nice on paper, but there's so many intricacies about valuation, why is the debt sitting there and all of that. And the only way you can kind of deal with it is the topco and deal with. And obviously, there's also, the topco deal will have its own issue in terms of regulatory approvals. But now, I mean there's nothing we can say to shareholders that we are reacting to the news. But we have to obviously remain strategically agile on the opportunity, but you'd have to be extremely disciplined about your strategy going forward.

Got you. Tsholo, my question for you is about dividends. I like dividends. I note that you didn't mention them, even though you had a very good presentation that referenced a strong performance. I'm interested why are you worried. Are you holding onto cash because of potential acquisitions? Why not divis?

So I mean, I think as I indicated -- and this is one question that has been commonly asked by our shareholders here when we're on road shows. I mean it remains a key component of our capital location framework. But at this point in time, it's just not #1 priority. It is important. The business is growing. It's important for us as I indicated that we invest for growth and scale the business. That's number one. And number two, as we indicated, we would like to reduce our debt as much as possible to deal with the dollar exposure that we have. And then we obviously pay the dividend. So we have committed to a ZAR 3.30 dividend per share for the end of the financial year. At this stage, we think that, that will still materialize, but of course, we do indicate to shareholders on time. And maybe in the future, once we're comfortable where the leverage is at, particularly from a debt mix perspective, priority #3 could be #1 or #2. So yes.

All right. I will now open to the floor. I'm going to take a couple at a time because I expect a lot. This gentleman with the blue jacket there. Thank you, sir, just your name and the organization you represent.

It's Myuran from Metal Industries. I'm very encouraged by the focus -- the laser focus on inflation plus increases in service revenue in the various markets. Can you just give us some color so that we can appreciate what's the struggle with growing at inflation plus in telco given the technology and given the regulatory environment as well as the consumer environment? Why is it so difficult to grow at much faster rates than inflation?

Thanks, Myuran. If you don't mind, just let me take one more, just passing it down to the gentleman on your same row there.

It's Jonathan from JPMorgan. I might have missed it, but previously, I think you targeted mobile money revenue contribution of 25% to service revenue by '25. And I didn't see that number there. I think the sub number is still the same. So just trying to understand what kind of level would be reasonable now. I mean, obviously, there have been dynamic changes in markets and regulatory interventions. So just trying to understand how you think about that over the next 2 years.

Yes. I mean let me take both, and Tsholo will [ top and tail ] it off. I mean just on the service revenue growing higher than inflation, I mean, in pretty much most of the markets, you got to go to the regulator to apply for tariff increases as an example. I mean, as I said, there's stuff above the line and below the line, so let's talk about -- that requires regulatory approvals. And in some markets, we've been able to get that. Sometimes, the regulators resisted for 1 or 2 reasons. I mean, I think specifically to Nigeria and Karl, who can cover this in his own presentation, so I won't ask him to come up, we had agreed at the industry level that there was going to be a 10% price up also to support the #3 and #4. And the minister set that aside. The former minister set that aside. But we still remain committed to engaging them because to your point, we're taking on the inflation on the expense side, and obviously. To generate free cash flow to fund future growth, we need sufficient revenue generation. I think that dialogue with regulators in the storm we're in, I think they are understanding it because the #3 and #4 are all struggling. And they're going to need -- some of them are going to need price floors, particularly for voice to sustain their own economics. So the issue is regulatory engagements. In a market like South Africa, obviously, Charles will speak for himself, that's an easier conversation. But some of the markets, you need regulatory approvals Ebenezer and the VPs will talk. Actually, in some markets, we have an arrangement with regulators to be able to periodically price up because some of them are closer to or in hyperinflation states. On the point around -- the target is there. We're maintaining the guidance for service revenue, fintech up to 20%. I mean we've always framed it as it's underpinned by the 2 key assumptions. The one was when we set up the target, we expected voice to actually grow much slower. So you enumerate a denominator effect when you start putting things as a proportion of a ratio. I think there's that dynamic that actually, we have a good problem that data and voice are growing much faster than we thought in the mix. The second was we always put the point that without Nigeria growing quickly, we're always going to be kind of mid-teens. We needed Nigeria to pivot quite aggressively. And I think Karl and Team will talk as will Serigne that as you look at the sub numbers now in Nigeria, actually, we have a plan to really accelerate now. And I don't want to give out the targets that they're pushing for that. That's what we'll push to us. Jonathan, we're going to keep the target there. And we're going to push for hell to push that. And look, as Sulu said, we have in our capital allocation framework #4 selective M&A. We're open to that, that in some territories, we might actually prefer to enter a territory on a mobile money basis, not a GSM basis. So for now, we're going to hold that -- it's -- we are 10 and 20 as far, but we're going to keep pushing. And when we feel that it's not going to be -- we're able to get them. I mean, we'll communicate. But I think make your own views, particularly after you hear Serigne and Karl speak about the Nigeria opportunity.

Yes. So if I can just add on the first one. I think, I mean, in a tough macroeconomic environment, it's difficult as well for governments to pass all the inflation to their consumers. So I think you will hear Charles and Karl talk about CVM initiatives. So what we do aggressively is to improve the ERM and RMB. So for us, that's important. But as Ralph indicated, some markets, we have been able to do headline pricing, but it becomes difficult in a tough macroeconomic environment here.

Let me just take some questions online before I come back to the room. From HSBC. [ Manvendra Singh ] would like to know what is your backup plan in case the cash upstream from Nigeria doesn't normalize for a longer period. I mean, I saw the script dividend plans. And I thought you want to do localization, but you take a bit more equity. We heard yesterday from the Nigeria assessment that there might be some realization. But I think it's a fair question. What happens if it doesn't happen? Are you going to keep on doing script?

No. I mean, I think we obviously plan for a number of scenarios. We do think that it's a temporary feature. It's not a permanent feature. So we've already indicated our plans in Nigeria to take the script. There was an AGM in Ghana as well for dividend, and we would be opting before the end of June. So we don't see it as a permanent feature really. And I think from a cash perspective, when we plan, we look at various scenarios, we look at the base case stress case shock scenarios and what are the management interventions that we can take then for Tuketa for those various scenarios. So we're comfortable that we should be in a good place.

Linked to that, let me come to you, Ralph, is a question around localization. This comes from [ Cesar Teran. ] He's asking, what is the time line of the localizations that were mentioned in Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria?

Yes. I mean we've -- I want to be a little bit flexible with the timelines because there's no regulatory pressures, particularly in Nigeria to say, you must do this. We went and said, "We think it's right as part of our create share-holder -- create value pillar of our strategy that we have more local ownership of our companies. And we put out that we would want to -- we're comfortable to get as far as down as 65% over time. So we're committed to that. But we need the window that in Nigeria, for example, we should be able to sell down and extract the proceeds. If we sell and gets locked up, it doesn't make sense, would argue that the best store of value is -- Tsholo said, we took a decision that, that's actually the best store of value relative to Naira sitting in a bank account and actually earning a negative real interest rate. You heard that story. So we think that's the best. So Nigeria condition Cesar is if we're in H2, we're able to get the dollars out. As I said, Kholekile and the team have done the work -- we know who to go to with a Nigerity, we'll execute. I think we'll get a tranche. We now understand that you probably can sell only 3% at the tranche. So you would assume that there are 3 tranches of the 11 that will get us through. Gone over try and get that done this year. And again, our conversations with the Central Bank there with the minister is, look, we can't -- we want to do it, but -- the Central Bank must give us the money. So if you can't give the money, give us this dispensation to push your time line out because the whole thing doesn't work. So Cesar, we have to be kind of flexible. If we give you a hard timelines, you hit us on the head when we miss by a month and say you said x. But I'm saying in the medium term, all things working well, the next 18 months in Nigeria would want to do the 11%, but it's market conditions, and we need that flexibility.

Of course. Can I take some more in the room, the gentleman there right there. Just keep your hand up sir. Here you go.

It's Preshendran from Nedbank. I've got 2 questions. Sorry, Ralph, it's a bit of a timeline one. I know you mentioned Fintech -- some announcement by June. I know we just started June, but any updates you can give us on that, we'd appreciate. And then secondly, Sulu, I think this one is more for you on the gearing. I think it's the first time I've seen MTNs Holdco gearing lower than the guys in Midrand. So well done on de-gearing the balance sheet. But now if the telecom deal doesn't happen, what's your next lever of M&A that you're looking for in the market? I know you mentioned there are some opportunities. Or I mean, is it a case of how low can you go?

Can I take the lady -- I saw the ladies hand at the back there? We haven't had too many ladies so, there we go.

Good morning, [ filey from Marvel Douglas ] -- so Tsholo, you mentioned you have a target for your expense efficiencies of about 1.5 billion this year. And you know there's a lot of work that's been put through in terms of reducing and getting up in terms of your cost savings. But what is the sustainable level that we can look at going forward?

Right. And let me say take 1 more.

We're going to forget the questions.

Just one more please. Indulge me yes, sir.

Nadim from SBG Securities. Just one question from my side. On your CapEx priorities, you mentioned the rapid rural rollout I would just like to understand whether you see that as giving you the same kind of return on CapEx as you other investments as traditionally rural rollouts haven't been very accretive. So just like to understand the opportunity you see there and how it will be?

So I'm going to remember the rural question. You guys must remember the first.

On the timeline one. yes, we said by end of June, today 1 June. At the end of June, we just started the month. So I know what you're trying to get out of so -- we said in June.

I think, Preshen, I mean we're not looking at anything at the moment. And I think if we do shareholders who would be advised accordingly based on our regulations. I think we've indicated that we continuously look and explore what could obviously grow and scale our business, and we continuously do that. I think at the levels that we are, it's important that yes, we have not yet extinguished the dollar debt, but we have intentions to do that subject to market conditions. We've always said that our leverage and obviously, dividend is based on stable cash flows from South Africa. Other dependencies on the dividend would be -- are we able to upstream successfully from the market? So we're taking a prudent approach at this stage. Given the expected headwinds, and we're comfortable with the 1.5x at this point in time for those reasons. I think on the expense efficiency program, as I indicated, we are busy looking at our global cost benchmarking exercise. If you recall, we did that in 2019 and that's how we actually came up with a 5 billion target. We've been able to achieve 6.4 million. It's important to refresh it now and look at what is -- what are other global peers doing relative to what we've been doing. Is there anything more that we have missed? Anything that we can cause correct. So when the time is right, we'll be able to provide a target for the medium term. But the forecast for this year is that 1.5 billion.

Yes, I just wanted to pick up on the M&A question is that, I mean, just the framework. I mean for us, M&A would work in a sense of in-market consolidation opportunities or ones that enable us to push 1 of our strategic pillars. But looking at new markets, and obviously, we have people who do that. In the near term, I think we would stretch ourselves a little bit too much, but the in-market consolidation and also M&A that helps our key platform businesses. So fintech and fibre I mentioned fintech earlier, but you could equally say fibre. So that's how we would think about it in the near term. But obviously, we're going to remain agile on the strategy question. You said you remember the local loss.

The investment in rural.

Yes. Yes, the investment in rural, I mean, it's not a big amount, but it's a very important nation state issue. When you roll out networks and the guys in the urban areas, the regulators, you saw the minister yesterday. He's going to go out to the rural area to -- and then there's no network and people complain. So we've got to arrange the -- and you can ask Mazen this question, but we have to find a model that works where actually, we -- yes, you're not monetizing that network as much as you would in the urban areas, but kind of a social cohesion and our own ESG ambitions, it's very important. You don't want to have an kind of a digital under clause in a country. So you got to fit it in the envelope somewhat. It's a really important niche. You're going to have the regulators coming to your QAS and all other things. And it's a rod for your back if you don't do it well.

Maybe just to also add, I mean, for avoidance -- of doubt, we do have a very robust value-based capital allocation where we assess all the investments from a sustainable value foundation et cetera. So we're quite clear around that. And of course, there are some of those that we call sustainable that Ralph indicates that we accommodating about envelope.

Two quick ones from the webcast, another timing 1 for you, Tsholo. To the CFO, this comes from [ Tim Dany and Victor Scott. ] Can you give me more color regarding TAM frames on settling the euro and U.S. dollar debt?

Yes. I mean, as I indicated, we are exploring it. We've already early settled part of the 2024 last year around September. We -- the 2024s actually expire next year in November, we don't want the situation where we forced to refinance. So we are working currently on that subject to market conditions, hopefully, we'll be able to do it sometime this year. If not before they expire next year.

Great. I'm going to give a chance to one more round. Yes, sir.

Mazi -- sorry Jaynesh from Mazi Asset Management. So just on portfolio optimization, you've now -- I think we're in 19 markets, with you're in discussions to sell 3 West African ones. -- after that, is the portfolio now optimal. I know you also -- you did bid for a license in Ethiopia. Presumably, if that comes up again, would you be looking at entering Ethiopia.

Great. And the lady -- the gentlemen behind the lady. Keep your hand up, sir. So they can find you. Thank you. That will be our last question for this round. Thanks.

Good morning, everyone. Lawrence from KPMG in Nigeria. So 3 questions in 1. The first 1, I understand yesterday when Bismarck made his presentation, he spoke about the currency devaluation in Nigeria. I got in this morning on the first headline I saw, currency got devalued by almost 48%. The projections we saw, I don't know if Ralph and Tsholo, we've considered an almost 50% devaluation. Question 2. Any plans to play in the generative AI space because we see big trends, big news in the AI space. And as we think about the tech core ambition of the telecoms model, any plans to play in the generative AI space. The third question is on 5G. How well is this giving us returns especially given that the OEMs like Huawei and Ericsson are already thinking the next G.

Thank you,. Thanks for those questions. So shall we kick off with the optimal portfolio question from Mazi first.

Yes, look I mean the portfolio, we said we want a Pan-African portfolio, but we want a portfolio also where the markets are generating they can fund their own growth, so to speak. So we're down to 19. We're assessing the 3. And if we conclude that and obviously, I mean it's an ongoing assessment, but in our concept to you and say they are watching briefs beyond those 3. And I think in investor discussions in prior years, we're always saying that there are some markets that's watching brief. Those are the 3 watching brief markets. We're not watching brief any other markets as we speak today. On Ethiopia, I mean, we've got our hands for. There's only so many of these people here. So we went in, we looked at the thing. We could pay $600. We couldn't pay $850. We couldn't see the return profile on $850. So we walked away. I would have loved to be in there. But again, on the market structure, we said we prefer to be #1 and #2. Number 3 is battle. We know everywhere. So it doesn't look like there is an opportunity to be #1 or #2 in those markets. So I mean, we looked at the process that is underway and we pulled back from it. As I said, we got our hands full. On the issue of 5G monetization are we getting -- let's leave that question to the Nigeria to [ Karl and to Charles till ] to answer that. On the issue of the rate, I knew somebody was going to ask in the session. So let me ask Carl to respond to that.

Sure okay. As of now, it remains a room of -- we understand that the Central Bank will be released in a former state around this. It's 1 newspaper that publishes Yes. Daily trust. Again, this is intelligent. I give you a little facility on.

Carl, you need to start again because the virtual...

The first thing is -- it remains a rumor. One newspaper published this, and there's been no further news on this. Our intelligence is, it has not yet happened. Our intelligence also says that I think we've all said there's a consensus that there will be a devaluation. Bismarck pretty much the same. But we sense that there will first be an appointment of the Minister of Finance before that step is taken so that there's a consistency of the policy and the follow-up actions for that. So I think that should put it to bed. We understand -- I don't know if it's true or not that the Central Bank itself may be coming out of the statement to making care that this is not a much rumor.

Motor will speak to how the valuation affects MTN, but I'd suggest to you that there's 2 angles first is 80% of our telco contracts that are anchored partially on the CBN REITs as an now element as well. official rates, but the rest of our transactions are somewhere in the [ 550 to 560 range. ] So that should give you a holistic picture. But we'll speak a bit more about it during the [ GS sector. ]

Thanks for that. And , generative AI.

Yes. generative AI. I mean -- Mazen is probably the expert here, but maybe I'm being told we've run out of time. I mean, for sure, we're exploring our generative AI as an overlay across our business. I mean, all businesses are thinking about kind of the use cases and applications across the piece. And for us, it is an area we're exploring. I mean I'm trying to give you a short answer that we're not getting left behind in adopting these technology trends.

Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for group CEO and CFO. Thank you right. That was longer than I expected, but I guess it is the Group President and CEO and the Group CFO. So thank you very much for your participation, both in the room and also at home. And Karl thanks for stepping in on the hot news off the press. So all is quite interesting how these things turn on the day we are having the Capital Markets Day. All right, ladies and gents, we're going to move on to South Africa right now, MTN South Africa CEO, Charles Molapisi is the MTN South Africa CFO, Dineo Molefe, are ready to talk to us about the South African market. As you know, MTN South Africa was the first of the group's 19 operations, having started operating in the dawn of democracy back in 1994. It now accounts for around 1/5 of both group service revenue and also group EBITDA. We heard yesterday about the macroeconomic environment of South Africa. We had yesterday about the challenges around load setting and the power crisis. And Charles and Dineo will talk us through where the business is right now and also we'll have a Q&A as soon as they are done. But before they get on stage, let's get a glimpse of the MTN operations here in South Africa. [Presentation]

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Myself and the CFO, will take you through the SA story. There's about maybe, let's say, 4 to 5 example questions that we need to answer today. Some of them have been mentioned about operation in the macroeconomic environment today, pressures of inflation. We also like to give a bit of color around load shedding and what we're doing from a South African context. And I think also with the guidance that has been given, I'd like to believe that 1 of the things that you're concerned about is that what is it -- what is the growth formula? What is the growth equation from MTN SA perspective? So we'll touch a little bit on that. And then -- and maybe just give a bit of context in terms of our ability to execute, do we have the management and the profile to be able to execute the strategy as we see it. On this chart, we give a little bit of a glance of the profile of MTN South Africa. #2 in the market, 30% market share. Ralph put quite at length around data as the future growth of the business. I'm requesting that you look at this chart with a data lens. If you do that, you'll see that the smartphone penetration in this market for us is about 80%, very, very important. That delivers 46% data revenue contribution. So if you look at the portfolio of our revenue -- 46% of our revenue comes from data. Another key highlight here is that 59% of our customers are active data subs 59%. So you've got about 80% smartphone penetration. Then you've got 59% active data users. There's room for growth. And that's a case we're making in terms of the ability for us to be able to scale this business continuously to grow based on data. If you ask me and say, the level of investment, we're investing to look about that in terms of the capital framework. And also if you look at the spectral assets. Are we resourced correctly or investing correctly? Do we have the right spectrum to be able to deploy these frequencies? Yes, we have. So we've got about additional 100 megahertz we got last year. On that, we got about the 2.6 and 3.5, they'll be able to use going forward to be able to enhance the profile of this business as we put data at the forefront of growth for the business. On the margin side, still within guidance at the 8.5% and the service revenue, again, we'll continue to grow savings revenue in the business. So the key highlights, like I said, look at this slide largely from a data lens perspective. One element, which I'll touch on in the next chart, is about the home broadband. What is MTN strategic posture when it comes to home broadband? The operating context we had yesterday, I mean, Dr. Rashad spoke quite eloquently around the pressures of macros. That induced, of course, by load shedding -- the implication of that, of course, is that you've got a subdued medium-term economic growth. And then, of course, with the pressure point in terms of cost at inflation level. What that means really in the end, and the question that I would have to answer is that what then do we do when we deal with the customer a very compressed wallet. What are the instruments that we have as a business to be able to still grow within that? On the far right, we're just making a call out around 4G and 5G penetration. We see that as a growth lever of this business going forward. 25% population coverage on 5G, a significant deployment of the 2.6 megahertz spectrum. So we see that a particular level of growth that will still continue to come through going forward. The market structure in terms of where we stand, key called me talked about maybe the EBITDA profile of the business at 38.5%, pretty much in line with the competition. CapEx intensity of 17%, the completion at 13% market share like I spoke earlier on, I said 30%. But I guess what's important is that what are the unique identifiers that you have for as a business to compete? What do we have? As a business, we've got the most valuable brand is MTN. It's a good lever for us. That red equity is very, very important. And we're making a very strong call out about the best network 5 years rolling. For the past 5 years, we continue to win the best network. Now I know that there could be a question to say, look, Charles, but load shedding pressures, even networks still the way it is and all of that -- I'll say to you, the investment we're making on load shedding we restore [ Netlist ] quite easily. So best network, 5 years rolling. Strong market share gains look at our growth in postpaid and enterprise, which I'll give you a little bit more color on enterprise and postpay later on. And of course, the largest mobile wholesale network. I'll spend a bit of time on that as well just to double click on it and say, what does it mean the context of South African brought a telco landscape, continued double-digit growth on data revenue. If we say the data is a clear growth path in the immediate term and the midterm, we say in MTN, we're say -- we're continuing double-digit growth on data revenue. Regulatory -- we all know, I mean, it's the regulatory landscape is quite fluid, but I'll spend time maybe just dealing with 1 or 2. We had a spectrum auction. We're very successful, like I spoke earlier of 100 megahertz that you got -- the 800 is still not cleaned up. So the 800 partially paid for. So that is still not fully deployed. There still engagement on that. So we're very clear in discussions with the government in terms of digital migration. We know what the government's aspirations and plans are. But the Q1, again, is the sunsetting of legacy network. In our network, we've got about the 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G network. So we've got a full layout network in terms of technology layers. We think that we can take out the 3G layer. When we do that, that gives us opportunity to be able to be able to repropose that frequency for the deployment of 4G. Not only that, there's a lot of cost that's sitting in terms of transmission infrastructure that we'll be able to unlock -- and of course, we can take the frequency to be able to deploy for something else. So very, very key. But I will have to question and say, we still have about 5.6 million or so 5.6 million customers who are sitting on 3G devices. So it's a collective effort together with our partners and the likes of point terms of how we're going to move our customers from let's say, 3G to 4G and eventually 5G. I'll talk about Ambition 2025. How are we prosecuting our strategy from ambition 25 perspective and SAS contribution to the broad Ambition 2025. Let me just start maybe with, let's say, mobile money, 200,000 customers in 2020 when you started and remind the audience that this is a business that is 3 years old. We're looking at this as Ambition 2025 for mobile money, we should deliver a set a range of 3% to 5% in terms of the number of customers we're looking at. Enterprise business as a significant engine of growth. We expect that this business, as you go into the next, let's say, 2 to 3 years, the ambition is very clear 14% 15% to 20% revenue contribution needs to come from this business. Whole sale, I'll talk a little bit more still about wholesale. But if you look at where we are today, ZAR 5.5 billion of revenue that has been generated from the whole business. Wholesale business with a significant level of upside, which I'll give a little bit of color. I mean if you look at 2025, the ambition is very clear, we say ZAR 6 billion to ZAR 7 billion. In terms of driving industry-leading connectivity I spoke about active data subs at 90 million in 2022 for us to really make a dent and to secure these busy in terms of data growth. We need to get these customers in the range to 25 million to 30 million. But already with 80% of smartphone penetration, you have had room to be able to onboard as many customers as possible to take them to 25 million and 30 million for active data subs. Home broadband, I think, is a question that a lot of people have and I'll leave it in my next slide to give a little more context. Let me spend a little bit of time on this because I think everybody wants to understand where will the money come from, where will the growth come from? See this in terms of, let's say, the signal, the growth curves of the business, 3 that you see on the chart and Tridea coming on the next chart. At the core of it is that the consumer business is still a significant part of the business at a prepaid and postpaid level, quite significant. Now we click on that consumer business, we see prepaid at a 49% revenue contribution. Ferrous about 13% double-digit data growth. So if you said to me, look, voice is under pressure, voice is declining. Of course, I say it's a migration from circa switch voice to pace Swiss voice. So you've seen that moving into the data market. So data, even within the prepaid segment, it's remain resilient and appropriate clear line of growth going forward. What are some of the things that has been stalling or derailed the growth of the prepaid. What are some of the challenges that you'll be having. I'll call it extra time, I'll say, in the market where our peers today -- advance -- item advance if we can call it that way. Our peers in this market are sitting around 40% to 45% extra time penetration. And we're sitting at 26%, 24% to 26% range. So that handbrake has to be removed. So what have we done today, this morning, we went live with a new partner, Otesto to remove this challenge that we were having for a long time -- on the previous partner. That should unlock there, then we need to get this extra time profile from 26% to 45% and peer-to-peer comparison. There is room to be able to do that. That will be able to happen. There was a question around price increases and inflation based pricing. What we have done in this market, we've done plus ups or inflow plan on prepaid. $0.99 to $1.50. So we have the lever to be able to scale up and price up. And also, let's talk about CVM One of the biggest challenges has always been that our competitor is much more robust with proper CVM or dynamic pricing program or plan. I'll give a little bit more indication on what we are doing and what we're investing. So we think that once we remove the handbrakes, once you the pressure that we head to extra time, ability to price up, deploy CVM and of course, fixed low staging, which I'll cover. Then we can be able to get some uplift in that prepaid segment, which is still significant at 49%. The bottom of that is postpaid. We are under-indexed when it comes to postpaid in the market. So there is room for us to grow within the existing incumbents. Today, the postpaid business contribute 18%, data growth about 8%. We took a price up early in the year. But what are the things that we also have to fix. And this also applies to both prepaid and postpaid. It is the simplification or the rationalization for price plans. So on the prepaid side, if I could go back to that is that we have this surgical delayering of the price points that we are doing and simplifying the price point that you have in the market. I always say that our consumer executive answer was here, we say the principle for pricing is that one for twenty. For one new price plan, 20 must be retired because all of that legacy price plans that are sitting there, a lot of leakage that we are moving out of the system. So product simplification. Also on postpaid. One of my underlies our executive who runs commercial operations. And we constantly say that this business has grown postpaid traditionally along 2 channels, what you call the BRC, the branded retail channel or telesales largely just 2 channels. But if you look at maybe the incumbent or the competitors in the market today, you see multiple channel points, we're closing that gap. And I'm not talking here boasting up bring in more time and setting up new stores. I'm saying there are existing channels that we never participated in that we are now unlocking to be able to open up to you to compete and be able to grow the postpaid base. There is definitely room for growth when it comes to that. Another point to imagine we're saying digital fast. There's always a temptation when you look at companies like us as legacy businesses and the new ones who'll come on board, who call themselves digital players. And you believe they don't have the DNA to be digital ourselves. That's not the case here. We are building inside MTN a proper digital fast online platform for proper gene onboarding upgrade for postpaid. That will enable us to dilute a couple of things, largely the deployment in terms of customer provisioning but also the pressure around cost of sales. So that is also one of the interventions that we are doing to address that. So that is the equation on the consumer side, prepaid and postpaid. What about enterprise? Very often, I get asked about enterprise, we see is this public sector based? Is it sustainable? Is it just mobile? The answer is this, this is multisegment based enterprise, large enterprises, SMEs very resilient mix within that enterprise portfolio. The work that we have done in the last 3 years has delivered quite significantly when you look at the type of revenue mix that we have. So well diversified in terms of the customer portfolio but also diversified in terms of the products themselves, [ Coregas, ] mobile, that is in the connectivity and, of course, digital services. And when I double click on connectivity, just to make a point. We're calling out on the chart that you're looking at that we own the hotel broadband network, [ TBM. ] What you should gather from this is that this GBN was never won from an MNO. This is not a competition against the MNO. There are many other players in the market who are participating in the connectivity space that we are going after those deals. You can see that we managed to win the GBN from Auto. And there are many of this nature. So when we're saying that we are diversified in terms of our ability to compete in the market to not just focus on enterprise, they don't want to compete with MNOs. There is a lot of fun out still to be able to deliver the enterprising and going forward. So I spoke about the segment. I talked about the segment, diversified. But the digital services is an element that also want to double click on.. And when I say digital services here, I'm not talking about traditional hosting platform, server-based infrastructure hosting. I'm talking about cloud, UCC, Unified Communications security. Today, as MTN Enterprise business, we now run for the MTN Group. The service operations center for information security that is being run and built under Mgen Enterprise business. We are building the capability within. So this ambition of 14% or 15% to 20%, we definitely believe that is reachable as we go forward. And that will also help us as we move forward to further derisk and the price that you might pick up on prepaid. Wholesale, our view is this that this market is ripe and will definitely consolidate on a number of levels. This market will consolidate at ISP layer. Definitely, there's too many ISPs that will definitely consolidate and its a pity now. This market is going to consolidate at the FNO level, and it's also going to consolidate in terms of infrastructure play. In terms of the number of MNOs we can provide infrastructure. And that's why we're posing ourselves as a network of networks. Today, we are concluding by end of this month, the entire Cell C traffic would be running on the MTN network. We've taken [ Kayser in for Telkom ]. He's now onboarded. And there's opportunities for federal growth. That sets us apart in terms of our ability to channel this traffic and position ourselves as a true network of networks while also enabling large-scale MVNOs. But also what excites me is the journey management that they're building, the platform that they're building, the proper BSS and OSS tech that they're building to enable much more seamless integration and onboarding of customers. So the pieces that you see before you say this. They say that in the immediate, we'll continue and we have the instruments to try and manage the prepaid voice part of the business. We see data as a clear element of growth. While removing the hand breaks that have been derailing the prepaid business, we're expanding the channel base for postpaid to be able to grow while making our product portfolio much more simpler and easier to be able to onboard new customers. And we're growing the channel. The nascent areas of business, like I said, look at this in terms of the sigmoid curve. So you have to look at these are really the base layer of growth, very early and nascent platforms. I want to talk a little bit about home broadband and say that just to be very clear, there is no strategic incoherence or maybe organizational in nature in terms of our ability to execute on the home, at least in the last year. We know that we've fallen behind in terms of home, but we're working very hard to catch up. So there's a lot of focus that we are doing here. But the biggest focus right now is that let's exploit the fixed wireless access on 5G, let's exploit the LTE network. Ralph spoke earlier on and said that in the U.S., we are seeing the fixed wireless access is outpacing normal wire or fiber into the home. We want to take advantage of that and utilize the spectrum that we have, the 25% population coverage. What better than up. So very, very, very clear area of growth. Fintech, the fintech here is broken into 2. So you've got a traditional mobile money that sits in here, and then you've got XtraTime, okay? I have a slide on Mobile Money, so I'll give that a little bit more focus. XtraTime, like I said, 26% recharge profile is just not good enough. But like I said, we have spent time. We've launched the platform, and we brought a new partner. And we're confident that going forward, we'll be able to deliver a much more penetration than what we have today. Digital, again, nascent business. We think there's room to grow. In the next few months, we'll be making announcements on the OTT plus that we are integrating. Essentially with digital, we're moving away from selling what we used to call like naked Internet. So we're moving to much more layered services that as we sell the package, as we sell that it comes with streaming services, that is a clear area of growth for us. So I've taken you through what we call the equation or the revenue formula. I'm saying to you, there's a clear core business that we continue to have this. Enterprise business, clear line of growth. You've got digital at nascent businesses and fintech and home broadband, but we're also anchored on data revenue as a key growth lever. Okay. The question, again, was managing in a challenging environment, driving commission momentum, the pressures of inflation, 4 pillars that you're calling out. Some of them I've covered already, commercial, supply chain, IT network and financial resilience. CVM, CVM, CVM, dynamic pricing, I'll deal with that. I spoke about surgically delayering the price plans, driving adoption of digital services to try and remove commissionable cost of sales and move towards more self-service and self-recharge and aggressively manage the device margins. Supply chain along the focus on vendor consolidation. With a platform of IT partners in the ecosystem, we are shrinking that base. I spoke about energy and energy security, which I'll cover in terms of load shedding, and of course, maybe look at full visualization and moving to the cloud on an IT network. Financial resilience. I'll leave that to our CFO. He will double-click on what we're doing around cost efficiencies, what are we doing to be able to try and hedge and manage the portfolio and eventually deliver the required level of margin. Load shedding. The message mentioned yesterday about the impact of load shedding on the economy, I think, landed well. Sounds very positive. And I think James was very clear that this is like 2 bookends. And I guess the question is that if these are 2 bookends, then where does MTN play? And how do you choose to prosecute this issue? The assumption that we're making is that we are pretty much at the relatively West stage that we can be, listen to what he said. So by taking that view and working investment based on that, so what are we doing? We said that we -- when we communicated to the Investor Day, we're going to help ourselves. We're going to bring multiple vendors to be able to help us to drive this. We have done so. So a couple of things we have done, site hygiene solutions that we have done, better solutions, better deploying, strategic genset and mobile genset. That is the intervention that we are doing to make sure that you counter the effects of load shedding. And also, I think you've heard the announcement, the Energy User and Supplier Block Exemptions that came because of the industrial associations lobbying at the ministry. And eventually, they are now allowing us to be able to share energy between ourselves, at least ourselves and Vodacom. That engagement has started. So we believe that we can share gensets. So if we are -- we have 2,000 sites where we share. They can deploy on this site. We can deploy on this site, draft proper SLAs. That engagement started immediately when this directive was given. Visible wins, I'll double-click on a little bit more when I continue. I said the strategy is based this way. You asked me and said, but how do you decide to invest? The base layer for investment on load shedding is batteries, and then you move to static gensets. Then it deploys solar panels, of course, portable gensets, which I'll talk about. This is all contextual. It's based on the site, if it's a hub side or not. So we made decisions based on revenue profile, the criticality of the site, and then we deploy according to that. The portable genset one, I'll give the credit to Rami Farah, who has joined us from Irancell. We've got this innovation where we have field engineers who have cars for managing our active infrastructure on the sites. We're giving them all gensets. [ Tele ] genset is where we're to. When there's load shedding and deep proof, we plug them where it moves to Protea. We move those to Protea, the FMEs, just to try and manage -- just to show you the extent of the level of detail required to be able to manage this program. With what we have done and interventions we have done, the question should be, what then has been the improvement. Availability has improved. On the sites that we have done proper management for Stage 6 and Stage 8, we're seeing clear improvement in terms of data volumes, clear improvement in terms of network availability. So ladies and gentlemen, I think the point I'm making is that we are confident that the interventions that we promised when we met you in the year, when you're saying that and invited you on self-help, multiple partner approach, it is definitely yielding the results. We'll now execute this for the next 6 months, and we believe that as we do that, we'll position this business practically in a much better situation than it is. The CVM or dynamic pricing, I spoke about it to say that one of the challenges that we've had in terms of our ability to grow the prepaid business has been the lack of capability around CVM. What do you need for CVM? First of all, you need a platform, which we have now, bringing the Oracle onboard. So we've got a platform. You need the capability. You need the people, the data scientists who are doing that now. But you also need to make sure that you've got the proper shout-out in the market. And for the first time now, we have a very clear callout in the market of our campaign, Made4U, which positions as the home for value, which we've never really in the past, positioned this very, very clearly. So customers know now, when I'm looking for value, where do I go? You can contrast this with the Just4U proposition, just to give you the context of what we're talking about. Very, very well positioned today. And then what we need to do is to make sure that this is a cross-channel integration. What I mean cross-channel, I mean that you must find value when you go to MoMo. You must find value when you go to the store. The engine will pop up and position value across all different channels, central engine, central offers exposed on multiple channels. So what has been the performance? 4% year-on-year improvement, 11% increase in average spend per user is now contributing 24%. And the drive is very, very clear that with the push we have done in terms of positioning the platform, the skills levels, cross-sell and integration, we are now aiming for 2025 to make sure that the dynamic pricing platform contributes 40% of the total bank revenue. Fintech, and I know a lot of people think about fintech in the SA context compared to other markets, that maybe the ambition is not as exciting. We believe there's a clear story for fintech and mobile money in South Africa. Just the same as the level of trading that happens in markets like Ghana happens in this market in [indiscernible]. People trade on the street. We can digitize the payment today. Our aim is very clear. We'll grow the subscriber base by 2025. The ambition is very clear, 5 million. And we're now launching the product called [ Motherland ]. Brad and Rob and the team are launching a proposal called [ Motherland ], which is in traditional remittance. Personal loans, were launching that. Expansion of MoMoPay, like I say, all the traders in the villages and the street who are able to be able to use mobile money to transact. The target is clearly in terms of to make this available to about 30,000 merchants, 50,000 agent base. And we believe that we'll be able to deliver the ambition that we have of the 5 million subscriber base on the fintech platform. I will now hand over to the Chief Financial Officer, Dineo Molefe, to take us through the financial framework and performance. Dineo?

Thank you, Charles, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I will take you through the financial framework, which essentially supports the strategy that Charles has outlined. Then I'll cover the financial performance for the past period and the framework as we see in the medium term. The financial framework that we are positioning is aligned with the group financial framework. And it really is overarched on the principle that we need to be able to deliver solid, stable and attractive free cash flows. It is also premised on service revenue growing on aggregate within inflation range levels and then having a cost structure that is optimal so that the balance of the formula allows us to be able to be profitable. Now in the past 3 years, we have grown service revenue at a CAGR rate of 5% despite the decline in consumer voice, which was more pronounced in the 2022 financial year. And in the medium term, we remain with a medium-term guidance of 4% to 6% on service revenue growth, which is an aggregate growth. Now you have to think about our service revenue within the market -- within the context of what is the mix. If you look at the growth formula that Charles has shared, the prepaid business isn't a business that would deliver inflation-level type of growth. However, the enterprise business, the wholesale business and then the growth areas going forward. And hence, we are confident about the 4% to 6% story that we have. Charles has mentioned that our growth is largely a data story where we will grow double digits even in the medium term. The portfolio simplification that we are doing as well as reducing the amount of free traffic is really to aim at improving effective rates. Together with CVM, as we continue to deploy CVM initiatives, this will improve effective rates and hence improve profitability as well. The price increases that we've communicated earlier in the year, we have implemented in postpaid, in enterprise as well as in prepaid voice and in some parts of the fintech business as well. So then we've seen an uplift in terms of revenue profitability. Residential is quite important for us. And the thing that we lack about residential is that it does tend to have more resilient ARPU levels. Even as we continue to connect customers, the ARPU levels are quite resilient in this space. Fintech and digital, we are investing quite a lot in terms of expanding their channel and the footprint. Most especially when you think about the fintech business, it is a mass customer business, and you need to be able to reach as many customers as possible. So we are investing in terms of channel there. So collectively, we believe that these investments will allow us to be able to attain revenue of 4% to 6%. In the environment that we're operating in, underpinning this ambition is the ability to invest in resilience, which we are doing. And so we've seen that as we've started the journey of improving our network availability, revenue performance is improving. And we are quite confident about the performance of half 2 being better than what we would see in half 1, as we've previously communicated. Now looking at EBITDA margins. We have guided 37% to 39%, which, as a reminder, has absorbed the increased cost of load shedding. You would be reminded that we've communicated that the increased cost of providing for power had a 1.2 percentage point impact on our margins, and the increase in group management fees had an impact of 0.8 percentage points. In terms of CapEx, we are guiding a range of 15% to 17%. However, we do see that in the short term, the 17% -- we would be higher than the 17% as we accelerate the investment in resilience. In 2022, we attained a CapEx intensity of 17.4%. And we have invested about ZAR 25 billion in the network over the past 3 years. Tsholo mentioned earlier the point around value-based capital allocation framework, which we've also adopted in the SA business. It's quite important that as we deploy capital, especially in this environment, that we are focused and we are deploying in a way that will ensure returns are protected for the business. Moving on to EBITDA performance and cost efficiencies. When you look at our performance in terms of EBITDA, we have moved from 39% in 2020 to 38.9% in 2021 and 38.5%, which we've reported in 2022. Some key callouts in terms of EBITDA. For 2022, load shedding had a 0.9 percentage point impact on what we reported. And therefore, we would have reported 39.4% excluding that impact. The profits from the tower disposals had a 0.7 percentage point impact on the reported margin as well. You would notice that 38.9% of 2021 is below the 39% that we previously had as guidance. And that is really because in the 2021 year, we were impacted by the provisions for share-based payments. So when you would normalize for that, the margin would have been higher than 39% that we previously had been guiding. Now our margin performance is quite enabled by the cost efficiency program that we are running, which predominantly is within the network and IT space as well as the channel costs as well. Network and IT costs in 2022 was 39% of our total operating expenditure. In 2021, it was 32% of operating expenditure. And the move year-on-year really is as a result of adopting power as a service and hence the increase in OpEx. But the point here is that network and IT operating expenditure is a lever for us to continue to explore and ensure that we are doing all we can to remain competitive in terms of a cost structure. So how did we achieve the initiatives or at least the savings that we've realized? We focused quite a bit in terms of the maintenance and support costs. We've engaged our suppliers and renegotiated key contracts with them. We've looked at network quality segmentation and implemented improvements there. As well in terms of power supply, we've implemented initiatives such as smart metering and modernization of cooling on our sites. We also have looked across the technology stack and platforms and retired legacy platforms and legacy technologies. In terms of channel and device costs, we have really looked at the in-source versus outsource mix that we have in terms of running the business, digitizing a number of the journeys in which we support customers in order to reduce costs as well as increasing the number of customers that are directed towards the online platform, which then helps us to save money as well. Device management remains a live topic for us, and we are supported by the group as well in ensuring that we are relooking at the mix of the devices that we source and ensure that we are optimal in terms of the device. And we are seeing -- in terms of margin, device margin, we've seen a bit of an improvement -- quite an improvement in the current year. Looking forward to the 2023 year. We have prioritized ZAR 0.5 billion of savings. Again, it will be anchored by cost efficiencies in the network and IT cost space as well as continuing to improve customer self-service journey so that we can save costs there. We've also outsourced, as I said, some of the functions, and we'll continue with contract renegotiations as well. With the increased investment in network resilience, that does come as well a cost increase in terms of OpEx. So we are carefully managing that cost increase, carefully negotiating with our suppliers to ensure that we remain within optimal cost structure overall. Lastly, looking at our cash preservation initiatives. To give context, South Africa over the past 3 years have upstreamed about ZAR 20 billion towards the group. So quite a significant role that we are playing for the cash of the group. So in terms of our priorities for the 2023 year, we are targeting ZAR 1.5 billion of cash release initiatives. This will largely come from receivables monetization. In the 2022 year, we were able to realize ZAR 1 billion from this work. So we'll continue and target the same level for this year. We are implementing omnichannel collection strategies really to ensure that we are collecting as much as possible of our billing. We have also expanded our supply chain program to more than one platform just to ensure that we are able to maximize on the payable cycle and then, of course, working with the group in terms of device sourcing. The exposure for euro and dollar, as we are all concerned with regards to the devaluation of the rand, we are 45% exposed in terms of CapEx and 15% exposed in terms of devices. In terms of CapEx, the split between euro and dollar is really the same, split between the 45%. And so we are continuing then to look at our hedging strategies as well as mitigation strategies. One of the key ones is to ensure that we are relooking at opportunities for changing the base currency through which we contract with our suppliers. Before I hand over back to Charles, really, ladies and gentlemen, the summary and the takeaway is that as a management team, we are comfortable that we'll be able to attain in the midterm the service revenue levels of 4% to 6% and that the EBITDA margins of 37% to 39% we'll be able to attain in the midterm as well as support the cash profile of upstreaming towards the group. I will now hand over back to Charles. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Dineo. In conclusion, we've spoken quite a lot about the strategy, the initiatives that we need to execute. I think, listen, all we're doing here is just to showcase the profile of the team that we have. I made a few callouts on the work that Rami has assisted us in terms of network. I spoke about the work that [indiscernible] is doing in terms of delayering and changing the price portfolio of our business and pricing up in the market and fighting off inflation. I covered a little bit around the channel expansion of our business to make sure that we expand the number of channels to be able to deliver the postpaid revenue. And of course, in the end, it's the quality of the team that executes the strategy that makes the whole plan credible. What is it then are we giving you as management? The entire MTN SA management is here today. What is the management giving to you as key takeaways? We are collectively saying to you that we will continue to see opportunities for growth in SA despite the challenging macro challenges, very clear about that. As a business, as leadership and as management, we remain positive on our growth prospects with a strong growth formula and a very strong level of execution, very clear. Again, we said to you that our platform businesses continue to scale as we position ourselves as a key network of other networks. The CFO has touched on our expense efficiency program that will continue to deliver significant savings for the business. And the entire team of management of MTN SA was saying that we remain committed to deliver on a medium-term guidance. The CFO has covered it. Just to remind you on what the guidance is, service revenue growth, 4% to 6%; EBITDA margin profile, 37% to 39%; CapEx intensity, 15% to 17%. With that, we thank you, and we'll be happy to take questions from you. Thank you very much.

Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys. Please join me for a brief Q&A. And Charles, let me start with you. You talked about load shedding. We've been talking about load shedding. I just wanted you to please provide some color on these generators. I mean how do they practically fit into the resilience plan, especially given how -- I know how network sites are set up in South Africa?

Yes. Look, I mean, it's a very important question you're asking. A lot of times, we get questions who say, you have done this in Nigeria, how come you can't easily do it in South Africa? And we are quick to answer to say, look, the Nigerian situation, of course, was from the beginning. So the network was built with that in mind. The SA network was built almost like a European network because at the time, the access to power was default. So what that means is that in terms of real estate on the site to start with was limited. It's almost a 2 by 2 kind of framework in terms of real estate. So we now have a situation where you have to sell provision on the site. So provision means a number of things. I spoke about batteries. Batteries need a shelter. Gensets also need a shelter. So there's a challenge in terms of space. That's what makes the project challenging. In some areas, we're lucky. There's enough real estate who are deploying gensets. So we're able to do that. In some areas, it's constant negotiation to landlords. We have to expand the real estate to be able to do that. And what we think we'll achieve and what we're doing, I mean the core or the hub sites, if you can call them, those ones by default must go in gensets. And then we look at the higher revenue generating sites also must go in gensets. And eventually, you're looking at maybe, let's say, 1/3 of the total number of sites supposed to be on gensets. That deployment, like I said, we're doing with multiple partners. We've got -- who are working with us. We've got ZTE working with us. We've got IHS. We've got ATC as well. So it's a multipronged approach, and the deployment of the mix is based on the site.

Got you. Got you. Dineo, let's talk working capital, accountant to accountant. You talked a little bit about how you are managing the cash and the working capital, but I'm interested in what the run rate looks like for that and maybe focus areas, especially given some of the challenges on the macro side.

We do, in our business, tend to see that in the first half, that's where working capital is mostly utilized, but we do tend to recover in the second half. So the focus area is really on the receivables because it's a topic of cash cycle. In the postpaid business, your cash cycle is longer in terms of recovering cash, whereas in the prepaid, it's a shorter cash cycle, 30 days. So the reason why we monetize the book is to manage the cash cycle effect on the postpaid book. And that's really where we get most of the efficiencies.

Got you. Got you. Let me open to the floor. Yes, ma'am, already with the microphone. Go for it.

It's Louise from Investec. Maybe if we can touch a bit more on your CVM strategy because I think you always seem to play catch-up versus some of your other peers in the market. What informs your strategy? And can you basically provide more color on your AI and machine learning capabilities and how that has progressed over time? And then on dynamic offers, I'm trying to assess how advanced your CVM capabilities are, where your geolocation intelligence can actually be linked to load shedding stages, and you can be able to push offers to customers in certain areas? Are you adept at specific stages yet?

Look, I mean, I think we, Louise, were the first one to admit that we are behind, I mean, in terms of where the market is. But [ the main first ] particularly is one of the parameters of the CVM proposition. First of all, it's a platform. You need to have a proper robust platform. Like I said, you need to have the right skills. You need to make sure that it's cross-channel integrated, so it's available on multiple channels. But we also need a proper shout-out in the market. And I think if there's anything maybe that we maybe never really did very well was that taking a proper poster in the market about where the customers find them. So positioning, tick, we have done that, Made4U. You can see it all out in the market at ATL level, tick. Platform acquisition, Oracle, tick. Acquisition of skills, tick. Cost and integration, about 14 channels we want to expose this. Online channels, MyMTN app, MoMo app, distribution channels, all multiple platform of channels, we want to expose this. I think we're sitting on about -- let's say, about 4 to 5 channels today where they're farming the proposition from one single central engine. Then we're working on AI and machine learning. We got about -- I think there's about 7 use cases that are now in test phase. On that, they use what we call -- we call it NBX, but NBX is next best thing, next best offer and -- while using AI and machine learning to be able to generate insights to be able to showcase there. So I think we're making significant progress. And I think for the very, very first time, we can make a very clear callout that we have a very clear plan that we have executed. Once we get all the NBX or the AI/ML into play, I think we'll have a proper fully fleshed platform that we've been trying to build for years.

Got you. Two-pronged question from Cesar online from Bank of America. The first part for you, CFO. He says, how long will it take to get back in line with the long-term service revenue guidance of 4% to 6% and the 37% to 39% margin?

Yes. So I guess Cesar is asking on the back of the Q1 performance that we issued. So we had communicated early in the year that we see that half 1 would be tougher. But we would see the recovery really in half 2. So by the end of the year, we should be within guidance. So half 2 is a period of recovery, supported by the resilience plan that Charles outlined. And then for full year, we would be within guidance.

Just to add on that, I mean, we are very clear that -- and I think the CFO was touching on it, that H1 will be under pressure. Even Q2 still relatively under pressure, just to be very clear. But we are sure that -- I mean, if you look at H2, again, look at the base effects because the level of deterioration in terms of low shedding kicked in quite aggressively in May last year. If you look at our average recharge daily rate, the decline happened quite significantly in May last year. So coming into May, June, we start to have the upside. That's purely based on base effects. And then when we enhance the availability that the team is driving quite hard to be able to bring the network back up, then you've got another upside. Then with the price, the price ups as well that they're coming in, removing all the -- not all, most of the foot traffic, optimizing some of the social bundles, that's another upside. So just to explain the instruments of why are we confident to support [ this year, so to say ].

Got you. So Q2 a little bit difficult, but from there on out a lot better.

Yes, sir. -- it's [indiscernible] again from Metro Industries. The network is absolutely key. I mean I'm a telco engineer, it's absolutely key, right? And it's very encouraging to see the robust plans you have to make the network in a part and the pun a robust to load shedding, right, immune to load shedding, right? Now I'm sure you're sleeping and dreaming about batteries, Charles. But when do you think the top 30 sites by the revenue will be immune to load shedding from your point of view because the 100% is not really the most important part. The top 30 sites when will that be ready?

Yes. Sounds like it's a good question. I think -- Look, let me say this. When we made the first decisions of investment on load shedding, all of us in this room practically assume that Stage 4 will be false measure. And since moved quite rapidly to Stage 4 and Stage 6. And what we've done as management, what we said is that -- which was really quite bold and courageous, I have to say. -- that I think instead of maybe operating this thing with one partner, we want to make a bold decision to see go with multiple partners. And part of it that will in-source and run it ourselves as MTN, something that we really never wanted to do. That's why this was supposed to be external-driven exercise. We have seen significant results. I mean there's a vital result Lenasia. We're coming to Joburg, we aew opening it finally. We're going into the Western Cape and Central province -- significant. So I will say that give me H2, not 380% of the site but for significant network improvement, 5% beyond 30%.

Great. I want to wrap up with the question that's coming online from Victor Scott. It's a Fintech question for you, Charles. With regards to the Fintech, is the end state of the platform to be a super-app, whereas like WeChat app in China, where the app encompasses various services, QR payment collections, loans, insurance, ForEx payments, ultimately perhaps transforming to our financial services app. Can you give us color on how this looks and how you plan to compete with VodaPay app or any other super app of the South African banks app, app, super, super.

I'm tempted to duck the question and wait for Serigne, I think. I think Serigne will cover that a little bit more in detail in terms of the positioning. I think I understand there's a contrast in the market. People look at the VodaPay app has got a little bit more lifestyle and finance at the same time. And while you look at our apps is, the MoMo app particularly is much more finance-centric but we also have the Ayoba platform as well. So I'll leave that for Serigne in terms of the strategic quadrance of how we're approaching it. But in the South African environment, just a point of emphasis of what I said is that there is a play for a proper Fintech player for the low base segment of the market. Andile you can -- you know so way too very well. You go in the streets and lead us a way to Khayelitsha, you go to [indiscernible] and Diepsloot. Our people are trading in the pavements and they're collecting cash. we think we can solve the problem.

We'll put that question to the Fintech team as well. Ladies and gentlemen, round of applause for team. Right. We're trying to keep up on time. It's a long day still a lot to get through. We are now going to be having a 10-minute stretch break. Ladies and gentlemen, there's coffee and a little bit of eats that have been made available. So you can make your exit at the top or at the bottom, I will see you at 11:42. Thank you very much. [Break]

Welcome back, Ladies and gentlemen. We're going to kick off with our second session as and when our colleagues are streaming in and welcome back also to everybody that's joining us via the webcast platform. Like we did yesterday, we're going to be covering the markets except this time. We don't have analysts and people from the external world. We've got our team members and the executives that run those businesses. You would have also heard Sandy earlier on when the group President and CEO and the Group CFO on stage, they referenced a lot of these questions, you must ask and you must send some so, while this is the moment to do so especially for the largest market that MTN has, which is Nigeria. That is our focus between now and lunch. And as you all know from the very first quarter that was made in MTN Nigeria back in May 2001, the operation in Nigeria for MTN has grown to become the largest OpCo, both in terms of its contribution to group service revenue, which is about 40% contribution and 45% contribution to the group EBITDA. Well, we've already touched on Nigeria actually this morning with some of the news that has come off a lot of the press, and you're now going to get the opportunity to hear from the CEO and the CFO of the OpCo in Nigeria. They will be taking us through a lot of the developments that are happening in country. The MTN Nigeria CEO is Karl Toriola and the Chief Financial Officer is Modupe Kadri, and they're going to be taking us through their plans and also their current performance. But before they get on stage, there is a video that we'd like to share with you on the operations of MTN Nigeria. [Presentation]

Good afternoon, everyone or just morning. Before we get on to the serious stuff, I got a bit of stick from the Ghanaian team yesterday about speedboats versus oil tankers. And we're in the telecom industry, and we measure speed by what? Network speed. We're on 5G, you saw 700 megs, even Shalom, tell me what your speeds are. Now unfortunately, I suspect that if this is related back to the honorable minister of -- for finance. He's wonderful why he's going to be seen the invitation for some delicious Ghanian dishes. But you know what I like about Africa, and we see this as a World Cup. I think Ghana knocked us -- us Nigeria out of the World Cup at the last Qatar World Cup. And we have a lot of rivalry between ourselves. But the minute there's 1 or 2 or 3 applicant teams left the whole of Africa gets behind those teams. And that's the exceptional about Africa. Anyway, on what the severe stuff, the Central Bank has announced that the devaluations story, it was a rumor, still going to happen, touchwood,hopefully, but the one that came out this morning was wrong. So I'll get on to the presentation. We are the leading operator in Nigeria. We've continued to maintain our lead. Currently around 75.6 million subscribers as of 2022 ending. You'll see that we had a dip in our subscribers' numbers as a result of the NIN SIM registration, but we're fully behind that, and it's a policy that we lend in towards. We've continued to hold our market share somewhere around 51%, 50.8% to be precise. And with significant technology investments, our CapEx intensity range around 18%. We are keeping within the guidance that we've committed but as we see opportunities to accelerate our growth, we'll take those opportunities. And you'll see, particularly in 2021 and 2022 as we talk to opportunities around accelerating data growth and the 5G investment we went back to a bit more CapEx but still stayed within the 18% range. Network sites up to 51,974. Our population coverage is around 92%. And with the recent addition of the Intel spectrum lease, we are pushing our 4G coverage to somewhere around 82%. And strong financial performance. We've taken our revenue from 2020 for about NGN 1.35 trillion to just over NGN 2 trillion for 2022. Very proud of our Ayoba progressed 5.2 million subscribers, and we've had solid progress on Homes Connected. I'll speak to that a little bit further in the presentation at 1.2 million homes connected. And the operating context, it's been a challenging macro. I think Bismark give a very well balanced but optimistic view about the macro going forward. and with rather tepid growth rates for what you expect from the giant of Africa. Nonetheless, we continue to push forward and grow pretty much ahead of inflation. I'll speak to that a little bit. The industry 4G penetration is around 24%, and our smartphone penetration is at 54% at this period in time. Key macro highlights pretty much replicating what Bismark told us geopolitical and macro developments, COVID, Russia-Ukraine war, energy cost inflation have affected us. We've been affected by foreign exchange volatility and availability in dollars, but we manage that very, very well. We actually accelerated our CapEx deployments in '21 and '22 and most of them in the first half of the year. This year, a little slower. We've seen rise in inflation and stabilization in GDP growth, inflation at about 22% now. And multi-policy typing with the NPR raised 500 basis points to 18.5%. But we are very excited about the demographics of Nigeria. We have low data and smartphone penetration. There's still a lot of runway to go. Huge population growing at about 2.6% predominantly youthful population, very quick to adopt new technologies, whether in the digital data or Fintech space. There's a limited traditional banking footprint, and there's still 36% of the population unpacked. Nigeria is a lot more than Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt. And if you could drive me to the [indiscernible], you'll see that there's a lot of reliance on cash as there is within the urban centers as well. And we think that there's a big opportunity in that space, even now -- even with the progress of the traditional banking industry in Nigeria. The GDP and the economic potential of Nigeria, I think, even though we've rebased the economy, I think it's still underestimated. And that's because we don't see full transparency of the informal economy. There's 40 million odd MSMs in Nigeria that account for 46% of the GDP. And we think that's a huge opportunity, both in the consumer and in the enterprise business as we address those. SIM registration requirements have given us a clear on equivocal base for approved SIM registration with an associated with it. So the issues of the past are really in the past, and we have a strong strategic partner to both the NCC and the National Identity Management Commission in NIN registration. Key regulatory updates, the same NIN registration leakage policy, I think we're pretty solidly behind that now. We've been a key partner of NIBBS. We've contributed in equipment towards building the infrastructure and capabilities. And I think that gives a unique [indiscernible] standard for KYC and we've been a part of accelerating SIM registration, which is going to have a lot of social benefits across the country. We were one of -- we were the only existing operator, but one of the two bidders that won the spectrum auction in December 2021. We launched that in September. iPhones came onstream in December, and that's performing ahead of our projections. We're very satisfied with that. I'll speak to it a little bit later. National roaming, we think there's a big opportunity, not just for ourselves in terms of revenue generation potential, but also to support smaller players in the industry. And with the MVNO licensing regime, we think there's also an opportunity in that space. the TSB license after multiple years of waiting. We finally got that sometimes in April, 2022. We've launched, but in the last few months, we focused on the governance structure, the control systems, and we're now ready to push and accelerate forward in terms of wallet acquisition. Most of that will be covered by Serigne supported by Eli Hini, who's our MoMo PSB, CEO . And there's been a recent directive or approval given by the Ministry of Telecommunication to disconnect banks as a result of the USSD debt. Now we have to do that in a responsible manner that doesn't disrupt the financial ecosystem in Nigeria. So we're in engagements with the Central Bank and with the deposit money banks to see how we address the debt, hopefully and worst case and disconnect, but we'll do it in a responsible manner. Compliance is nonnegotiable. And I think the stability that we've seen out of Nigeria I think it was lady who reminded me earlier that we haven't seen any material fines out of Nigeria in 5 years. Is indicative of the strong governance structures that we've put in place and continued stakeholder relationship development, which we've put in place also gives us an opportunity to stay at policy as much as we can. At least our voice is heard, and we're on the table into discussions and insight in some of the developments we could reach out to the central bank this morning and see has the currency been the value? And now, you'll hear from us soon enough, which is why I said there will be this communication. We've aligned activities with national priorities. We're supporting small operators as much as we can and we are promoting high-impact projects. The one we committed to, and there was two actually, the head office, which we've acquired the land, we are going through the phases of design. We'll start construction probably next year or so as we complete the whole design and tender process. The other one we're extremely proud of is the road infrastructure tax rated screen, we've committed to the rehabilitation of Enugu-Onitsha expressway, which is the most important artery in the east of Nigeria. And we're going to make a bit of noise about that with the new administration, but this actual physical work ongoing on site, and we're going to collect our tax credits. We have repositioned successfully, MTN Nigeria is the best partner for government. The perception of a foreign extractive organization has pretty much disabled in Nigeria. We seem to be very much locally integrated, a key partner to all strategic stakeholders in the country. And we continue to explore dispute resolution mechanisms that avoid large frontal conflicts. Looking at the market space. As I've mentioned, we are somewhere around 58.8%. We've pretty much held that position across the years. But what we're, I think, particularly excited about is the evolution of our 4G market share, 4G data users. We've seen quite material growth over the last 3 years, approximately 4% in the 4G users in the market that is assessed by Facebook. And how have we done this? We are #1 in Net Promoter Score since 2020. We've enhanced our network quality and speed, and we have reassessed ourselves as the leading operator, particularly with the 5G and better customer experience. We continue to leverage our large distribution network. We are rolling out 4G and 5G aggressively and continue with our rural deployment. We've just added, I think we had a sense release a few weeks ago. 500 megahertz in the 900 spectrum, which we're using primarily for 3G. But they're also very interested in, it's a 10 megahertz spectrum, FDD 1800 spectrum from -- which we lease from Intel which is one of the existing operators approved by the NCC following the process, paying all the right fees. We've activated a very fast speed -- and this is only in 19 states, by the way. We'd love it to be in Lagos and Abuja, It's not. But in those 19 states, there's a huge opportunity where we've been able to improve our network coverage and speeds and accelerate our 4G penetration and with the use of that spectrum. Half of that we could do without any hardware upgrades, we've pretty much executed that. The remaining half is going to take another 30 to 60 days to implement, and that's going to give us another upside in that space. We're accelerating our home broadband penetration into the country using -- leveraging our 5G solutions and fiber to the home. The primary source of the connection is for 5G fixed wireless access but we're cherry-picking locations, where we already have some existing fiber infrastructure where it's easy to roll out, where it's secured, maintenance is less of a struggle like gated estates, et cetera. And we are quite successful in the homes and pass-to-homes connected ratios. And we're looking at other partners who are willing to invest in the infrastructure and we use our brand, our technology solutions to actually connect as much as possible on 5G. But we're very excited about the successes of our 5G connectivity. And I think we're trending ahead of target there. Quick coverage on Ambition 2025 -- in 2020, we had 1.4 million Ayoba users. We're now at 5.2 million as of the end of 2022. MoMo users have grown from 4.7million to 14.9 million Momo users. But the majority of those on OTC. Our focus is shifting clearly to the wallet business, and our active agents has also grown exponentially. In terms of driving industry connectivity, industry-leading connectivity solutions, we are accelerating our active data users now at 39.5 million from 32.6 million. We've more than doubled our home broadband users, and we continue to remain #1 in NPS, customer NPS and network NPS. On our Reputation index talking about stakeholder management, our score for 2022 is actually ahead of our long-term targets were 81%. And we've executed the localization of MTN Nigeria has spoken to our clear intention to go all the way to 11% or group shareholding down to 65%. But when the economic conditions are right, and we can see a path to getting our cash out of the system there. We're proceeding with the structural separation of our Fintech and FiberCo businesses. This slide shows the compounded average growth rate of our revenue, which is 20%. But actually, if you take two steps back, and that's from 2019 to 2022. But 2019 and 2020, our growth rate was in the mid-teens. We accelerated that to the low 20s percent in 2021 and 2022. Voice revenue for 2022 was NGN 1 trillion, up 7%. And this is in spite of the challenges that we saw in NIN registration, which hit us on our voice quite significantly in quarter 2, but quarter 3, quarter 4 going forward, really pushed up our [indiscernible] revenue in terms of growth, particularly using CVM and smart price up solutions as we had a reversal of the headline tariff increasing. Data revenue up 52%, closing in on voice revenue. FinTech up 34%. We think we're just at the beginning of that curve of growth. Data revenue has kept in the big driver of growth through the last few years. But Fintech with and the push that we're going to do on mobile money PSB is going to be the next curve of growth. And Digital showing actually the strongest percentage growth at 69%. The numbers are still relatively small, but there's a huge opportunity in Nigeria, and we'll speak to one or two points there. Opportunities specific to Nigeria, which is probably the largest content creation market in Africa, and there's a great opportunity to be an aggregator and distributor of content in that space, not just for Nigerian content, but for all international content, working with our group digital teams who are working on deals with Netflix, Amazon, et cetera, et cetera. Our Enterprise business, 20% up, we think that's a strong growth. We are gaining value share in that space and corporates are coming and turn it to us more and more. We haven't spoken to our relative competitive performance. We've actually matched in percentage terms and actually slightly beat in our competitors' growth in the last year or 2 of our very large base, that's significantly higher absolute narrow growth. And we're very proud as a management team of that acceleration of our relative performance. This shows just quickly, the two growth curves, data. We said that always said that there's a sustained shift in the consumption patterns of data. And what I'd like to speak to is maybe a little box that talks about data usage per active user, which is at 6.8 approximate gigabits per user. Weather homes is somewhere around 20 gig per user. But you have to keep in mind that Western homes actually also has a lot of offload of a mobile user and towards WiFi networks in at home and in the offices. So we think there's multiple avenues to grow this. One, we do have a high segment of high users, where there's a lower segment of a lot of customers that are still relatively low in terms of their usage and they are going to grow exponentially over time. Two, we're going to capture the home and office consumption through our fixed broadband initiatives. And then three, there's still a lot of runway in terms of active data users, which we can still drive and, of course, handsets 4G-capable handsets and of course, the upfit we see from 5G. On the fixed broadband, home broadband usage, we're actually actively swapping out 4G home broadband users to 5G for a multiple of reasons. One, it offloads our 4G network and reduces our CapEx requirements. Two, 5G is actually more efficient in terms of deployment, the cost of deployment of data in those networks. And three, you actually see an uplift in consumption when you might go to a customer from 4G to 5G. So that drives our swap. We've seen accelerating, and this is very much in the recent stages, adoption of Fintech services and transaction volumes but again, another exponential growth trajectory there, which we think we can drive even faster as we continue to focus on our MoMo PSB wallet space. How we're driving to sustain growth? Voice was really nice success for 37% up in 2022. We did have an initial approval, and we executed it less than about 1.5 weeks. Initial approval for a headline tariff increase that was reversed for a multitude of reasons. And in spite of reversing that and in spite of the NIN registration challenges which really hits our voice revenue in Quarter 2, 2022. We managed to deliver 7% voice revenue growth using revamped voice propositions, working on our bonus structures. CVM was a big lever of that and continue to grow our coverage expansion while, of course, protecting our market share and ramping up our gross connections. Data revenue increase was sustained by natural consumption trends, CVM initiatives, positioning ourselves and not just position ourselves but delivering as the quality as a network of choice, network of quality in the country and expanded -- accelerated, expanded 4G and 5G coverage. On the home, we've increased our fiber to the home deployment in key select clusters. We've accelerated our 5G home broadband connections and we're very pleased with that. We have 100 megahertz of spectrum, and we are focusing the deployment of our 5G network driven on two things: one, the presence of handsets Samsung handsets are yet to come on to stream, that's imminent in a few weeks once we get the Samsung handset software deployed, we'll see a bump up in the consumption of 5G traffic. The 4G -- sorry, the iPhone handsets are online and they're delivering solidly on that. So we select our 5G coverage on the basis of consumption demand for home broadband solutions, what we see from fixed broadband. When we see users that have very high usage on 4G on our -- on the fixed wireless access consumption, we upgrade them to 5G at a subsidize cost and we see the consequent uplift. And then we pick select locations like universities and tech hubs, et cetera, et cetera. And we put 5G in that space. We launched a few quad-play solutions, together with ShowMax, Amazon Prime, et cetera, Apple music as well. And we continue to lead in customer experience on our reward program retention. In Fintech, I'm not going to cover that to a great extent, but I'll be happy to join any question-and-answer sessions. Serigne and Eli Hini are going to cover that. But our focus is now on growing wallets and the merchant ecosystem. And starting pretty much from the month of June onwards, we are on a large campaign to really create and generate awareness and excitement around the PSB solution. And as we expand our wallet base, we'll be building on advanced services across printer verticals. Digital is focusing on gaming, OTT video, digital advertising, a lot of music and video opportunities to collaborate with the right partners to address the challenges of Nigeria around the health and education space. And on the enterprise space, we co-create customer-centric specific solution solutions. We enable digital transformation across verticals for all of our customers, and we're focusing a lot on the SME space. Navigation. Our challenging macro environment, I'm sure all of you would have seen the results for Q1 2023, 21.6% revenue growth, and we should probably say is slightly below the inflation rates of today. We were hit in Q1 2023 by the cash crunch and it hits all the businesses in Nigeria quite significantly. We're one of the very few businesses in telco, and I have a slight dispute with Bismark around that. We've won very few businesses in Nigeria that actually saw significant growth. A lot of the food companies actually saw in the peak of the crash crises decline in revenue of around 30% to 40%. And we saw growth and through this quarter of 21.6%. So we think within limits, and we're a very, very resilient business, which takes a priority of spend. And so we think that through continuous optimization of our pricing to address the challenges -- and hopefully, we're looking at tariff increases. I'll speak about it in a bit. And we ramp product offerings, I think we'll be able to protect our revenue base quite robustly. Supply chain management, we have always traditionally committed our CapEx up front as early as possible and secure the dollars for our CapEx expansion program at the rate currently available to avoid any increase in effective narrates as a result of devaluation. We use trade lines for letters of credit. And we have redenominated as much of our foreign currency contracts to local currency as possible. On the network space, we have well-structured ToweCo agreements, which mitigate rising energy costs. Again, majority of them are under the IHS contract that have a significant portion of dollars but they do have a narrow component as well. And the rest are pretty much narrow contracts with an energy pass-through pricing. So we think that on balance, we have a good structure there. We've always said consistently that a 10% devaluation in the currency will approximately impact us at 1.3% EBITDA margin. But that's a straight line analysis. We continue to look for efficiencies through our EEP 2.0 to get more out of it, out of our open-system and that's one. And we will be looking. And I think there's been consensus across the stakeholders that this industry is well overdue for a price increase. It's been a question of the timing. But I think with the imminent crisis devaluation removal of the subsidies, potential final implementation of an excise duty, and we're optimistic that we will able to get that through. We have a very well structured funding and liquidity profile. [indiscernible] speak to that in a bit. So I don't want to go on that extensively. To understand our tower contracts and energy and power contracts, 50% -- 55% of our tower contracts are indexed to the USD in FX rate. And the exchange rate is adjusted at the start of each quarter. And as I mentioned, 10% devaluation in the narrow results to a straight-line 1.3% impact on margins, but we optimize that. There's 80% tower contracts do not have an energy pass-through. So if the energy prices spike or decline, it doesn't impact those contracts. About 20% do have an energy pass-through. The tower contracts have a U.S. dollar and a CPI escalation. It's not one for one. It's a portion of the CPI impact, but that's applied annually based on prior December year's rate. Our 5G network progress and opportunity. We are very excited about this. there's been people who have thought that 4G was't for Africa. I think that's been well proven wrong. Likewise, for 5G, we're at the forefront of this, and we think this is really going to be successful. We acquired 100 megahertz, that is material spectrum of 5G spectrum in the 3.5 gig space. We acquired the spectrum that had the highest handset penetration marginally better coverage, and we commercially launched. We've rolled out 708 5G sites as of end of quarter 1. But we're plus/minus going to triple that in the course of this year. And we think there are great opportunities in the lower band spectrum for dynamic spectrum sharing to actually accelerate our coverage, particularly in building solution over the course of this year. So we're very excited about that. Our intention is to reach 10% coverage by 2023, but with the utilization of the lower bands of spectrum, we think there's actually an opportunity to actually even improve that even further. Our traffic is ahead of projections based on iPhone users and the home broadband solutions. And we will continue to accelerate this as we swap out 4G devices for home broadband to 5G, as I said, to relieve congestion on our 4G network where it exists and to improve our ask win in that space. I'll hand over to Modupe to take us through the financial and capital allocation. Thanks.

I'm going to talk about the financial and capital allocation framework. The framework is not new. As it's has been shared previous by [indiscernible], [indiscernible] -- what we're talking about from a Nigeria perspective, in terms of what we're trying to do and how we ultimately trying to ensure that we generate free cash flows. So the four pillars -- the three pillars, service Revenue growth, Karl spoked about that. We're targeting at least 20% service revenue growth. We do recall that sometime -- 3 years ago, we dipped up the market guidance to at least 20%. So we're still committed that -- and of course, it's always a balance to try to maintain ahead of inflation. The average inflation in Nigeria last year was about 10.8%. So delivering above that, you see in the next chart how we've fared in that regard. How do we do this? Karl just mentioned about escalating our mobile plants, scale the platforms. We're going to talk about that. And then Serigne will also unpacked that from an Nigeria perspective. And of course, Voice is not going away. That's the surprise that we see. And of course, we'll always try to maximize and ensure that we monetize those opportunities in our markets. Then that also takes us to the margin expansion story. Despite the strong headwinds, we've been able to expand our margins, how we been able to accomplish that. [indiscernible] talked about DCB 1.0, 19 2.0. And I think you've seen a Nigeria's contribution to the group program in that regard. So we got to operate leverage in our size. We're going to maintain relentless focus on expense efficiencies. That is to look for areas, we will continue to expand our margins and I think we are making some progress in there. Actually, that's one of the reasons why you look at last year's results, you'll find that the OpEx was somewhat under control, notwithstanding the strong headwinds that we experienced. And of course, will continue to accelerate our digitalization program. Now in terms of value-based capital allocation, that remains our top objective. We are committed to reduce our CapEx intensity to sub 18 levels, 18 or so sub-18 levels. But I will say that as we do mention on the course of a period, if there are opportunities where we have monetized, we would have to explore that in terms of the growth of the market size. But so far, we've kept within the CapEx envelope that we have. So we're going to scale our advantage. Network and IT optimization, continue. Some deployments of the cloud to reduce dependence on infrastructure on the ground and of course, we are going to remain disciplined in our capital prioritization. So you've seen -- when you look at the growth in data over the past 2 years, you've seen that we've consciously allocated to growth areas in the 4G space to capitalize on the data opportunities, and we're doing the same on the 5G space, and that's why you've seen -- we are monetizing that asset. Now all this, of course, will lead to attractive free cash flows. Our cash flows are well-managed. And I think we also have a working capital efficiency programs with Dineo also mentioned, and that all flows to the bottom line. Now in terms of our capital allocation priorities, it still remains 4G coverage, 5G coverage, which also details on Ambition 2025. It's all about data. Voice will remain there, but it's more focused on data. Capacity of grades were possible. So we're going to see modernization of the network and ensuring that it's robust enough to carry the traffic, it's not in the market at the moment. Now in terms of dividends to shareholders, we have a dividend payout policy that says -- that we will pay up to 80% of retained earnings. Now we've been committed over the past 2 years, it's actually up to 87% [indiscernible], DIneo mentioned, but I would mention that we soft streamed over $1 billion over the past 2 years. And she confidently missed that. But we did to $1 billion, at least about $530 million, $580 million for the past few years, and we've done a bit this year, but because we've not released it into the market, I can't be talking about that at the moment. So in terms of investment. So Tsholofelo, Serigne are going to come on stage also talk about the Fintech space. So I'll leave that. We're going to scale Ayoba actually scaling that, trying to leverage on that. And of course, the Enterprise business, we actually have a digital program on that, trying to monetize the opportunities in our space, and it's actually doing well in the contribution to the service revenues that we've seen. And in terms of our capital structure, -- like -- so actually mentioned, exposure in terms of foreign debt is about 10%. Most of it is local debt of 90%. Of that 90%, 46% is fixed and 54% is floating. So some of the questions that may be anticipated that we anticipate, okay, we did a script program. What we're going to do with the cash. Ultimately, we're going to see how we're going to take out some of those floating instruments, to reduce the finance cost. And of course, if you listen to what Bismark said yesterday, the cost of capital is going to go to rise, at least given the current macroeconomic conditions, it actually makes sense to see if you can take that and have some more free cash flow to pay out. So in terms of the financial highlights, specifically within the evolution of our service revenue growth from 14.7% like Karl said, mid-teens. Now we're actually seeing 21.5%. And then the key challenge is how we're going to sustain that. One of the things we're looking at is to get that tariff increase in place. It's also cushion the effects of the operating costs that we're seeing. So we're pleased with the growth. It's a healthy contribution. In terms of EBITDA and EBITDA margins, the guidance we gave as part of Ambition 2025 is 53% to 55% and we are still in 53% ranges. We still are committed to that despite the headwinds, and we are pleased with the trajectory. And if that is going to change for any reason, then of course, we'll come to the market at appropriate time but for now, that's where we are. And the Q1 results released to the market is also in that space. In terms of our profit after tax and now in Nigeria, annually, we have the finance bill where the government usually tricks. So today, the effective tax rate is almost 10% to almost 35%. So even though year-on-year, you actually have to normalize the ETR, the effective tax rate in that year to compare -- to look at the evolution of the profit after tax. That's why 2021, we saw the leap 45.5%. But subsequent to that, the effective tax rate is gone up by almost 2 percentage points, which affects the profit after tax. But of course, if we grow the top line as we committed to doing and maintain our cost profiles -- and of course, that should also flow through. In terms of our free cash flow, we've also seen healthy growth in terms of year-on-year evolution, and that's also in line with our disciplined approach to ensuring that we'll continue to look value in where we are placing our investments. So with that, I'd like to hand back to Karl, who will talk about the conclusion and highlights.

So the one thing that Modupe did not speak to, which was really a master stroke by himself and the treasury team is how we went to the market and really got long-term funding through points as well as commercial people short term. At rates that are slightly incredible, it looks like sorcery, actually below the bank CBN rate. So that has given us a very well-structured long-term funding. And then we'll migrate the rest of the free-floating instrument. So a great job by the finance and treasury team there. Looking forward, Okay. This is the right one. I think what's probably a bit special about MTN Nigeria is our ability to execute and that's thanks to these people here. A lot of them are old faces, Modupe, we used to be in Ghana, still the Head of the Chairman of Mobile Money in Ghana. But a few new faces I'd like to call out Aisha Omer Mumuni, our Chief Digital Officer, appointed a few months ago to drive the digital space. We went and store the Head of Mobile Money from Ghana Eli Hini, you okay? So we are part of the capital or human capital flight program out of Ghana. But we really were looking for the best, most experienced pair of hands that have seen this journey from bottom up and has done it at scale. So we're very pleased to Eli have early as part of our team. [indiscernible] has been doing an amazing job in fixed broadband and also relatively newly appointed actually challenge identified by Martin when he was CEO. I sent to him a message saying absolutely amazing choice. and Sina is Chief Sales Distribution Officer. I think by July onwards, you really start to see the impact of the transformation of that function. It's been comparatively -- probably are slight [indiscernible] compared to the competition, but I think we're getting well ahead of that. And then Hassan, of course, who is now old because he's been with us by like a year and 3 months comes from the most advanced digital market. That associated [indiscernible] we have a minority shareholding in MTN Group, which is MTN Irancell, brings a wealth of experience there. But it's really an amazing thing which we're extremely proud of. Looking forward, what are we looking at? We will capture the sustained growth opportunities presented by structurally higher demand for data. We'll ramp up our growth connections. We will accelerate our 4G penetration quality and 5G, while at the same time pursuing aggressively, and we think the time is right, a headline tariff increase. We'll continue to drive our home broadband strategy to capture significancy of the market growth, not just the growth but to ensure that when the migration from the mobile devices to home and office broadband happens. We are the ones there to serve that space. We're going to access our platform with one big primary focus, and we're going to do it aggressive and we're going to do that scale. And that's Fintech at this point in time, but digital is just as important, but the acceleration of the contribution to revenue, we think, is huge. 36% of the population on cell. The rural areas you have to drive kilometers and kilometers to get cash. I think that's a huge opportunity. We've got the right team. We'll continue to focus rigorously on our expense efficiencies. I think you've seen the EBITDA margin evolution in spite of inflationary pressures, has shown that we have strict discipline, expense efficiency and continue with discipline capital allocation, and we'll execute our Ambition 2025 strategy and deliver in line with our medium-term guidance and driven by the Management team. Just a closing slide just to show what the medium-term guidance is. Service revenue at least 20%, EBITDA margins were 53.5%, reducing CapEx intensity of 18%, dividend payout of 80% of distributable income. So -- and that's it. Thank you.

Thank you once again, gentlemen. Please have a seat, and let's fill some questions. Karl, let me start with you on the competitive environment that is Nigeria, especially when it comes to data, it's been quite robust in that market from what I can tell. What is MTN Nigeria's advantage in this space? And what gives you the confidence that you'll continue to lead on data side.

The advantage is customer experience. That's the first point. And Commerce bought to their wallets pretty quick. So we've driven our data acceleration by investing significantly in 4G coverage expansion. Through spectrum acquisitions, we had an 800 megahertz spectra acquisition, which we completed approximately 2 years ago. We've just completed the Intel spectrum, a lease in 19 states that allows us to expand quite aggressively. And we are not only perceived, but in reality, we are the leading operator in the technology space. So customer experience, transparent billing, competitive value propositions in the market and a great customer service, at least within the context of our markets and a recognition of the contribution and the privilege we have to service customers. And we're building a great brand that's deeply planted in Nigerian cultural identity.

Modupe ,We've been talking about ForEx or in a couple of context, right, mostly about the whole issue of upstreaming and repatriating funds, et cetera. But the other thing you got to deal with is the fact that some of the OpEx and CapEx particularly are not in narrow. How do you manage that?

Well, so we -- two things. So where possible, we leverage on our balance sheet. So some of those contracts we prepaid them in terms of the actual rate at the time. So that helps give us some leverage. And of course, where possible, it's 80% of the cost basically are more like although the denominator didn't have a foreign currency base but actually paid in. So it's not as safe, it's an FX effect. But you converted at the rate ruling at the contracted basically. So it's not really -- you're looking forward for that quantum of Forex. However, the real question probably on what would probably do with CapEx, that's where you actually need the real dollars then, of course, we have to leverage on our trade lines and where possible, get some foreign currency denominated loans and of course, use the letters of credit that the Central Bank has in place. And then that's how we backfill those things.

Got you. Yes, sir. Right at the back.

Neil from Absa. I'm interested in your relationship with your tower operators. So how can I put this? I mean it's pretty much a cash in '22. We all know the share price is under pressure. And I think part of the reason there is the relationship with its partners in Nigeria. What is the risk here that the lease or these lease maintenance or renegotiations that are less telco friendly. Thank you.

We, the Nigerian team look at this from a Nigerian lense only. And that is management, and that's the Board. So we'll make the decisions that have the best outcome for Nigeria in terms of our margins. And Group will deal with the share price issues on their own. We have to do that for governance, for equal protection of all shareholders. And that's what we're doing. We're going through an exercise on 2024 portfolio to ensure that we get competitive best available rates in the market. And to the best extent as possible to protect the margins of Nigeria. And Ralph will explain the we, whatever impact that might have on just -- and we really do take that very seriously. We have a very strong independent Board of Directors, key senior independent directors that apply themselves very robustly to these decisions with the heads of the of the financial obligations of MTN in Nigeria.

I mean I think Karl answered correctly there. I mean the issues about our holding is not cost problem and should never be because I think you've got to make the right decision for the business. Neil, I would characterize your question and maybe make a slight adjustment. I think what is affecting the share price is the fact that 70% of the earnings of IHS are Nigeria and people are not -- or taking view is we have an official rate here. We understand what IHS Upstream cash adds and MTN and there's a parallel market rate. So spread is too wide -- for, I think, some investors to take an informed view of -- I think that's actually the material thing. I just understand that when they are negotiating with an OpCo, the OpCo has to have the lens to make the decision that is absolutely arm's length for that. And there's a bit of attention there, but it's the right sort of tension to get the best kind of outcomes. So I wouldn't say it's the relationship, the 2024 portfolio naturally is coming, the 2029 portfolio will come and the same dynamics will happen. And Karl is absolutely right. That's not his problem, that's myself, Tulua and a few others, and he has to do what's in the best interest actually for the Opco.

Yes. Sir, the back -- I'll come back to you, sir.

Vik from RMB Morgan Stanley. You've talked about the price increase that there is a timing to it and eventually, it will happen. But what about, I think on the tax situation, apparently the previous -- or I mean, still the finance minister kind of signed an excise that was supposed to happen on the telecommunications, what are your view on that? And have you gotten any kind of information in terms of how it will be implemented? And can you pass it on to the consumers or not?

So it was a slightly confusing period and to exacerbate that there was a handover of administration, shortly often of this was put in place. The excise duty was apparently within the law, signed into law but what we were told, and there was actually a posting on the Ministry of Telecommunications website was that telco was excluded. We're still not 100% clear on that. And the agency that actually is responsible for the collections of excise duty is the customs and they have to document the framework under which this is going to be implemented, and it's going to be 5% -- if or when it's implemented and the entire position of the harmonized position of the government needs to be clear. We are going to be prepared for it, but we think that's one of the strong justifications. In addition to further investment, inflation, profitability of the industry, sustainability of the players that are a lot smaller than us to have a tariff increase of more than the 5% excise duty. We're lobbying for that. We've been lobbying for that for ages . We think the circumstances are pretty much right now to follow through on that. And we were optimistic that we'll get that sooner than later.

And if I may add -- let me add the part of this question was if when it does come to play, it's going to be passed on to the consumers.

[ Myron from Luka ]. A question on your home broadband strategy. Maybe actually, it's more about the market structure. Is this area just for the mobile operators? Or is there people outside the space who are competing head on with you? And what's their point of differentiation in terms of their offering to the consumer.

So it's a vibrant space. There are fiber to the x players, people like ipNX and FiberOne, et cetera, Swift as well. There are also people that are deploying wireless solutions. So it's a vibrant space. And our point of -- or unique point of sale, first of all, is our expansive coverage leading technology, recharge and distribution is clear. And we have a brand that's associated with quality in the context of the space. But we don't take anything for granted. The advantage of fiber can be stability if you don't have frequent fiber cuts, it depends on the nature of your infrastructure and effectively a limitless pipe. And so that's why we are also playing in that fiber space, but doing so in a smart way where we can have returns, right? Right away costs are very expensive in Nigeria. And the cost of maintenance is also quite significant in Nigeria because of repeated fiber costs and infrastructure challenges. So where the opportunity provides where there are pockets of locations where we can have a high ratio of home passed to homes connected and already some infrastructure taking towards our base station then we get into those opportunities. And we're seeing good progress in that space, and we'll continue to pursue them aggressively. We do have limited capital. So we always put our capital where we get the highest returns first. But we'll capture any opportunities that we can beyond that. But fixed wireless access 5G is the main driver. And we'll capture on a select basis and the fiber space, while looking at all those with whom we can widely be people that will use their capital to put the infrastructure down and we can take the upside of working with our brand opening systems, et cetera.

Final question from Cesar from Bank of America here on the webcast. You seem very confident in the price increases in Nigeria in H2. Is it based on conversations you've had so far with authorities? Or do you think the telco regulator will change post the new government?

We need to appreciate one thing. A lot of the leadership in government agencies are tenured positions, okay? So if the tenure goes on to 2025, 2026, except the leadership of those agencies decide to design or something else happened, they will be there for some time. But the economy of Nigeria, hopefully with the new leadership shows indications that it's going to change, but there's an understanding of the pressures that business is under. And the first few steps of the first few days have demonstrated that there appears to be a will to make a change. The truth is, even in the previous administration, there was a wide acceptance that this industry was well overdue for a tariff increase. Unfortunately, it's regulated, so we need formal approval for that. Perhaps it was not the best time politically when you head into an election to make some of those decisions. But I think there's a wide understanding from probably the most important stakeholders around the economic planning and inside the regulatory itself, that this is necessary. That's why we actually got an approval for a 10% increase, which was subsequently reversed. So it's hard to put a finger on it and see this is when it's going to happen. But I think we've read quite well the sense of where policymakers are going. And we think we're optimistic sometimes in H2, we'll get this.

Carl, let me thank you for your time and run of applause with the team from Nigeria. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for that. That was very interesting from the biggest market in the MTN Group. Ladies and gentlemen, as you know, MTN's geographic footprint is wide, stage is over 19 markets, as I'm sure you've heard. And we've already heard from the leadership of the 2 biggest 1 being South Africa and Nigeria. Well, there's 17 other markets, and they are arranged into a cluster that's led by Mr. Ebenezer Asante who is the Senior Vice President for Markets. And he is going to be taking us through the presentation, give you the overview of these 17 markets that are split into regions. So there's a Southern and East Africa region known as [ SEA ] . There is a West and Central Africa region known as WECA and there's a Middle East that North Africa region known as MENA. And he'll be doing a presentation and then later on, he will be joined by the VP for SEA, [ Yolanda Cuba ] and also the VP for MENA, Mr. Ismail Jaroudi, who will be joining us online. I'd like to now call on Mr. Ebenezer.

Karl, I will resist the temptation of responding to your speedboat analogy. Sad to say that when I meet Minister Ken, I will tell him he was present in the room today. Greetings from markets. Earlier on Ralph talked about the case for markets. So I will not go into the details except to say that what market brings to the party is first, growth; second, opportunities; third, how we take their platforms into this piece and realizing that also there are challenges to manage very complex dynamic environment we operate within how we also manage the nation's both as a challenge and also the opportunities we see there. So in brief, if you forget, Karl, remember that if God is in detail, growth is in markets. Markets overview overall 175 million subscribers and maybe you should take it not higher. We have huge population across all markets growing around 3% year-on-year. And our subscriber growth rate is about twice 2.5x that of the population growth rate. So that is the first thing you need to take into account. And then the penetration into the base for data, for mobile financial services as well as digital. You realize that they are a way lower than[Indiscernible]. So again, vertically and depth, it's also given an indication of the growth and the opportunity prospects. And when you look at it, horizontally in terms of the monetization of the base, base on the opportunities that we also see today, revenue contribution is 37% of group whereas of [ Saba ] contribution is 61% of Group. It also gives you a gauge of the opportunity in there. Even if you remove the Iran numbers, you're still looking at 44%, 45% of the group base. In terms of the EBITDA margin as well as the EBITDA contribution, 34% and then capital intensity also we are within guidance. The profile and positioning of markets is one of leadership. Across all the 17 markets, #1 or #2. And we also lead in this piece of customers in terms of experience with leading technology. We lead in financial performance just as we also lead in the area of subscriber base. So it is one of leadership. It's one of positioning, and it's one of market intensity. Life is tougher out there, and it's even tougher in the market. So we have leadership both at the regional level and also in the opcos, we are able to manage these complexities. Very elastic, very resilient, very dynamic, diversified in all aspects, very, very strong, and we are able to manage meant the opportunity that we see and also net that would be necessity. So the necessity management and ensuring that even as we grow, the growth is sustainable and it's also not dictate politics in the space is highly managed. So we have Yolanda in charge of SEA and Ismail, who will also be joined virtually in charge of MENA and for the CEOs quite a broader range. We have Selorm in the room. The others, I'm sure they are joining me virtually. We are happy and very proud of the recent appointments MAPULA coming on board as well as Sylvia, also joining 2 of our key markets in Cameroon and Uganda. So we are very excited about the diversity that we are seeing there, and it's only an encouragement to do more into the future. Now the operating context for geopolitical and social environment, a lot has been said by Karl and Charles and their team. So I'm not going to repeat some of the points. And suffice to say that even though we see some security and social spots in some markets. Broadly speaking, the operating environment is relatively stable. And we are also comfortable in the fact that even though 6 of the markets in the next 2 years, we'll be going through elections, we expect the outcome to be positive. And we also expect the political environment to be healthy even into the future. In terms of macroeconomics, how it impacts on us and how we manage it. Again, I'm not going to repeat a lot has been mentioned around inflation and inflationary pricing, a lot has been mentioned around volatility in ForEx, particularly for the anglophone market. For francophone, which is a part of our portfolio, we don't have much issues with pricing and ForEx volatility because of the Europe currencies that we have. But even for anglophone market, we take care of these pressures through inflationary pricing and at the same time, managing the supply chain in a way to minimize the CapEx as well as an OpEx impact as a result of the macros. Regulatory environment, I touch on the leadership team very powerful, very strong, very dynamic, working constantly to ensure that we also manage the risk within the environment. Let me pick on a similar situation in the trend that you are seeing across most of the markets. In the short to medium term, it may appear as some noise. It may be a challenge. But if you take your guess into the long term, it's actually an opportunity. Opportunity in the sense that will be a health KYC and the biometric data that is being captured we'll be able to do our fintech business a bit more robustly because some of the fraud issues that may be in the space will be very well contained. And the digital solutions that also requires some enhanced KYC, even as we grow into the future, we'll be taking care of. In terms of competition, it's a very, very intensive competitive space that we operate within. The dynamics in the Francophone is a little different from that of the anglophone. That because of our dominant -- because of our strength in the market space in terms of the leadership that I talked about, we are able to also raise the anti in terms of where we compete. We compete in service, we compete in network, and we also compete in delivering and growing new spaces in order to add a layer because if you take a market like Ghana, and you take a market like eSwatini , where we are very, very strong in all the parameters in all the portfolio areas. How do we grow? We can only grow through new areas new services, new categories that we are able to make a difference. And once we do that, we are also able to leave some space for others so that the SMP risk does not become too pronounced. For this slide, I'm not going to dwell on CVM, we've talked about it in terms of how we use it to manage pricing and also protect our growth. The bit that I just want to highlight. And I have the opportunity of going into all the markets from time to time. And it is better experienced than be told. The team on the ground understand their game. They know where to meant and where to get growth from. So market intensity within the portfolio, voice, data, fintech platform and even in recent times, home is a clear area of difference between us and our peers. And beyond that, we also understand how to meet the opportunities and the growth to the nation state issues. So with that, we are also able to even protect ourselves as we grow. So that is a bit on commercial. And once we do that, managing the supply chain and the costs associated Assure network leadership, the financial resilience is only an outcome. For this slide, what I just need you to please focus on is the trajectory. If you look at what we've done in 2020, 2022, you can just do your own projection into 2025. So ayoba, Momo, in terms of subscribers and how we are projecting for the leading connectivity side in terms of data users and the #1 NPS game and how we are projecting. And then when you go to 2022, the number that you are seeing for home broadband. As I indicated, in terms of the opportunity, it also gives you an idea of where we are heading towards 2025. But a band into the future, strongly placed would also be on home broadband, just as was mentioned by previous presenters. Creating a share -- hold up the shared value for our stakeholders reputational index, very important, moving from 75% to 78% and making sure that the ecosystem also fill part of MTN in itself. The portfolio side, significant progress made in terms of fintech separation. We've done the first layer. We are into the next phase. And I'm sure when Serigne comes, he would also tell you a bit about what we are doing for the final phase. But we are making very good progress, and we are excited about it. This just gives you the competitive and stakeholder positioning in the market. What we want to do and our connectivity and the platform play, fintech and then also the nation states. And just a bit of the nation state. Overall, at the end of the day, we see a big opportunity in the digital economy that all the countries, all the finance ministers all the sector ministers are talking about. And that opportunity is what we engage them around. So the challenge and the issues should not always be around taxation, because we are also able to show them. Even if you want more tax, there is a way we can collaborate you to also get more from the bigger economy. So working with them on digital economic drive whilst we have also been using it to drive our business is a key area for the nation state and ESG leadership. With this, a few words, let me invite Yolanda to join me here, and then Ismail will also join virtually. Thank you.

Thank you for joining us Yolanda. Let's just make sure Ismail is online. And while we're waiting for him to come online -- oh, he's there. Hello, Ismail.

Hi, how are you doing?

Very good, very good. Thank you for joining us. Where are you by the way. Exactly.

Thanks a lot. And let me start by just apologizing for not being in the room with you guys. But I think Ralf alluded earlier that we are trying to do and orderly exit from Afghanistan. So I thought that I would stay close to that transaction and make sure that we are delivering on time.

Lovely stuff, lovely stuff. Ismail, I'm going to come to you in a moment.Yolanda, thanks for joining us. But maybe let me just pick up a bit, one of the things you referred to was fintech in your region. And market as kind of a cluster, but WECA in particular, seemingly has been doing very well when it comes to driving fintech and other platforms. What has been the case for success, especially in WECA?

Well, the case for success across markets and in particular, wake up for things. First is how we drive the base. I touched on the market intensity, how we acquire customers based on the distribution and metal network. The third is the advanced services that we are driving beyond their P2P. So remittance is big, BankTech is another and the new area of InsurTech is also another area. And we also positioned fintech also as a go-to platform. So we use fintech itself to drive the core connectivity business. So those are some of the things we do to ensure success for fintech across WECA.

Great stuff and Yolanda, let's go to your SEA region. Once again delivered a strong performance over the period from the year double-digit growth at recently in service revenue. Could you just provide us an overview of the performance of your segment?

Yes. Thanks. I mean from SEA region, really solid performance, as you said, I mean, we've seen like between 2020 and now 16% higher in terms of service revenue, and that's actually on the back of actually data accelerating and growing at 28% CGAR. And then if we look at our fintech also growing at about 27%. And what was surprising as was mentioned earlier, is the voice robustness in the mix actually still coming in at 7%. So if you look at our overall kind of performance, really solid performance. And if you look at or the market intensity that the repeal to. We grew our subs by about 3.5% to about 35 million subs in the period. as well as making sure that we're actually driving very hard or fintech users at 20 million. So if you look at 20 million versus the 35 million you're saying they're somewhere around 56%, 57% penetration in our base. actually at fintech. And then when you look at data, which is where we're really more challenged is we're only looking at 50 million subs, although we've seen great growth. However, there's still a lot of work to be done there.

Indeed, once again, a great opportunity on the continent. Ismail, let me bring you in here. In the MENA region, I've seen a lot of talk around some new revenue streams and that those could potentially be good lessons, I guess, for the rest of the group. I remember reading about the Snap app and how it's grown in that region. Just unpack that a little bit, some of the, call it, new revenue streams that you guys are leading in your region.

Yes. Thank you very much. I think this is a very important area, maybe to shed light on. As you know, we have some financial investments and a couple of those platforms and Snap and Iran and Middle East Internet Holding and the rest of the Gulf countries. Those platforms, basically, they are -- they stand over 12 different services from ride hailing the rights of the Ubers of the world up under to health care, food delivery, et cetera. And I think we have been seeing a very healthy and proper growth in the past 7 years. I mean -- and it's not as an example, they reached or close to 4 million rides a day. They reached close to 300,000 food delivery a day on the super app. We have around 6 million active daily users and the total of 50 million active subscribers. And of course, this is all driven by high level of smartphone penetration, high level of data as well users. So we believe that this is an area that we can learn from, and we can replicate that success story in other markets and the African continent. And we are busy right now considering those.

Great stuff. Let me open to the floor and also online. Guys, if you are joining us via webcast, please feel free to send your questions. Any questions for the Markets division like MENA, SEA, going once, going twice. Well, I have a question for you Yolanda on Uganda data. I see that there's been some interesting developments when it comes to driving connectivity over there. How does that go?

That's going very well. I mean Ralph in his presentation actually mentioned the Chase Spring work. that we've been actually driving throughout the organization. And for us to double data, we're actually focusing a lot on how we actually execute on that model. So from a Uganda perspective, specifically, we actually started with the connectivity layer and increase our 4G penetration and our coverage on 4G. So what we did, we actually moved that from about 45% all the way to above 75% and that on its own resulted in us actually moving our data subs actually more on to the 4G network. And today, Uganda actually, the data contribution of 4G is about 62% of our overall kind of traffic. And as we actually invested in the last sort of 18 months, we saw a 52% increase in traffic in absolute terms in that regard and 28% increase in revenue. So being very disciplined about it. And maybe one of the things that I actually have to touch on is that the Chase framework obviously starts with Pace but it also has the handset, which was a key challenge. So one of the things that we've been doing in Uganda specifically is actually negotiating with partners to actually help us with the distribution of handset. And as we do that, what we're finding is that actually our partners want to partner with us, right? So if I look at -- so I mean, we tackled it at multiple levels. First, it's negotiations with the likes of transient Techno and those guys. And also doing device financing. And then on the device financing side, maybe this is what actually noting. In Uganda last year, when we partnered in the last 16 months, we partnered with [ copper] , the same time as in Kenya for device financing. And right now -- I mean, last year alone, we actually added about 12 within 16,000 devices as a result of device financing from their side. On our side, obviously, you always have to have a self-help model and we do have a self-help model, and that's self-help model in the last kind of 3 months. I think in January, we did 10,000 handset device financing. Last month, we did -- no, 2 months ago, we did 37,000, and now we're at 56,000 as of end of last month. So we all momentum that we're gaining around device financing and the partnerships that we are doing. And then as we move forward, obviously, affordability is important. There's always a lot of discussion around CBN. And CBN will look at it in multiple kind of levels. The first one is the snacking bundles, right? People in my region are not used to data. Our data penetration is still very low between 25% and 30% in most of the [ opcos ] . So we need people to try our data. So we give them small bundle first to actually try out the data. We actually do bundling when we sell with partners and they say, you will get x amount of gigs a month. And then we spread it through the months, we actually encourage and stimulate usage. And then we actually play with the portability using CBN, so that we're giving the right offers to the right people and using some of the intelligence in our CBN tool to actually be able to do that. I want [Indiscernible] speak to the rest of the Chase model. But I just wanted to give you a sense that it's something that lives every day, and we drive it every day in the organization.

Absolutely. I have been just in closing as the Senior VP for markets, what would you say the temptation with MTN Group is to focus on South Africa and Nigeria. Because they're just so big. You've got an opportunity to talk to the investment community. What will your parting shot.

Well, maybe the model I need to leave with them is the smartphone that we are having. So the first is a superior growth. That is what you should continue to expect from us. The P is how we take the platforms to market. H is home. I touch on home from 0.6 million and where we are taking it, O is how we build operational momentum for leverage. And then N is the nation state dynamics and all the work that we are doing in terms of the economy and the digital economy approach we want to partner governments on. E is all the work we are doing around efficiency, for CapEx, for costs across all the markets. So if you look at it from that category, then the market is a piece to watch. Thank you very much.

Round of applause, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, guys. When Evan said, the acronym is smartphone now is going to there's going to be a lot of letters to get through it. So when I heard him S and P, I was like, oh, thank you. Ladies and gents, it is time for lunch. We're going to take a lunch break for about 30 minutes to allow you to be able to fill up your tanks. You know everything else by now. I don't have to repeat it all. Exits on top, exits at the bottom. The stage is straight to the chow. That one, you'll have to take a flight down of stairs to get there. It is 13:10. I'd like to get going at 13:40. So if you don't mind grabbing your chow, we get back and we're going to focus in the afternoon purely on fintech, which is by far the most exciting growth prospects of the group. So 13:40, we kick off. Thank you. [Break]

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us again. I hope you enjoyed your lunch as well as I did. And of course, to the folks at home, welcome back, and I hope you did too. We couldn't whatsapp you any lunch, but I'm pretty sure you sort it yourselves out wherever you are. We're going to be moving on with our program, and we've got 2 very exciting businesses. I was called to order when I said, 1 was exciting, they're both exciting. And that's the pharma business as well as the FinTech business. Now as part of MTN's strategic priority to drive industry-leading connectivity operations, the MCN Group has very clear ambitions on 2 key things. Number one, to own the home and also to be the leading fiber call in Africa. To take us through the progress that has been made to date, I'd like to introduce you to Jens Schulte-Bockum, who is the MTN Group Chief Operating Officer, and he's going to be joined by the MTN Group Chief Technology and Information Officer, Mazen Mroue, on Own the Home. As they come up, we're going to be watching a video on what MTN calls OTH. [ Presentation ]

Good afternoon for the afternoon session. First of all, I'm pleased to see that some of you have survived until now. What I can tell you is the end is near. We are on the last stretch of our presentations, and I'd like to take you on a journey to what we are trying to plan around the home and the broader fiber opportunity. We'll talk about Home first and then secondly, we'll talk -- we'll cover fiber, our Baobab setup in the next section. And I think it's quite topical because what you saw this morning in the individual markets overview is that we are currently still sitting on a long-term growth trend of mobile data. We've had mobile data growth with a CAGR of about 30% over the last few years. But obviously, as a long-term committed business that wants to win in connectivity and wants to lead in an industry-leading way, the connectivity field, we need to plan ahead, we need to think ahead. And hence, the home opportunity is very, very central to what we believe we need to do in the next few years. Now let me try to put things a little bit in perspective. Here in this chart, we are looking at our top 6 markets. In those markets, we see a growth to about 125 million households. That's the overall scope of the market by 2025. Now obviously, not all of these households will be addressable from a financial affordability perspective, from a coverage perspective and so forth. But we've estimated that roughly 1 of 3 households will become eligible for home connectivity by 2025. Underneath, you see a set of different ways the industry collectively is covering these households. And obviously, this data also reflects our own plans to a large extent. So by 2025, we will have grown our fast broadband mobile coverage, so 4G plus to more than 90% of these households. There is going to be a rapid acceleration of 5G coverage, and we estimate that we'll be sitting at about 40% to 50% household coverage with 5G by 2025. And you finally also see that the fiber opportunity is kicking in. Our estimate is that we currently have about 6 million homes passed in those 6 markets. The vast majority of that is sitting, probably 2/3 of that sitting in South Africa. So it's very nascent outside South Africa, but that is expected to double roughly in the time frame. And I think it will continue to grow dynamically, even though we would argue that the next few years will be still very wireless-centric, but over time, pivoting more and more also to fiber connectivity. Now this represents in value pool terms, about ZAR 120 billion of revenue in 2025. So quite a juicy addressable market that is giving us the prospect of extending our data growth story beyond the near term, which is still very much mobile smartphone driven. So here in this chart, you see a bit of a breakdown on how we believe the technology mix will unfold. And we'll come back to that in a little bit more detail and explain the underlying technology trade-offs. My colleague Mazen will explore that further later in the presentation. But roughly, what you see is still a landscape dominated for the foreseeable future by WiFi, by mobile broadband with fixed wireless access kicking in. largely fueled by 5G and what looks like a very small segment on fiber to the home, but that is a high-value segment because you also see on the right-hand side the corresponding ARPUs for different technologies. So they range from as low as 3 for a decent WiFi based mobile broadband-based service, all the way to $20 plus for a fiber-based service. And in some cases, we are still sitting in a very high-value fiber-centric model that -- where the ARPUs in Africa can be even above even $50-- we expect that to moderate a little bit, but there is substantial value pool size in the fiber side coming through over the next few years. Now where are we now? And how does that contextualize towards the Ambition '25? Historically, we haven't very much focused on home. So only a year ago, we were just sitting at 1.7 million subscribers across the group. That has grown 40% year-over-year. Simply because we started to focus and mostly on the back of wireless technologies that we are driving the growth with. By 2025, our ambition is 10 million homes are connected on MTN home connectivity with a mix of MBB, fixed wireless access and fiber. Now that sounds like a big number. Now we think the 2.4 that we have right now is going to grow organically to roughly 8 million. I was very pleased to see that my colleague, Karl already committed up to 5 million for Nigeria. That's a big relief. So I'm sorted as far as my targets are concerned. And we saw that South Africa will be contributing probably between 1.5 million to 2.5 million homes, depending on a contribution of inorganic activity. I'll come back to that because we do realize, particularly in the fiber domain, that we won't be able to address that market organically. There is and continues to be a significant wireless segment in South Africa as well. So we think that quite rapid evolution to 10 million subscribers will be possible and that represents then roughly 30% market share in those top 6 markets in terms of home connectivity, which we believe we also need to safeguard our overall mobile position because a lot of the high-value households will pivot their primary relationship towards home connectivity and look at mobile connectivity increasingly as a bolt-on, which is the trend you see in more developed markets in Europe and North America, where actually the choice of a household is anchored in the home connectivity and everything else ultimately becomes then an add-on. Let's explore the market dynamics a little bit more in detail, because ultimately, home is a very, very local strategy, local proposition that needs to be adapted to the realities of the specific markets. As I mentioned, the South African market is already quite developed. We've had a legacy of course, operational DSL that has already pivoted aggressively towards fiber. Most of the medium- and high-value geographies in South Africa are covered by fiber today. There is still an incremental opportunity in provincial cities in some of the higher-value rural areas of the country, but it's already abating from a coverage perspective on fiber. In the meantime, there's been very, very strong growth on the wireless segment in South Africa as well. And we believe that we can basically use that growth curve and Charles talked about that to initially address the wireless segment. We have, at this point in time, admittedly a subscale supersonic vehicle as an ISP on the fixed side, we realize that scale alone is not going to take us to where we need to be competitively, so we will be exploring consolidation opportunities as we believe the market consolidates. And if you look at the South African environment, it's a highly fragmented market, both at the fixed network operator side and also at the ISP side, based on international precedents, it can be expected to consolidate, and we will explore options to double down on this segment because we believe, again, it's an anchored choice for households for the overall communication portfolio we've got to be there. Now if you look at Nigeria, it's a very different market environment. Much more blue sky, very limited fixed broadband connectivity except for some high-value clusters that Karl already referred to. We are already in the game. We are one of the early players in that market, but we do believe that the market is for us to make. And eventually, based on the experience that we are drawing from Latin America, from Southeast Asia, we will see medium and higher-level income high-density areas being covered by fiber as well. But for the foreseeable future, as I mentioned and also Karl referred to, the connectivity of choice is going to be 5G. 5G is now rolling out quite explosively in Nigeria. It allows us to offer home connectivity at very attractive price points. And we can certainly address a big chunk of market demand on a wireless basis. We have 100 megahertz of spectrum available. So Nigeria is predicated to drive explosive growth. And at a later stage, we think as we start to roll out fiber as well, some of that market will start to transition towards fiber, which is ultimately the high-value customer, high-usage customer technology of choice. And then last not least, the next 4 markets we are considering are very similar in some way to Nigeria. They exhibit also early-stage development of home connectivity. In Ghana, we've had a very successful platform around a product called TurboNet, which was 4G-based. We realized that without sufficient 5G spectrum and access to 5G, that becomes very, very difficult to execute. So we now need to transition to 5G and ultimately also to fiber. And we are looking in places like Côte d’Ivoire and also Uganda at selective fiber deployments to drive a technology mix that will allow us to address all conceivable household needs in these markets. Let me briefly talk about how these technologies and use cases come together. So what we're really starting with is looking at the household needs. And they can range from basically light browsing all the way to low latency console-based gaming applications. And obviously, not all technologies are equally suited to support these use cases. So what we -- it's a rather complex chart, but what you want or you will see is ultimately mix evolution of 4G, 5G and fiber coverage, 2 different households depending on what is available in a particular geography and what the household needs are. I will explain in a minute how that corresponds also to differentiated propositions. But obviously, you can already get the idea: To roll this out effectively, you need a micro marketing approach. You need to look at population density, purchasing behavior, household value in the geographies. And we feel we are extremely well positioned to do that because we have the handset data. We see where the purchasing power sits geographically. We see where the usage sits because it originally comes on to the mobile network via tethering of handsets, then people migrate to Mi-Fi devices, eventually to home routers, still wireless, eventually to fixed routers. And the idea is that with a more dedicated approach to this segment, we will be able to drive that transition and look at the right mix at any given point in time. Now we are trying to match the propositions to these demand pockets. And what you see on the left-hand side of the chart is basically a simplified description of what our portfolio looks like today. So it's 4G-centric, and it's what -- in the industry, we call bucket base. So you get a small and medium or large bucket of data, you get it on 4G, you get it with a mobile broadband device or with a home router. And typically, the price point -- the implied price point for the data is much lower than what you would get on the smartphone, but it's basically geolocation-coated, so you can only use it in one place. Now as we are bringing in fixed wireless access based on 5G and fiber, the portfolio will transition to what is on the right-hand side. So there, you have unlimited usage and you have more speed-based differentiation. And you see also additional layers of value-add coming in. Some of the colleagues talked about our ambitions in digital, the partnerships that we are going through with the number of the OTTs. We believe we can bundle OTT video experiences, to some extent, gaming experience that sits on top of the pure connectivity. Plus, of course, household security solutions, both cybersecurity solution and physical home security solutions, basically smart home-type of solutions as well will come in as we transition the portfolio more towards the right-hand side. But for the avoidance of doubt, we are not giving up 4G anytime soon, that will still, as you saw earlier in the presentation, address the needs of a large chunk of the market, particularly the more suburban and rural segments. But in the more urbanized 5G-covered areas, we'll move quite decisively to the right-hand side of that portfolio. Let me, at this point in time, hand over to Mazen, who will explore the technology mix in a little bit more detail.

Thank you, Jens. And strong alignment with what Jens has shared with us and has presented in the previous slides. And in order to deliver our ambitions for the home, we have considered multiple technologies in order to really deliver the home strategy, specifically within the fixed wireless access and the fiber, focusing on 3, let's say, deployment strategy modules. The first one is the fixed wireless within the existing 4G and 5G implementations. Offering services would base on the spectrum available within the 1 to 3 gigahertz, specifically on the 800 megahertz on the 1800 and the 2.6 and 2.5, providing the 4G and the 5G services and delivering speed from 10 -- from 10 megahertz up to 1,000 megahertz with a cap model mostly and uncapped in specific cases whenever we have a sufficient spectrum. Definitely, the coverage in this case varies from 1 to 2 kilometers away. The second module is more about the fixed wireless as a stand alone, as a separate investment. Specifically, we're looking here at the spectrum that we can use within the unlicensed band or within the 5G millimeter wave within the 26 and 28, specifically, gigahertz, where we are currently exploring and we are doing a lot of pilots that can really help us to determine the right model when it comes to the dedicated fixed wireless model. And finally, the third deployment model is about the fiber. Specifically, we're looking at under and above ground, depends where it's feasible and available and possible. The cost definitely is lower when we are above the ground. And definitely, we're looking at the areas that are very much concentrated and definitely where there is high demand, and there is also demand for low latency and definitely for much more online services. Looking at the next slide. Definitely, if we the right strategy and the right plans and the right technology, that is not enough. To make it happen, definitely, we need to look at the operational side of the plan. And for that, we make sure that during our assessments for the deployments of the fixed wireless and the fiber, that we have very much dedicated teams on the ground commercially and technologically separated from the mobile business, dedicatedly focusing on the fixed wireless and the fiber propositions, supported by separated agents on the -- within the call center and the customer services. The aim is to make sure we will provide a superior support services and attention to the potential customers for the fixed wireless and the fiber for the FTTH. The second area is mostly about journey for customer experience. Definitely here, we make sure and we are making sure the whole journey end-to-end is digitized and allowing the customers to order, to track the order, to be delivered, to be implemented, to go live to be activated, to be paid. And definitely we'll provide support after sales as well within the same journey, fully automated. And definitely, with the expansion of the channels to ensure that based on the customers' lifestyle and availability, whether online or physically within the app or within the web or within the portal or within the e-commerce, all those channels are made available to ensure the customer has a superior customer experience and journey to acquire the product. And definitely, the third area, which is also very much thought about it, it's more about the logistics, making sure that we have very strong processes in place to order, to collect, to refurbish and to really reinstall the CPs to reuse the CPs where available and applicable. And finally -- this is really a good example when it comes to the fixed wireless and to the fiber, good example on how to use the AI within the telecom. And specifically, where we look at different scenarios, as in scenario of customers living an area where we have 4G and 5G coverage but is using a legacy network. Here, the AI model and algorithm play a vital role to determine those subscribers. Another scenario where we have high-use customers who are really living in areas where we have a limited technology. Here, the AI also comes with a role on say, how we can accelerate and prioritize the expansion and the improvement of the network. Another example, with the profile of the subscribers who are really demanding for low latency and for an uncapped, let's say, usage, the role of fiber becomes required and the AI help as well to determine the targeted customers. And that's really -- another also scenario which is very helpful, we're looking at the profile of subscribers for those who are using heavily our voice, but very limited the data, the AI model also comes up with different scenarios that can really help to approach those customers, upsell and make sure that they enjoy MTN fixed wireless and FTTH service. Back to you, Jens.

Thanks, Mazen. Am I back on? Yes. Just to summarize, what we want to leave you with is a couple of thoughts here. First of all, this is a significant opportunity. 37 million households eligible in our footprint, we are planning to address 10 million. 10 million households doesn't seem to sound a lot compared to 300 million mobile subscribers. But the reality is, the ARPU of these services is roughly 3x the ARPU of what we see on the mobility side. So this is already by 2025, a significant market. And it's bound to grow way beyond that. What we see in other parts of the world is that ultimately, 50%, 60% of homes in emerging markets will become takers of fixed or fixed wireless -- fixed wireless services for home connectivity. We will evolve our portfolio in a very flexible way. Based on what Mazen has laid out, it will be a suitable mix of technology that really reacts to the specifics of the local markets, spectrum availability, household density, purchasing behavior and the like. So that also necessitates that we drive localized implementation on a market-by-market basis. And we are currently working with all of our principal markets to achieve that. We have 4 POCs running, initiated right now on fiber to the home. But of course, in the meantime, the wireless solutions are scaling quite aggressively. And we take a lot of inspiration. I talked about that. We have partnerships around the world and relations around the world that we've leveraged, particularly in the last half year. We've actually spent time with Telefonica talking about the Latin American operations. We spend time with Tigo, Millicom Tigo in Central America. We spent time with Axiata in Asia. These are all, in a way, emerging market colleagues who are slightly more advanced as it comes to managing the home space. And we think we can transfer a lot of these insights into the African context and make it work in an environment that outside South Africa is still very much a blue-sky environment. So very excited about this opportunity. And hopefully, that will extend our data growth opportunity way beyond the current 30% CAGR phase that we see on mobility. This will kick in and hopefully also allow you to believe that there is still a lot of gas in the tank for the core connectivity business. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much to Jens and Mazen for those 2 presentations. We're going to move on and keep it moving. We have a very brand-new, rebranded fiber core business, Bayobab. And before we get to those presentations, we're going to watch a short video. [Presentation]

Yes. The timing couldn't be better, considering that the brand just launched in the last couple of weeks. So we are very excited. As the video showed, Bayobab is a tree that is an ecosystem in its own right. And I'm not a biologist, I'm not going to dwell on it for too long, but we take that inspiration, and we really want to make sure that we change lives by bridging the digital divide and connecting communities across the whole continent. And we will do that with next-generation, open access digital solutions. That is the core of the Bayobab proposition. And of course, it's all fueled by the core belief that we share across MTN that everybody deserves the benefits of a modern, connected life. To enable that, it is obviously critical to ensure the connectivity within the continent and to the outside of the continent. Now before I start to focus more exclusively on the fiber side of the business. Let me talk briefly about the current setup of Bayobab, because there's actually 2 businesses rolled in one. What we are consolidating under Fred's leadership and Fred will join me in a minute -- is, on one hand, the communication platform business. This is what people historically referred to as Interconnect. But it also includes now A2P solutions, application to person messaging, which is a very profitable, fast-growing business segment, and IPX solutions that allow basically Internet players to drive their innovation on the continent and to connect to the continent's customer base. And the business setup is, of course, focused on enabling connectivity for our own operating companies, but we're also making it available for third parties. Economically, it is a trading business. So you see relatively higher revenue numbers, but it's a relatively low-margin business, because effectively, you're trading connectivity in and outside the continent. And there is a juicy margin that allows us to reinvest some of the margin we generate, because we have a captive customer base, into the fiber side, which is on the right hand of this chart. Now fiber, obviously, is fueled by our current position in undersea cables. And as we said in the video, we only started to look at fiber as a commercial third-party opportunity in 2018. We incorporated what was then called MTN Global Connect in 2020. And we've just now transitioned to Bayobab fiber, which is addressing this opportunity with the aspiration to basically combine the undersea cable assets with the terrestrial assets that is -- that are currently still largely sitting in our operating companies, and of which we have 107,000 kilometers of proprietary, so fully, physically-owned fiber, which is a second to none position on the African continent. And you see here also that the revenue is growing very dynamically. A lot of that is fueled by third-party commercialization, which, as I had mentioned, we didn't have before MTN Global Connect at the time started, but now external parties are contributing significantly to that revenue generation. And the fiber side is generating very healthy margins. That's -- it's not a trading business. That is obviously an infrastructure-based business. So you can think of margins in excess of 40% for the fiber business. And as we are unbundling that business and carving it out, we'll obviously come back to you and give you more information on the detailed financial profile of that business. So you have to forgive me if I'm just indicative at this point in time. Now just one final word on the communication platform. This really is a turnkey solution, a one-stop shopping solution for parties that want to come to the continent. And we've been able to attract basically all the big hyperscaler customers in the last 2 years. So we're doing business for Meta, we're doing business for Microsoft, for Google and the like, but of course, also connecting to the other mobile network operator groups globally and indirectly to a lot of people who are looking at advanced remote connectivity solutions, which is happening on this side. And historically, we relied a lot on third parties. So we've been able to internalize that traffic onto the Bayobab communications platforms and Habit, basically out of physical presence that we have in Amsterdam in London that connect ultimately the continent, all operating companies. So effectively, the aspiration here is to internalize all the international traffic onto the communication platform. And that also allows us to avoid and minimize bypassing gray routing of traffic and so forth, third-party solutions where the margin is left with somebody else. So we've been able to internalize a lot of that margin in the last few years. Now -- as I said, I will now use the rest of the presentation together with Fred to exclusively talk about the fiber side of the business. This chart illustrates a little bit where we aim to be in 2025. So you see here the participation in 16 undersea cables that will grow, I believe, to 17 by 2025. We are adding, we're activating as we speak 2Africa and Equiano, where we have made deals to get physical fiber access on these networks that allows us to be a reseller of that capacity. And of course, we still have a significant participation in a lot of the, let's say, more legacy consortia in the undersea cable space as well. The footprint of terrestrial fiber is expected to grow to about 135,000 kilometers in that time frame. And already today, our Bayobab organization based out of Dubai can commercialize the end-to-end solution. That is very critical to appreciate. So we can actually connect business in Frankfurt to a business in South Africa or in Zambia or in Rwanda end-to-end, largely based on our own infrastructure. And that puts us into quite a unique position from a lease line and connectivity perspective, and it's particularly relevant for the data center players and the hyperscalers as they come into the continent. Now, we have made significant progress. I don't want to rehash some of the numbers that I've already shared, but you see that we've been able to grow, just in the last 2 years, the terrestrial fiber has stayed by 22,000 kilometers. That is still largely happening within operating companies, but we've already started via Bayobab to directly invest into markets where we set ourselves up. For instance, in Zambia and in Kenya, where we've converted a prior ISP into a fiber-dedicated vehicle, and we've started to invest directly. The undersea cables represent 300,000 kilometers of connectivity. It's a bit of an artificial number. You need a lot of space on the ocean to drive that connectivity, and that is going to grow somewhat based on the Equiano and 2Africa deals that are coming up. And we started to incorporate local fiber codes. And if you fast forward to Ambition 25, the idea is that we will have fiber codes incorporated in all of our principal markets, plus a part of a project that is called East to West that Fred will come back to and explain in a little bit more detail. So you have the combination of the existing undersea cable estate, the existing terrestrial build that we are already doing via Bayobab and then the carve-out that is coming from the operating companies effectively in 1 entity that will have these local subsidiaries but control that value chain end-to-end. Now we are very bullish about the demand drivers here, because as we saw from the other presentations, mobile data is still growing dynamically. It's expected to grow sixfold between '21 and '27. And we talked about home a minute ago, the home opportunity, particularly the fixed fiber home opportunity is very nascent on the continent. And there's no reason to believe that Africa won't catch up in time to other regions of the world. We're not going to be America overnight, but we will be in a similar place as Southeast Asia and Latin America before long. And that is coming with an explosion of data usage. You saw earlier that the average users on a smartphone in Nigeria was about 7 gigabyte per month and per user. The average household usage in the U.K. on a fixed fiber line is 400 gigabyte. So that's a fact of 50 basically on the single user. So the growth of data demand is going to be colossal, and we want to be right there and drive that. And the rationale to carve this out as a business is basically threefold. One is a more efficient capital structure. We can attract third-party capital. The return times for fiber business are different from the mobility business, it is lower risk, but also lower return. So it is attractive for a different type of investor and potentially, co-investors that would share some of the burden of what we plan to do over the next years, and that's part of the carve-out rationale to open the platform up to third-party investors. Secondly, focused management. Historically, I said before, 4 years ago, we didn't even think about commercializing our undersea cable assets to third parties. Now we are focus -- it is focused way going after that market. We have large teams at international fora like the ITW conference that just happened a couple of weeks ago in the U.S., engaging with all the other carriers and hyperscalers to suit their needs. So we've built that commercial muscle and the dedicated business approach that Fred, I think very convincingly stands for. And last not least, it's -- this is bound to become open access. Ralph has already talked about the regulatory aspects of opening this up for third parties. But of course, there's also a business rationale because it's similar to the TowerCo business, where the economics are ultimately going to be driven by multi-tenancy and burden sharing for a heavy fixed investment that very few people can do, we are going to be that player on the African continent. Now just to put it in context of the value chain, you see here end-to-end that the entire telecom value chain is ultimately powered by fiber. Some people jokingly say, all that a mobile or a telecom network is a fiber network with a little bit of mobility at the end. And the question is how far is that mobility? Is that just effectively Wi-Fi in your home? Or is it a little bit more like our radio access networks? So everything except for fiber to the home and the radio access network, which we see as part of our operating companies, is ultimately going to be carved out into these structures so that we have end-to-end control and can develop that business system. And of course, you see here at the center -- the data centers, and they are a critical asset that we currently hold. There is scarcity of data centers in Africa. While there are a lot of investment projects, they are there for a reason. And MTN has capillarity. So once we are done with a fiber carve-out, we look at the data center carve-out, and our plan is to attract suitable co-investors. We don't think that we have the right commercial profile to monetize the data centers directly. So we'd be probably looking for partners that bring effectively management control and commercial leadership into the data center space, but we want to do it in a way that it continues to benefit our fiber assets and that our fiber assets remain, of course, the priority partner for the data center as said in the future. So we're not exploring that in more detail today. I think in a future update, we'll come back to the plans on the data center side. That's a very interesting project in its own right. So for the time being, the FibreCo, the Bayobab scope will be everything fiber are enabling this end-to-end value chain. With that, let me hand over to Fred, who will explore some of the plans in a little bit more detail.

Thank you, Jens. It make me smile that I see a lot of the Group Executive Committee are also starting to adapt -- I've got a clicker, don't worry -- to adapt our new colorings also. So I saw Lele, our Group Chief Executive from legal and regulatory already adapting the colors, thank you for that. And even Ralph, I mean, in your very beautiful, elegant dusk-colored suit is very nice also. So thank you for that. So I heard a lot of many variations of the name, but let me just be very clear to it. It's Bayobab. And like the Baobab, we are a digital ecosystem, which we really are driving the industrial digitization of our network across the Pan African footprint. As an ecosystem also, we are really on track to create value from our existing capacity, but also building new fiber in order to create new opportunity as an open access for our customers. Now the East to West project also, which I will be discussing a little bit later on, we'll also simply activate a tremendous amount of capacity, dark fiber and active capacity across more than 10 different countries across our footprint. Mainly the landlocked countries will be well-served to that because, I mean, we've got a lot of arteries, which we call the subsea cables around the continent. But what is also very important is to have good connectivity in the continent on all levels. So also very important, and Jens alluded to it, is the structural separation of our fiber within our mobile operations. And we've done quite some major investments already that, and to consolidate all of that under 1 roof in order to have an open access, neutral set up will unleash also new opportunities for all of us in order to grow this continent even further. So we started in a couple of years ago. And in order to drive with new investments from a capital investment perspective in 2021. And we plan by 2025, based on our Ambition 2025 to spend around 500 million in order to make sure that we deliver that ambition. Now our growth within those 4 years -- 5 years of existence has been phenomenal. And I thank my team in order to make the significant strides in such a small space of time. We started a very small team with about 10, 20 people in order to first really commercialize our submarine cable infrastructure, and we built out with our platforms quite a healthy setup. We have been self-funded since the start. We continue to be that, and we are really looking in order to grow even further with partners like yourselves. Now we provide a one-stop shop. What makes it really attractive for a lot of our customers across the world, actually, where we take away the complexity of dealing with all of us in Africa and also having a one-stop shop in order to reach almost 300 million subscribers business is also extremely appealing to a lot of the parties in the rest of the world, which makes it really interesting also for us to continue driving this dry and wet fiber rollouts across the world -- across Africa. Now to date, like I mentioned, our investments have been self-funded. But to give you a bit of an idea how we started, I'll not dwell too much on the details, but I mean, to give you a clear example, I can give you, with Zambia, the way how we operate it. We've got around 2,000 kilometers of fiber through our mobile operators, which we are in the process of structurally separating and put into Bayobab Zambia. But in the meantime, in a 2 years' time frame, we built already over almost 5,000 kilometers of brand-new fiber, which has been actually very well utilized as we speak, not only by our own mobile operator, but with a lot of other parties in Zambia. Now Zambia is a very structural country for us, a very important country for us because it's completely landlocked, but it, of course, running with about 9 countries, which we, of course, need to feed and connect across for the continent. Also in Ghana, I'm super proud of what we've done there, because we had a big chunk of our network operating center activities based outside of Africa. Now we took the strategic decision also to really start in-sourcing that, making sure that our core competencies are -- continue to be a great success and also making sure that we've got the right talents in the right countries, and we've done that in Ghana and also fractionally in Kenya, where we built our network operating center and our success centers in those 2 countries. So really happy to continue that journey. And also, what was also announced recently is that we've -- and I want to give you a bit more details around that, of the deal we've done with Africa50 on our East to West Coast project, which is actually a fundamental game changer on the African continent. So this partnership is done with Africa50, and for the people who don't know Africa50, it's an investment bank, which is focused on high-impact national and regional infrastructure projects. In Africa, it has more than 34 shareholders, of which 31 African countries, of which the African -- Central -- West African state bank, but also the African Development Bank. And I think it's a great highlight. It's an industrial party to invest into that project in order to make this happen. We really are building now, terrestrial fiber of over 20,000 kilometers, which is quite a big ticket, in order to help bridge Africa's connectivity gap, improving the broadband across this country, mainly landlocked countries also in order to achieve a very low latency route. And what is quite important also is that we are also creating FibreCos in all of these countries, even where we don't have mobile operations, which is quite impactful also. And we are there to establishing partnerships with local and international parties across the board. Now when we -- in order to give you a bit of a feedback or update on the market -- strategic market fit, I think we are quite well positioned and uniquely positioned in order to grasp a lot of these new opportunities. I think we've got a strong competitive positioning in the market. We've got a super experienced and diverse leadership team. Also have a very strong track record, as you can see. And also, we do have extremely favorable market dynamics. Also, what is very, very important to us, and we constantly, every day, are here to delight our customers. If they are internal or external, it doesn't matter. We are, like Jens said, one of the preferred partners of the hyperscalers. We've got more than 1,000 contracts with the world from a roaming perspective, international roaming perspective, [indiscernible] messaging, et cetera. But what is important is that a lot of the hyperscalers are giving us a big chunk of their needs and capacity to us in Bayobab. So across that, we also drive to make sure that the products and the customer experience are actually the best in class. So we do think that we have a good advantage of leveraging the scale of the MTN Group, not only from our mobility services, but also from a fiber infrastructure perspective. So we do have a consistent growth which we shown over the last couple of years, always been ahead of very tough budgets and also being self-funded, so far, driving over USD 0.5 billion in revenue -- profitable revenues across the board. So importantly also, I think as Africa's presents substantial opportunities, like I mentioned also, not only from a demographic growth perspective, but also from a digital adoption and some underpenetrated markets. Now when we look a little bit on how we navigate the regulatory environments. And I think from a regulatory perspective, we've actually nailed it well in order to have this open access digital neutral model. And by aiming -- by doing this, we're aiming having the best services across the market. And by opening up on one side our network -- our proprietary network to third parties, and on top of that, growing the infrastructure, a lot -- I think a lot of the regulators like what we are doing also. We also offer them to third parties as well as to our internal customers to actually be in control of their networks in a sense that we are helping them doing the hard work. So the model is actually a direct support of the government and regulatory policies in all our markets, and it also provides additional benefits from the government or telecom aspirations, which includes also strengthening the digital ecosystem and not only in strengthening the digital hubs. And we all know there are in Africa, 3 main digital hubs, which is South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya, but everything around them. And through our plans, we are really promoting that. And in order to do that, I think we are having a great team to manage that platform. And we are continuing in order to grow at a rapid pace. And we really spend a lot of time to having the right individuals into Bayobab, experienced, talented people. And I'm also very proud that within Bayobab, we've got over 44% female colleagues, which is quite an achievement and great to have also in our management team. We've got now 4 managing directors and all of them are ladies, which -- it's really close to my heart in order to make sure that we've got a well-balanced, diverse, let's say, team in place in order to have this fantastic customer experience and delight our customers also. Now on that note, I'll hand back to Jens in order to conclude.

Yes. Thanks a lot. There is not much for me to say, except for summarizing. We want to be a leading player for fiber connectivity on the continent. And we believe there's really only room for very few players. So this is a great opportunity to really corner that market to some extent. We have, of course, MTN as a captive customer to start with. And as you saw, we are reinvesting a lot of that potential into building an open access platform of scale that will be second to none in the continent. We believe that when everything is said and done and we have effectuated the carve-outs from the operating companies, which is planned to be executed by next year, we'll be looking in 2025 at a business that has more than [ $300 million ] of fiber revenues with about 40%, 40%-plus margin. Now a lot of you know in the investor space that the multiples on fiber business vastly exceeds the multiples that you see in integrating mobile operators. And they do that for a reason because this business intrinsically is longer term, is lower risk, is longer return and investment cycles. But we believe we can create a genuine unicorn here. A business that in the fullness of time, will attract third-party capital and scale to one of the leading connectivity platforms in the world, given that Africa is such a sizable geography that over time will need this level of connectivity. So hopefully, you picked up a bit of excitement in this presentation. We remain very excited about the connectivity space, whether it is Bayobab or whether it is home. And we believe that in addition to all the other platforms that we are setting up on top of the connectivity space, that pillar in our strategy will continue to thrive and contribute significant returns in years to come. Thank you very much.

All right, ladies and gents, in the interest of time, I'm not going to waste any more. I've spent enough time with these gentlemen to answer my questions. I'm going to open this to the floor and also to the colleagues online. I do know that there's a lot of exciting developments that haven been presented yet, and many of you may have questions. Just by show of hands, yes, sir, let's start with you.

It's Preshendran from Nedbank. I've got a question particularly around South Africa and how fiber fits in with your ISP business, Supersonic. You talked about homes past. Can you share with us what's your connectivity rate? And also how much of your Supersonic subscribers are on your own network versus other networks, and then vice versa, is the MTN FTTH network and open network where other ISPs can also utilize?

Yes, Preshendran, thanks for the question. It allows me, first of all, to clarify that we see the fiber to the home opportunity and the Bayobab opportunity as 2 distinct businesses. One is open access, multi-country backhaul, connectivity. Supersonic is more in the fiber to the home space. And actually, the way we've developed Supersonic recently, it's to reposition it much more as an ISP rather than a fiber operator. I can't give you the details. I think we'll have to refer that and come back to you. I would have to refer to Charles for the details on the connection rates, but it is not in the focus right now to expand Supersonic from a fiber build perspective. I think when we talked about the home space earlier, we signaled quite clearly that we don't believe that we have a scale play at this point in time. We need to reassemble. At this point in time, we are focusing on the ISP layer for fiber. That's what Supersonic does. And Supersonic will also support the MTN brand so that we can offer fiber via Supersonic for the MTN brand as well. And the South African market on the home side is basically an open access market. So all the fixed network operators are selling to the ISPs, who are then in turn selling to the end customers. So we want to participate in that opportunity definitely in the near term. Everything beyond that would be a question of M&A-related activity to build a stronger position in that particular market.

Great stuff. Any more? No? All good? I have a question for you, Fred, on Bayobab, you touched on the partnership with Africa50. You didn't get a chance to give us all the details. So I just saw $320 million. Who's paying? Who's doing the work? What does it mean?

No. Well, thanks for that, Andile. There are 2 things around that construct of the deal. I mean, first of all, we would like to expand 20,000 kilometers of fiber across the East Coast to the West Coast. In order to do that, we're going to go in 3 various rings across the continent. In order to enable that, we need to cover over 10 countries on the African continent. And some of these countries are really hard-to-reach countries. So one of the key partnerships we are doing through Africa50 is because they are really entrenched in the continent also with all these, let's say, shareholders who owns actually Africa50 also in order to help us as a real partner, not only from a financial perspective, but also from an industry cooperation perspective and governmental perspective, they're helping us out in a lot of these countries. So it's really a partnership which goes beyond just putting some money on the table, which is of course, very, very helpful. But over the coming years, we will be able to spend over USD 320 million in order to roll that all off. We progressed already super well. A lot of the highways are being built as we speak. A lot of the new fiber codes are being set up as we speak. And you'll hear a lot more about it. And what is important also is that we've got a big demand from the hyperscalers in order to lower completely the latency, because before we wanted to -- we were going all around the African continent over the subsea cable infrastructure, either South-bound or North-bound to Europe. And here, we are halving actually the latency, which will, of course, give a far better quality, a lot more resiliency, a lot more, let's say, higher quality of service for our customers.

Mazen, on the home perspective, I can only imagine like, given the difference between all the various markets that the group operates in and the demands of households and what it is that they want too, I mean, it must differ from market to market. Does that complicate your ability to roll all of that stuff out? And what kind of dependencies are there from each market to another?

Yes. I mean, very good question. I mean as Jens said, the average, let's say, users in Nigeria, as example, is 7 gigabytes per month per user comparing to probably hundreds in other parts of the world. So one of the challenges is really become the ownership of the spectrum that require to be able to roll out the technology that we require within specifically 4G and 5G space. As a market leader, we are always making sure we have an advantage when it comes to the spectrum. And wherever we trigger, let's say, there is a need to expand, we advise our colleagues in the Opcos to go further and acquire additional spectrum. So being a market leader means you have to be always ahead of the curve when it comes to spectrum ownership, that's really one. The other area as well, to make sure we have, let's say, an advanced planning for rollout of the capacity that's required, that require very good capital allocation, exercise and definitely rollout and implementation and disciplines to stay ahead and ensure enough and sufficient capacity that cater for the additional growth of data in our respective markets.

All right. Just check in the audience, if there's any further questions, I see no hands. Gentlemen, thank you very much.

Right, that was owning the home and Bayobab. Did I pronounce that correctly? Bayobab. There you go. We're going to move on, and we're going to get straight into the other exciting business I told you about, and that's the building of the various fintech platforms that MTN Group has been doing. The MTN Group Chief Fintech Officer, Serigne Dioum, will lead this team, and he will be giving us an overview of MTN Mobile Money or MoMo, as many of you may know it to be. And he will be joined by Eli Hini, the CEO of MoMo Payment Service Bank in Nigeria, as well as Adekunle Awobod, who is the CFO of Group fintech and will be speaking to us about the fintech financial framework. Each of these guys will give us a presentation, and then we'll wrap up with a Q&A and also wrap up the day. But first, a video on MTN fintech. [Presentation]

Maybe we should start with an exercise, everyone to wake up and sit down, so that I can make sure that I get the attention because after lunch, after Jens, some may have start to sleep. So I'm going this afternoon to present to you -- I'll give you a view of our fintech journey. Remember, 2.5 years ago, in between 2 various software viruses, we had our Capital Market Day, where we revealed our fintech strategy. At that time, some of what we wanted to do was mainly concepts, and -- but now, I'm happy to tell you that we have materialized -- started launching most of them. It is really very concrete. And what I will do today is that I will start by giving you an overview of our fintech business, give you some flavor of the contracts where we are operating, but I'm not going to spend a lot of time because yesterday, this morning, people talked about it. And we'll also refresh a bit our strategy and then go into what is more important today for us, which is where are we on the implementation of our strategy, the execution of our strategy. And we'll call on stage Eli to take you through our business, where we are in Nigeria. And Kunle also will impact the financial framework. So I will start with giving you an overview of our fintech business currently. And -- but we'll start by telling you just for you to appreciate where we are coming from. We started our journey in 2007 in Uganda, where our customers were able to buy airtime and to transfer money, what we usually call P2P. Since that, we've expanded our services into 15 more countries. We are now in 16 countries. And also, most importantly, we've expanded also the portfolio of product and services that we have across our footprint, and we'll come to that later. And just for you to have a view on how this business has been growing. In 2013, we had 2 million active customers. So accidentally, it is when I joined, was appointed to be Head of fintech. And 2016, we had -- around 2017 -- 2016, we were at 46 -- 2017, 21 million; 2020, 46 million. And end of last year, 69 million active customers. So we have been growing the business very -- in a very fast way. And we'll unpack that later within the presentation. And now I would like to just also for you to appreciate the vision that we have, to remind you to everyone, which is that we want to be the largest fintech platform in Africa. We believe that we are already the largest fintech business in Africa, but we would like in 2025 to be by far the largest one. And our -- for that, we've deployed a portfolio of products and services to our customers. So today, we are addressing consumers. But also very importantly, we are addressing businesses and mainly also SMEs and very small businesses as well. So today, a Mobile Money consumer is able to put money into his wallet to send money, to buy airtime, to get loan, to pay merchants, to send money or receive money internationally, and also to be able to get micro- or nanoinsurance. Our business is -- we started with them mainly with payments. So most of them are able to, with our stack MoMo Pay to be able to receive money, but also they're able to pay salaries, they're able also to pay their suppliers. They're able to -- when there is a need to have more working capital from us by taking a loan, and also they are able also to export their products and services within our e-commerce platform, and we'll get back to that later. And as you can see, the more we go, the more we are shifting our revenue from consumer base to businesses, getting more money from businesses. And that is very important because most of the things that you see on your left, we would like them to be commodity by 2025 and a little bit more and then to get extract more value from our -- the businesses we are working with. Now I'm going to unpack the operating context, and we'll start with talking about potential. So first of all, the potential in Africa, I think we talked about it. More than 55% of people of adult population is at a working stage in Africa. And also, you can see that where we are operating more than 65% of adult populations are unbanked and underbanked, which is a huge potential for us. And also, you can see that still, 90% of transactions in Africa are cash. So like one would say, cash is still king. And we really -- that shows that there is a huge potential in Africa when it comes to fintech. And in the rest of the presentation, I'm going to show to you how MTN fintech is unlocking that potential, tapping into that potential and also -- to show you also how in the future, we will do it much more even. So would not be fair to present, to talk about fintech in Africa without also talking about the regulation -- the regulatory environment. We are operating in a tough regulatory environment, no need to talk about it, come back -- because people talked about it since yesterday. But what I would like to show to you is that we have made a lot of progress on getting licenses where we're operating. If you look at the table, you would see that in most of our countries, we have what we call EMI licenses, which is electronic money issuer licenses. So that allow us to operate independently and to be able also to be regulated by the Central Bank and for us to launch new products and services, go-to-market is faster because we interact directly with the central banks. There is only one country here where we still work in the -- the regime we used to call bank-like regime, where we leverage a banking partner license to be able to operate, it is South Africa. But we assure that regulation evolves and we'll get there in South Africa. So something also very important is that these licenses come with a lot of compliance that we need to fulfill, and we at MTN have a very strong compliance and regulatory teams, and they are really working. We understand the regulation -- and the regulations, and also, we have a very strong compliance framework that we are implementing to really make sure that we lower the risk profile for our fintech -- of our FinTech business. And also, we have a very strong -- I think, Ralph talked about it earlier -- stakeholder framework what we've [indiscernible] from Nompilo supporting us, and we have really a very strong framework that we are implementing across the footprint and which is helping us also to be able to manage our key stakeholders, which are the Central Bank, which are also our customers and partners. So I talked about the potential earlier, but as you can see, or as you know already, we have a lot of companies in Africa that are trying to also capture the fintech potential. And here, you have some of them. And you can classify them. Most of them are classifying themselves or calling themselves super wallets. And also, you can see that most of them are local, they're in 1 country. Some of them are in a couple of countries. We can call them regional, but as -- and some of them are also Pan-Africans. And also, some of them are addressing 1 vertical, some, 2 verticals, some, more than 2 or 3 verticals. And in the next slide, I would like also -- some of them are super platforms who are operating in Africa and they are Pan-African superwallets. And I would like to focus a bit on those ones today and who are trying to build the same thing that as MTN fintech we are building. And if you can see -- you see there is a competitor 1. So I had the names [indiscernible] to look like that but with the colors, you can guess. But don't be surprised the blue as the blue is MTN MoMo. So talking about dress code. So I'm trying also to -- Ralph was complaining this morning, "Where is the yellow?" So I was telling to him that, "Yellow was the past. Now we are the blue." So you can see that the blue -- as MTN fintech, what is important is that -- this figure comes from GSMA. Every year, there release what they call the State of the Mobile Money Industry. And if you look at MTN Mobile Money, globally, I think we are a key global player. We have 17% of the global wallets within the world, which is quite substantial. And so we also -- if you look at Africa, you would see that we have more than 30% of the wallets in Africa. And also more than 30% of the transaction values in Africa are processed by MTN fintech -- so, which positions us, really in Africa, we are well positioned. But after -- in the rest of the presentation, I will show to you that we will be even better positioned in 2025. Just for you to see that we've made good progress, and we are ahead of our competitors, and we are also the biggest player in Africa when it comes to mobile money. So now I'm going to unpack a bit the execution of Ambition 2025. And we'll start with this slide, where you can see that in 2020, we had 46 million wallets. We had 800 million agents, and we had 440,000 merchants. So end of last year, we had 69 million active mobile money customers, fintech customers, 1.3 million agents, and you could see that we have 1.5 merchants -- million merchants. And 2025, we are still aiming 100 million active customers, more than 2 million agents and 5 million active merchants. And if you look at where we are today, we are very confident that we will be getting to meeting our KPIs for 2025, and I will unpack that later. So just a view on a regional basis for you to understand also how our customers are being spread. And you can see that even if we started with Uganda, I talked about it earlier. But you can see that what is important here is that we are being successful everywhere. So I think this is one of the power that we have today is that we are not successful only in 1 or 2 countries, but we are becoming successful everywhere. That shows that we have a framework which works in all our countries, and we make sure that even it is a small country, we are becoming successful there, and fintech is becoming important. So there is one shaft that you will see, which will position it better so that you can feel it better. Now just for -- as we said, we have very bold ambitions. And 2020, 2021 when we had CMDI, we reversed a strategy which was built, where the B is that we wanted to become the biggest fintech platform, operate as an OTT, leverage MTN core connectivity and deliver 5 verticals in 1. And if you can -- if you see -- as you see, today, we are the biggest fintech platform in Africa. We are in 16 countries. We have more than 69 million active customers. And also, we have a very vast and large agent network. Also, in the second part of the O, you can see that we started that time, we started talking about structural separation. Now it is largely completed, and we made very good progress on that in most of our countries or in all our countries there is a separated business, with CEO, CFO and it is working really separately -- structurally separated. And also, you can see that we really started also to position ourselves as an OTT in some countries, and we are rolling out everywhere. You can see that we are today able to onboard non-MTN customers as fintech customers, which is very important. And something very important also is that we are moving really, our customers from USSD generally to an app-based journey. So really, what we are doing is that, first of all, we are launching -- first, we have a first-class app now, we've migrated our stack. And in some countries, we have -- and we are doing it this year, by end of this year, we'll have it everywhere and also we're focusing really in term of field activity, in term of marketing to move our customers from USSD to app. That gives them a better experience, but also it make our business more sustainable, because when competition will come, OTT from Europe, U.S., it will come even up with a good experience, and we want to make sure that our customers have that before. And leverage MTN's core connectivity, that is very, very important. Because MTN, I will come back to that. We have unit assets, and we are leveraging as MTN FinTech to really grow our business and to be where we are today. But I have a slide on that and deliver 5 verticals in one. We talked about the wallet is where we started Payment and e-commerce is the second vertical BankTech lending is a third vertical. Insurtech is a 4 vertical and international remittance is the fifth vertical. For all of them, we made significant progress, but I have a slide for each of them, and I will unpack it later. Yes, this is my favorite slide, because -- I mean, one need to be grateful and to recognize the reality is that we've built this business using MTN assets. And why? Because MTN has unique assets in the continent that no one else has. We have the most loved brand. We have the largest customer base. We have the largest distribution network. We have most importantly, people who know the continent, people who have you -- who are very skilled as well. And that you cannot find it anywhere else. And those are the assets that we have been leveraging on, and we will still continue leveraging on those assets to scale further the FinTech business. And if one can ask what is differentiating from -- you from the others, this is 80% of that. It's very important. We have something that anyone else [ has ] in the continent. So now I'm going to unpack in detail each of the verticals, and we'll start with the wallet business. And you can see the chart here. So first of all, the wallet business is a very scaled business. As I said, we have the biggest wallet business in Africa, 69 million customers in 16 countries, it is a scale business already. But this chart, the objective is to show to you the potential that we still have. You can see that on your left, you have the penetration of FinTech, if you compare it to GSM and also you have the tenure when we -- as a maturity of the business, we could see when we launched it in a number of years. And you can see that Uganda, as I've said, is the country that we've launched first. And you see that Uganda, the penetration is high. You see that Ghana came after. But what is important here is that we took a lot of time for Uganda to be where it is today. But if you look at countries like Kongobi, for example, they took maybe 1/3 of the time to be where they are today. That means that we've learned license when we build Uganda, Ghana and we are applying to other OpCos to help us to scale them faster. And then it brings me to Nigeria and South Africa. So Nigeria, as Charles said earlier, we had our -- Karl mentioned earlier, we had our license last year. And we spent most of the time to really recruit people, focus on the complement side and also get the platform right, and some basics are building. So now we are ready to accelerate, but you see that the potential of Nigeria to bring it to where Uganda is will bring us to the 35 million that Eli will talk about earlier. And also, we'll do the same with South Africa, get to the 5 million. And why we are confident that we will be able to achieve our 100 million customers, how we will do it. The operations where we're operating today will increase further the penetration, all of them to be where Uganda is today and also the new markets like Nigeria will be successful in Nigeria and will scale Nigeria. That will bring us to the 100 million. So now payment and e-commerce. This is very important. Because we want to build the largest FinTech business. That means that we want 100 million customers, but we want also to build the largest FinTech ecosystem in Africa. And to get there, you need to have the largest merchant ecosystem. So today, we have 1.5 million merchants, and we are looking at 5 million in 2025. And today, the merchants -- our merchants are able to accept the payment, they're able to pay their suppliers. They're able to get more capital with our lending -- merchant lending business, they're able to sell at time and they're able also importantly, if they want to connect to us to use open API. So I would like to start to stop a bit. We MTN are very humble people, most of time, we don't talk about our success. Our success is that open API is one of those that we are the first FinTech or mobile operator in Africa to launch an open API. So before for any merchant or business to connect to us, they needed to build a VPN to take 6 months get credentials, start testing and it used to be like 2 years project. So today, for any business to integrate to us, they will go to momodeveloper.com. You can try it and download the APIs. There is a sandbox. They do their development, they test with the sandbox. And when they're ready, they can download these documents, fill them, subscribe. And then we take 2, 3 days, our back office and then the service is open for them -- to them. And we have a lot of APIs, and that is something very powerful. And the API platform is gaining more and more. We see that people are still not interested in talking to us, because they have this and it is something very important. We had many ORs on this. The last one was 2, 3 weeks ago in Dubai. And this is something which is [indiscernible] our business very importantly. And how we are going to get now to the 1.5 million to 5 million merchant users by merchants by 2025 is that -- as you can see, we are growing very quickly, [ 400,000 ] 2020, 1.5 million end of last year, and we'll continue that in the [ existing ] markets. But Nigeria also will contribute and Eli will talk to that. And also we'll continue making sure that we are launching an e-commerce platform that in pilot in 2 of -- 3 of our countries today. And it will help really the merchants also to be able to expose their products and services in a second channel. And the value-added services that I talked about are very important, because what we want is that the merchants that we will have, we give to them everything they need, so that anyone else will come won't be able to propose to them something that they don't find for us. And we did some work to understand, what are the needs of our merchants? And also a second differentiator is really the value proposition. If you go to Europe, U.S., merchants -- value proposition, merchants need to pay $20 every month. So there is nothing. So people -- so our merchants do not pay on a monthly basis, and they pay on a transaction basis, and we think that, that is the right value proposition for them. BankTech lending. So this is also, as we -- as I said earlier, it has a very big potential. Lending is untapped in Africa. As you know, getting a loan is very difficult, only for person of adult population have access to lending. And as MTN with the set of data we have on our customers, we've also -- the partnership we have on banking partners, we are able to really uniquely positioned to capture the potential of lending. And we started that journey in 2014. And lending is already a scale business for us. Last year, we discussed more than USD 1.4 billion to our -- loans to our customers. But our ambitions are very big on lending, and we're going to capture that market as much as possible. And we have a set of lending product that we are working on. All of them are live in some countries, the [ bullet ] loan. As I said, we have it since 2014, 2015. But now we are working on our own lending products, which are overdraft for consumers, for agent, for merchants, and we are rolling them out across the footprint. And we feel that lending in the coming years will become the biggest revenue contributor, and how we achieve that is that the old products we have on lending, we'll deploy them across the footprint, and we'll think that we'll be able to extract a lot of value on that. Remittance -- international remittance, it has a huge potential as well. And as you know, sending money to Africa or sending money from Africa is very, very expensive. And as MTN, we have started disrupting that. We have so many corridors that we have today. And most of the MTOs today, money transfer operators are able to send money to our wallets directly. That simplifies the life of people. And also, we are able to send money from one country to another. It's like you are sending money locally, the same experience, and that is very powerful. And we -- last year, we have disbursed more than 2.4 -- we processed more than USD 2.4 billion as remittance transaction value. But we have not addressed the 2 markets where we have the biggest potential, Nigeria and South Africa. We didn't have the PSB in South Africa. In Nigeria, we didn't have the license to operate, but all those came now and we are working on really unlocking that potential. And with that, we think that we'll become the biggest remittance player in terms of transaction process by end of 2025. InsurTech, you all know that we partnered with Sanlam for IO, and it is very powerful because the assets we have, I talked about them. We have payments, we have distribution, and Sanlam has also a set of powerful product -- instruments, product and services. Those together will help us really to become the biggest InsurTech platform in Africa. So we already have further 3 million active policies, but we think that in the coming years, we'll become the largest InsurTech business in Africa using -- leveraging this partnership. If you remember well, last year -- 2 years ago, I started my presentation with Kafui. Kafui is Ghanaian lady, who lives in Takoradi and does everything with mobile money. Kafui was a concept 2 years ago, but now it is a reality. Personally, I was in Rwanda 6 months ago. I met a lady, and I was very happy, because she were selling tomato in the market. And she was explaining that she used Momocash to take a loan every day to buy tomatoes that she would sell the whole day. And after that, she would reimburse and do it. And then she started saving and now she has her own capital. She is paying school fees for her kids. She is getting food for the family, just starting with us using our lending offer, which is Momocash and using MoMo Pay to access payment and leveraging. So Kafui now, you have many, many Kafui in Africa that we have enabled. And if we are proud of something, it is that, because our own purpose is that. We wake up every day to really make sure that we give back Africans their dignity. How you can give to someone dignity is to [indiscernible] that person to become final literally independent and to be able to live by himself, and it is what we are doing, and it is why every day we are doing what we are doing. So now I'm going to hand over to Eli, before that, I think we have a video -- oh, we are not showing it anymore. So I talked about it, and we'll share it with you. So it is talking about the power of open API, but we'll share it with you. And I will hand over to Eli, who will come to talk -- to take you through about Nigeria. And after that, Kunle will come and unpack the financial framework for FinTech, and then I will come later for -- to close and we'll go to questions.

Thank you, Serigne. And I'm sure we are all excited about the FinTech story for MTN. I will spend probably the next 10 minutes to unpack the opportunities that exists in our market. Africa's most populous nation which is Nigeria, a lot has been said already about the opportunities in Nigeria. And I believe by extension, a lot of our 2025 ambition also hinges on the success of Nigeria. And therefore, we are poised and very determined to make sure that we deliver on our commitments in Nigeria. That said, I mean, we all know Nigeria is one of the largest economies in our footprints. But remain -- the FinTech market there remains largely underpenetrated. And those opportunities we see comes in the form of the number of the adult population. We do have 109 million with only 50 million bank accounts. And therefore, we see the opportunity there to unlock the potential, and like Serigne just talked about, to give financial freedom to Nigerians and Africans for that matter. We have also seen that in that same market, we do have a number of opportunities around digitizing our financial transactions. 96% of transactions are still in cash. And in terms of our digital payment penetration, it sits at 30%. And therefore, that opportunity in terms of our strength in that market, positions us actually to transform the market from cash to digital payments in Nigeria. It's also important to highlight the fact that, when Serigne was talking about the remittance opportunity in Africa and Nigeria came up. And we actually estimate that by 2025, in terms of inbound remittances, which Nigeria currently is the biggest, we project to receive over [ 23 billion ] in terms of inward remittances by 2025. And that gives a lot of opportunities in that particular vertical -- the remittance vertical. But quite apart from that is also the opportunities we have in terms of trading within that regional environment between Nigeria and Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon and all the opportunities that exist in that particular regional remittances. And there has been a lot of talk about the Pan African payment and settlement systems, the paths driving a lot of opportunities within that space. And we believe that we have what it takes to support that regional integration to drive regional remittances as well in Nigeria. Then the other thing I want to talk about is in the area of insurance. And today, we do have only 3% penetration in Nigeria. And also in terms of loans, only 4% of Nigeria, micro, small and medium enterprises have access to loans. And so that gives us also a huge opportunity in terms of our insurance or InsurTech and BankTech opportunity in Nigeria. And last but not the least, a lot of the work we are doing today in Nigeria is changing our strategy also from our initial rollout and from -- and I'll come to a bit of that. We started as an agency operation. Now we are focusing a lot with PSB on wallets. And with the wallets also is the opportunity that it gives us to unlock the opportunities in payments and e-commerce. And therefore, that's also another big area for us when it comes to the Nigeria business. Now in terms of our Ambition 2025 execution, we've made a lot of progress towards that, starting from our initial license, which is the supply agent license in 2019, we have made a lot of progress with that. In that year when we launched within -- by the end of 2020, we had 100,000 agents across Nigeria. Fast forward to 2023 today, we have more than doubled the number of agent network that we have. We have now over 260,000 agent points that are across the length and breadth of Nigeria, providing access to our customers in terms of assets to FinTech products and services. And therefore, that agency model that we started with has given us a lot of leverage. Otherwise, we would have had to now start building our agent network. And so in that light, we are actually working and have received the approval to match the 2 businesses and leverage the opportunities that we get from both, the agency business which is the IBFS operation and then the MoMo PSB operations. So with that leverage, we can now expand quickly our agent network. And with that, we actually are looking towards going past the 500,000 in terms of our agent network. And hope that, that will feed and strengthen our presence in the Nigeria market. Then in terms of the wallet transition that we have done, we have also seen some growth coming through. Like I mentioned, when we rolled out the supply agent business, mostly what we tried to do was over the counter transactions because we didn't have the license to open wallets. But with MoMo PSB, we now have the opportunity to open wallets. And therefore, the strategy lies to focus on expanding our wallet ecosystem. And that, we are beginning to see traction from a closing of 2 million at the end of 2022. We have closed the first quarter of this year with 3.2 million wallet subscribers. In terms of our OTC, a bit of that has also been impacted by the strategy as well as the scarcity that we had to deal with in the first quarter of 2023 in Nigeria. And therefore, people really didn't have access to cash, which was one of the key drivers of our OTC operation. And therefore, we had to work with a much smaller OTC numbers, quite apart from the fact that we've also by strategy, moved on to our wallet going forward. And so for us, we believe that we have what it takes and well placed to become the biggest FinCo with the largest distribution network and customer base by 2025. We have also talked about agent network, which we'll be expanding significantly by that time. And in terms of customers, we expect that we should be on the upper side of 30 million heading into 40 million customers by 2025. Now that will give us the opportunity to actually deliver the services that we want to deliver to our customer base in Nigeria. It will also allow us to ensure that we are providing all the various support to the other parties that are part of the FinTech ecosystem. Because we believe that our success would not be just us as FinTech -- MTN FinTech but our success was to expand to other players within the ecosystem, so that we can expand the ecosystem better and deliver the right level of service to our customers. In conclusion, I want to say that a lot has been said about the Nigeria opportunity. The best part of last year, like Serigne mentioned, we used it to actually improve on our controls, make sure that we've provided the right processes and systems to support the accelerated growth that we envisage. And the best part of this year, also, we have done a lot of work around an accelerated plan that we'll begin to see the acceleration that we expect to see in Nigeria in the second half of the year. And so that will come with a lot of investment in customer education, a lot of training of our agent network and equipping them with the tools that would support the kind of service acceleration that we want in Nigeria. Then there's also the conversation around partnership because we believe partnership is also part of the strategy to expand quickly in that space. Because the license itself requires us to partner in certain areas. For instance, our loan portfolio cannot be delivered with our partnership with financial service providers. And so that partnership itself exists. In terms of even reaching the wider Nigeria financial ecosystem, we needed to also partner and integrate with the NIPS, which is the Nigeria interbank payment and settlement systems. So those are part of the partnerships that we need to expand the ecosystem. And so that will also be part of the work. And overall, we believe that these interventions and the investments that I've talked about as part of our accelerated plan will drive the business in Nigeria and help us to execute and deliver on our Ambition 2025. So that said, I want to invite Kunle to come and share the financial framework that would support these executions.

Thank you, Eli. Good afternoon, everyone. My name -- my full name is Adekunle Awobodu. Generally, my colleagues refer to me as Kunle. So for those that don't know, call me Kunle. I previously had the CFO roles in MTN Nigeria and [indiscernible]. The objective that I have today really is to briefly unpack the financial framework of the FinTech business. I'll also explain the way we see the expected evolution of the business, how do we see revenue and how do we see operating margins, right? Well, before I talk about the future, let's take a quick glance at the past. We've historically -- and I'll tell you something about the past in a minute. With all this, we've delivered very strong performance across our FinTech business, right? Late 2021, the role of 2022, we did face several regulatory headwinds. We had competitive pressures in some of our markets. They are physical challenges. Every introduction in Ghana, there were some tax and fiscal measures in [indiscernible], this battle of that, we've delivered revenue growth of 20% by an on a compounded basis. And on the back of that, was the fact that we keep increasing the penetration of our GSM base, which sort of give us the solid foundation that we need while we keep growing the OLED business. The OLED business is growing at [ 110% ] on a [indiscernible] basis. What is more important though is the fact that payment and e-commerce is growing at over 50% since 2019. And again, remittance is over 35% and like I promised my colleague that [indiscernible] is actually close to 39%. BankTech importantly, including Airtime Advance, has been growing at 20% panel. If we shift to the right of the slide, you'll see how we look at our revenue pie, right? At the end of 2022, 55% of our revenue is still coming from basic services, while 45% is coming from advanced services. This is important, right? Our ambition really is to change the structure of this pie. We have to keep shifting this pie towards advanced services without -- and see able to sustain our wallet businesses. That is the past. Now before I go to the future, to my framework, I think -- I know I'm being timed, but I want to tell a story. So I sat down listening to Karl, I'm going to pay today, they put a slide to [indiscernible] revenue. What I remembered was -- so traditionally, we have a business cycle where we come to group to come and present revenue, our purchase for the year. Now group FX are very tough. Okay. Rightfully so, right? That's their job. So I remember, I don't remember what I was at the time of [indiscernible] was 2018, 2019 in that period. I grew up being in a car with Freddie, Rau, I don't remember what else if there was somebody else. And we're debating, what should we do? We know they're going to push back against, traditionally will not accept our budget. So with that, you know what, we are going to go with an ambition. We are able with an aspiratory budget. At that time, Nigeria was facing a couple of head wins, we are regulatory penalties, right? [indiscernible] just devalued. We are planning to do listing by introduction [indiscernible]. So we said we're going to put a project down. That is the come push back [indiscernible]. So we aspire for 1 trillion. I think the number is actually 1.02 trillion, exactly. So I think the reason I'm telling the story was that as we were looking at [indiscernible], my CMO partner says, this guy must be crazy because there are so many headwinds, why we're going to do this? I remember saying to Freddie, one thing I can remember is that you've got to dream. When you dream, you will ponder. When you ponder, you will act and when you act, it will become a reality. Let's put it up, right? I'm telling this story because I sat down today and can I modify [indiscernible] 2 trillion, right? So is this completely blown my imagination, [indiscernible]. I want to say thank you actually for getting off there, right? By the way, that budget was not accepted. Yes, we want that 30 million more. I'll you another -- one more story, right? Every time I meet people, I'm talking about MTN ambitions. What I keep telling them is I keep coming on with one quote, Thomas Jefferson. This says -- I'm an accountant, right? As an accountant, I'm trained to be conservative, right? I'm trained to record the paths. Just tell you this is what we've done and all of that. But what comes to my mind every time I look at our business as is me. You know that frame was timeless quote? I like the dream of the future better than the history of the past. So I don't want us to do another [indiscernible] past. So I'm going to show you the future, right? We believe that if we [indiscernible] a lot of opportunities for notably investing and increasing financial inclusion, we talked about it. We think we can impact lives in Africa. We also believe that we can do it in a sustainable, socially responsible way, and we have a lot of investable opportunities for creating big shareholder value, right? That is the dream. We've seen it done before. We want to put it on the [indiscernible] again. So there are a couple of things we have to do to fulfill that. But when I present the FinTech financial framework, there are couple of growth metrics that I just want to highlight. The first one is the revenue growth. Yes, in 2020, '21, we put an attribute 20% of good service revenue. I think [indiscernible] answered the question today. We know where we are. We know we have with [indiscernible], we've talked about it. That's why I talked about let's look at the promises of the future, right? 20% of [indiscernible] revenue is still our target. We want to put there. The way I see it, I did explain it. The way I see it is simple. By putting that on the table, there is a numerator, there is denominator. When this was third, there was a denominator. If we keep lifting the denominator, and we keep lifting the numerator and we don't get this number, I think it's a win for our shareholders, because we lift the board, and we put an aspiration [indiscernible]. But to really deliver this, we will have to rely on our ecosystem. And the key ecosystem we have to rely on is we have to keep pushing our active subscriber base, right? Our main talk of agent is important. Those are the line metric that we have to use to get to that service revenue. And again, what is important is the fact that we have to keep growing our affiliate -- [indiscernible] affiliates, right? And once we do all of that, importantly for us, we have to accelerate the adoption of advanced services. Now I'll move to margin expansion. I know there's a lot of questions. [indiscernible] sort of tells me that when they go on [indiscernible], there's a lot of question about expansion, would do it quickly? And our estimate at this point is that we will be mid [indiscernible] on a stand-alone basis. And let me explain stand-alone quickly. When I use word stand-alone, I'm looking at FinTech business itself, standing alone itself. That number we include revenues that are coming from the GSM business that they are paying for recharges, the commissions that different FinTech business is signing. It will be included in that calculation. Also importantly, before for that as we do the operational exercise, we are beginning to also make sure that the transactions between the 2 parties have been done at [indiscernible] business. So it does include cost of USSD, cost of SMEs. It also includes [indiscernible] shared services between the GSM business, both at the OpCo level and at a group level. So it is all inclusive cost that we are talking about here. Then [indiscernible] is also include the fact that in some of our countries, where we really want to scale, we have to do some investment at the beginning. We have to do this investment to push our decision network. We have to put investments to push our acquisition. It's [indiscernible], we believe that Nanobank will keep rising as we implement our priorities. There's also some focus on cost efficiencies. I'll talk about that when I get to the next slide. We keep talking about value-based capital allocation philosophy. It's a low capital intensity business. We estimate is that this is going to be about 2% to 4% of our revenue. The investment really geared towards -- we want to continually transform the business, transform our technology, platforms. We want to increase automation. There's a little bit -- a lot of focus on automation of our processes. And also importantly, we want to improve our data mining capabilities. So those are the places we are going to push our CapEx into. A combination of the fact that we're targeting a very ambitious percentage of growth in revenue. The fact that we had a plan, we have in order to expand that margin. And the low CapEx result in an attractive free cash flow. For those that will pick it up, we'll load this slide, I do not have capital allocation priorities. I have operational priorities. It's not that CapEx is not important. But what we actually need to do is to [indiscernible]. And that's why we've got to execute our strategy. And that's why this slide -- lower part of this slide is focusing on operation priorities. So what do we want to do? We want to increase penetration of our DSM base, right? We have to keep aggressively expanding that agent expansion network, so important. Once we do all of that, we are able to shift our activities and our revenue transactions towards advanced services, and we can then penetrate that fully. [indiscernible] is important, right? The last point that I hear is that we won't succeed in Nigeria, and we have to meet progress in [indiscernible] for all of the stores. Social separation. That's what I've been working on for a year. These such as [indiscernible] of the business, in my view, is currently already -- and we also -- is also happen as to improve focus, operational ability. We are now better positioned to proactively manage regulatory engagement, right, as well as the fact that we want to make sure that there's fair value resource allocation between the telco business and the GSM business. Operational excellence, we have to focus on data, we have to be data, tech and technology driven. We have to prioritize our growth. We've got to focus on execute. Everything [indiscernible] is we got to execute. Our process is -- we have opportunity now that we have separated and we have to focus on [indiscernible] processes. Let's start with my processes in finance. I have to give them a financial system, we've got to make sure that we get our novel time. And then this gives us an opportunity for us to now optimize our unit economics as we go forward. I have on the slide on the right side, the last one is our strategic partnership. This is important. This will enable us to accelerate some of our partnerships. We keep looking at that. Partnership, where can gain capacity quickly, where we can get knowledge, where we can use partnership capital, we'll do that. We also have to look for inorganic growth. If we need to close any gap on that ambition 20% of [indiscernible], we need to look for organic growth opportunities. My next slide really is target that a college FinTech growth move then, I quickly explained it. The base of everything we want to do is to keep pushing the velocity of the activities on our network. We have to keep pushing it. We've done that in the past, but we have to really accelerate that. We've already delivered active users at a CAGR growth of 25% in 2019. Our agent has been growing at 35%, greater than that. We've just been exploding, pushing and scaling in our merchant network -- is over 90%. Now what does that do, right? What it's done so far is to allow us to grow revenue of basic services at more than 18% per annum. I mean, I'm not showing you a little bit, if you want to model our numbers. Our drivers in that area are activities like withdrawal, what we call cash out, transfers, B2B, transfers. Then we have the non-targetable deposit. That is important because that is the beginning where we bring everything to the ecosystem, right? And that is the important point, we have to keep scaling that as well. The last part of that is deferred. From a margin point of view, the cost year is lower -- the margin year is lower. The cost is more because of distribution costs, sharing costs, and the cost of transaction itself pushes the margin year lower. And what we have to do is to keep shifting our activities towards the right, to our advanced services. As we shift that towards the right, we have to make sure -- we've already delivered growth of 25% per annum. We will keep pushing our payment services activities, lending. We have to keep lending transactions -- remittance transactions. We have to keep pushing that. And the important message here is that advanced services margins are higher than basic services. I record the higher between 50% to 90% higher than [indiscernible]. This is key for us to shift across the advanced services. We've got opportunity on our cost intensity. We keep pushing our upward penetration that we post lower transaction costs. We have now visibility of our costs, so we have opportunity to optimize the cost that is there. Our capacity intensity, like I said before, is 2% to 4%. If you just add all of that up, it gives you an attractive free cash flow economy. Last slide that I have, key takeaway. The foundation now for us is the for that we are now separate companies between the GSM. Look, the GSM is still where we get our synergy, still important. But the fact that we have opportunity, we have now separated give us a bigger foundation to really go after priorities. Key takeaway for me is our focus will be on: We increase penetration. We have to drive customer base, we have to keep expanding wallet in markets -- in our existing markets. We have to scale up in Nigeria, and not forget that Africa, we've got to make progress in South Africa, yes. App penetration is important because that allows us to shift transactional costs a little bit from the [ channel ] costs that are more expensive. And then we will grow advanced services that I talk about, we will keep looking for opportunities to leverage partnership. Thank you for listening to me, [indiscernible].

Yes. So I think it is very important for me to show really the team behind what we are doing. And why it is important is that most of time you see me. So today, you are able to see Kunle, to see Eli, but I can tell to you that the rest is more brilliant than us. and they are more passionated than us and they understand the FinTech business really. And we have a team and different type of skills and people they complement themselves. Kunle today was a dreamer, but most of time, when we dream, it brings us to reality. And really, we have people coming from [ Cedric HN ] working in this since long time, more than almost 15 years. Herman is new; Vatika is a very big good background in terms of technology; Ryan, Chief Risk Officer, very seasoned person, we can [indiscernible] with them that compliance will always be right. You have [indiscernible], you have [indiscernible] and [indiscernible]. We have Mudassar, who is the CEO of the biggest -- one of the biggest lending microbank in Pakistan, who will be joining us. So we are making sure that we have the right team to be successful. And on top of that, you have Ralph and [ Solo ] who are giving to us the money and challenging us as well, which is very important. So really, the message I wanted you to understand is that we have the team to really execute and deliver what we are telling to you here, and we have the right support also from MTN. The key takeaways, I think we also that the potential for FinTech in Africa is huge. And the second one is that we are well positioned as MTN to save that opportunity. And we will deliver revenue growth. We'll expand our margins by implementing the advanced services. As Kunle said, we will be successful in Nigeria. We will be continuing to be more successful in other countries, and we will make South Africa to work. And also, the last thing is that I keep saying it, we have the right people to deliver this and to be successful. Thank you very much.

Thanks to Serigne. Eli and Kunle, please join us real quickly, just so that we can feel some final questions on the FinTech side. I'm pretty sure the investors are quite interested in some of the dreaming that you've been doing here, Kunle? Any questions from the floor? Yes. Sorry, let me start with the gentleman here. Okay. Also the gentleman there. You can go ahead, sir. Well, I'll come back to you, sir.

Vik from RMB Morgan Stanley. Your red competitor basically gave us the take rate in Nigeria at 0.2%, which is much lower than what you probably get in other parts of the continent. I just wanted to know, I mean, I think is the adoption rate as much better potentially in Nigeria that it will cover up for the lower take rates that you potentially could have in Nigeria?

Okay. Let's take one more. Look at me, ma'am? Here. There we go.

Janise from Mazi. Two questions, if I may. One is, when are you getting your own banking license and doing lending yourselves? And two, as an OTT -- I mean I think like an OTT, operate like an OTT, is this scope for Momo in other markets where MTN is not a player?

Okay. Let's take those 2 for now, Serigne.

Maybe we'll let Eli start the answer on Nigeria and I will...

So thank you for the question. Maybe just to start from the second question, yes, the opportunity to do OTT exists for us in other markets. In Nigeria, it's part of the strategy, and soon we'll be onboarding customers on other network. In terms of the opportunity and the size of what we believe is possible in Nigeria, we've highlighted it sufficiently. What we believe we need to do, we are putting together in terms of our strategy and plan. What we need to do to sustain that growth we have done over the past 1 year in making sure the control environment has been well established. And therefore, on our part, what is left to do now is the execution of the plan and to make sure that we can take as much of that market as we find as opportunities today. So yes, the market may be looking slow today, but it is because we are yet to take off with the accelerated plan that I talked about. And with that accelerated plan, we should be able to see the kind of growth that we are talking about in terms of our Ambition 2025. And therefore, in the next 1 year, probably when we come back here, the story will be better told in terms of where we are in terms of what we've been able to achieve in the next 12 months. Thank you.

Maybe just to add on that, the take rate in Nigeria is one of the lowest across our markets today, which is normal because -- when you -- there is a journey when you launch mobile money in a country, people will more start by topping up buying airtime. And that doesn't have a big revenue. But the more you go and the more you people will send money, people will start paying bill, the advanced services will be coming. And what I will say is that in Nigeria, the evolution of the take rate will be faster. Because before we used to launch, wait for 5 years, 4 years to launch more services. But in Nigeria, we are launching merchant payment at the same time a lot. So you will see the evolution quicker. In terms of, are we -- will we be doing OTT in markets where we are not? I will be talking on behalf of Ralph and Khol, they can correct me. And -- but it is within our ambition, if we see opportunities in markets where we think that the potential for FinTech is high, we are thinking about entering those markets within FinTech to start only for -- as a FinTech player. Yes, we have that ambition.

There was a question about banking license?

Yes, banking license on the -- for lending, I think as MTN, we have an evolutive approach. When we started lending back in 2014, we didn't -- all we knew was that there was a big potential of lending. Then we start -- we scan the market, and we identify partners who could help us to do lending with us, and we used to be just a distribution network. But after 5, 6 years, we understood better and we understand now better the lending business, and we decided to do more. So today, we've -- when I talked about Momo advanced, agent advanced, merchant advance, we are doing ourselves, the technology, the scoring and everything. So all we are doing now is that we are leveraging on banking partners for their licenses and their funding. So -- and we do believe that after a few years now, if the opportunity comes, and we will be tempted to use our balance sheet and also where we see the opportunity we'll be tempted also to apply for license. But the right license may not be a banking license. If you look at Uganda, for example, you have a lending license that you can get easier and also your commitment in terms of complement and those things are lower. So we may start with that. But as I would like to remind to everyone as MTN, our Fintech business, we are positioning ourselves as a platform. Platform means that we want to make sure that we are open to everyone to be able to work with us to get access to our large customer base and also to bring some innovative products and services. And I would like also to emphasize on something which is how we partner with banks. We do not see banks as competitors. We see banks as partners. And as long as it will be possible for us to partner with banks, leveraging the assets, we will do that. And today, we've -- most of the banks, we partner with them, we have a framework, and it is working quite well. Thank you.

Let's take one more round. Yes, sir?

Yes, it's Myuran again from MIBFA. I just want to follow up on Vikhyat's question, right, on the take rate. I mean, even after you scale up the business and the merchants are onboarded, the -- it looks like there's a potential for the ARPU per customer to be lower in the Nigerian market, than your other markets. The reason I'm saying is this, if you look at the pyramid of consumers, you have this top end, that's quite a lucrative market, but all the OTT players are going for that. And the bottom end is, by definition, the poorer market, and that's where your competitive advantage is strong because you have distribution reach way into that market. But the top end market is where all the advanced services might grow and might too well. So I just want to hear your thoughts as to why you think that this might be more successful than maybe on paper or to my simple mind it seems.

So what I would say is that Nigeria, how you describe it is not different from other markets. If you look at our other markets, let us take Ghana. All high-value customers, they do have bank accounts, and they're using banks to transact. But the customers, those high-value customers surprisingly, are early adopters for mobile money, first of all. Secondly, the way it works is that those high values are the ones who are putting their money into the ecosystem. You have your mother, you have your aunties, your family, and you're getting money, you are sending to them because they need something. And those people will use their money to transact and to do others. And we've seen also some people who are banked and who use Momocash, it's our lending offer to borrow money. And when you ask for them, they said it is a commodity. Sometimes an outside, I don't want to go to an ATM. Someone needs money, asking me, I borrow the money and then after, I will pay quickly. So this is really surprisingly, the high-value customers are mobile money customers. And also, what I would like to think about also is the fact that the beauty of mobile money is that we are not inventing new transactions. We are digitalizing cash. Remember, we are fighting against cash. So someone may be, you talk to him as a poor, as low-value customer, but that person is transacting a lot every day and by digitalizing that money, bringing it into the digital ecosystem, that customer may be the one giving you more ARPU. And as I said also earlier, because of that, we want to transact. If someone pays a customer who is buying something is paying, we don't get money from that customer but the merchant will pay to us. So that means that indirectly, he is generating money to us.

Maybe just one addition to Serigne's submission. There's also the middle group of artisans and small service providers as well who provide these services and get paid by the people on the upper side of the pyramid. So you have a plumber who comes to work for you. The easier way to pay that person will be through mobile money because that's the easiest way you can reach that person. And you may also have someone who may repay your vehicle, a mechanic. So those are to the opportunities that we bring in terms of those who are higher up the pyramid participating because they interact with people from the mid- to bottom and also I would leverage that opportunity. Thank you.

The CEO of Nigeria would like to add.

So without a doubt, these are the experts of mobile money. But I do have some understanding of Nigeria. So we always talk about the estimation of the informal economy in Nigeria. And I'm going to give you a very visual example of what this is. You drive through Abuja, Nigerian is chaotic nature, you're driving to the airport and you see a herdsman, herding 500 cows down the street. And it's crossing the road that it blocks traffic. That's almost $1 million worth of money. Those guys are transacting in cash. And those are the guys we're going for. The traders in Kano and Katsina go to the market every day and come back with $20 million, $30 million, $40 million that they keep in their houses. They appear like the bottom of the pyramid, they're not banked today, but they're incredibly valuable and we've positioned mobile money and Nigeria is better than cash and want to capture all of those people. Thank you.

On that note, thank you, and well done. All right. Lots of exciting things to look forward to. Another round of applause to Serigne, Eli and Kunle. Okay. So we have come to the end of the day. Can I have a microphone, please? In fact, can you pass it on to Ralph Mupita? We have come to the end of the day, ladies and gents, which is, in fact, also not just at the end of the day, the end of the 2-day Capital Markets Day. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us now in 2033. It's been my great pleasure to host you for the past 2 days. And there's been great place also to be exposed. So all the good work that's happening in this Pan African pioneer that is MTN Group. Thank you so much for your attention. Now just 1 or 2 announcements I want to make, first of all, please send your feedback, you might get -- you will get an e-mail, ask me for your feedback. But if you do have any feedback today, if you're anything like me, and you want to get it all done now, the e-mail to send any feedback you might have is [email protected]. Any feedback good, bad, ugly, doesn't matter, anything that will help us improve the experience for next year. I'm also been informed that we have catered for some cocktails. So if you're in a grad a beer plus the wine, before you make your way. You're more than welcome to join us in the area where we were having lunch. From me, it is goodbye. And I'm now going to hand over to the Group President and CEO, Ralph, to say some final ways.

Andile, thanks very much, and I really want to say a few concluding remarks, because I know several of our investors need to catch flights and be on the way. I mean firstly, to thank all of you for accepting a 2-day -- and I know that some of you, it's a 3-day invitation because we do have a sidebar I understand tomorrow on South Africa, Nigeria and the FinTech business. It's been done by JPMorgan. So I think some of you are staying for 3 days for what we had built as a 1-day event. But for us, that's a positive that people are engaged in our investment case. Thato said, I must say something funny at the end just to make sure people are not sleeping. I don't know, but he gave me a few -- he said it's called fun facts. We've had over 1,000 log-ins into the last 2 days, quite a lot of it, not just on the webcast but YouTube. AT people have uniquely come into 14th Avenue for 2 days or mostly for 2 days. So that shows that there is an intense amount of interest. Minister Pravin Gordhan, asked me yesterday, can you just estimate the capital in the room last night? I asked one capital allocator, and they were in the trillions in terms of what they manage. And that's why we got to the 1.5 trillion. It must be at least 1.5 trillion. So obviously, a lot of interest in terms of what the story is. And as we've built it, what we're doing today is really the last 2 days, to give you a sense the progress, how we've engaged the macro and how we're moving forward with our strategy. Some nuances around how we are executing, particularly the story we referenced around the balance sheet. How are we thinking about the ARP, how we're thinking about localizations, how we feel we can still delever without the IHS sell-down and the Nigeria for the localization being necessary part of the deleveraging. We've delevered without fully executing that. So that gives us, again, some flexibility and some ability also to be strategically patient around some of those investments. I mentioned IHS earlier on. And so we're still committed to the program of focusing on our capital allocation and giving us the financial freedom to come back to you as investors because we often get the question, can you lift the dividend over time? And we say we're investing in growth. So hopefully, we've covered that story about how we are navigating and dealing with some of the issues to Thato's framing that we really focused around the progress and the priorities and the prospects of the company. So I trust that over the 2 days, you really got a sense. You also got a sense of the team that is executing. And I think the common denominator I can say without fear of contradiction is that the team we have here are well-schooled in dealing with the challenges that come across our way, and a lot of those challenges, we quickly turn into opportunity. Charles is an example of that. So today, we say load shedding and we have a sense that, that must be negative for the equity story. Charles' point is, for sure, I'm going to reconfigure my network to look quite different, and we've got to do this on a self-help basis and need some capital investment. But as you heard from James yesterday, actually, if you think about it and you say, okay, I have these investments I need to make to make my network more resilient, 13,000 towers, 1/3 of them with gen sets or with batteries, autonomy 6 to 8, as Charles would have said. But that could also be an opportunity we could be talking to you about in a year or 2's time. And we didn't say -- James said that obviously, in South Africa, there is these bookings around load shedding that we should think of. So we see often challenge and we say, how do we turn that into opportunity? So I mean, I was interested to jump in the take rate discussion as that I held myself back, because as an asset to the team in one of our deep reviews because I do what the guys called the investigator off is an investigator mode. So I'll say why is our ARPU 1.27 when Airtel's 1.97 and in pesos 2.3? And then the guys start looking at that. And in that analysis, you just see an enormous amount of opportunity when you look at chargeable events and how do you balance adoption and monetization. If you push adoption too quickly without thinking about where the curve of monetization comes, you're going to build a platform that you can't make money off. But if you push the monetization way too quickly, don't get the scale effects, and I think this is where Karl came out as an example. So the team here is a team that is really focused on saying this is our home, these are markets, we understand the challenges. But inside every challenge is an opportunity, and this is the team that is really, really focused on living this dream that we feel deeply and passionate about that what we want to do is drive digital and financial inclusion and give the people of Africa dignity, open opportunity. Because that's what drives us in the morning, otherwise, the work would be too hard. So I hope you felt that quite deeply, because this is the real engine. It's not the PowerPoints and everything. It's this team that really wants to execute and deliver on our targets. And as I said earlier on in my remarks, I hope that over the 2 days, you have a couple of takeaways. I won't go through them. These are for referencing. We truly believe that as we now move through the second half of Ambition 2025, near-term headwinds for sure, we understand them, we're real and sober about them. But deep in there is -- there's opportunity. We're going through a down cycle. We're maintaining our CapEx. The resilient companies over time, sustain investments are through the cycle in the up cycle and the down cycle, the winners generally do that. Because when you come to the other end, you'd be in a stronger position. Karl often reminds me and he says, Ralph, we push him hard and said, "Listen, you've got to drop your CapEx intensity. So I promise you I'll give you your targets because I'm seeing enormous opportunity." So we're seeing the opportunity. We're very well arranged for the near-term challenges. We're very real about them. And I hope over the 2 days to get the sense that this is a team that is grounded and sober but are also deeply looking at the opportunities. The value unlock opportunities are real. And Neil, for sure, we would look to unlock the opportunities we see in FinTech and [ fiber, ] you heard the story. IHS, as we said previously, we were saying that allows us to delever. It's not so much an issue, and we'll be able to kind of progress with our deleveraging. We have an upsized DMTN note program, 20 to 35. That's another quiver in our bow that we will use to drive deleveraging the 2024, 2026 bonds. Capital allocation. If Tulu and the team are successful, I think we'll come back to you and say the batting order has been reviewed. But for now, it is as we've communicated and we -- being the custodian of the capital that you give us, we think this is the right way to manage the business and allocate the capital. And as I said, the team to me is what really makes the difference. I have to leave this team, and you can well imagine the headaches I have when I go home, dealing with Jens and the Karl and Serigne and everybody else, it's like herding cats. But at the end of the day, we get it done. We get it done. I'm sure some of you like to be flyers on the wall when we make decisions. It all looks like nice and tidy, but boy, these guys are giving me this great beard. It's not the market, it's my own team. But -- and on that base, I wanted to start to thank them, because they're the real people that are executing. They're the 17,000 MTNs were really behind the execution. They're not in the room, but I know a lot of them are listening. That's, I would believe, is the distinction of MTN and the culture that we have, and I spoke a little bit about the values I know not much. You won't put another ZAR 4 a share because of the fact that we've refreshed values, but I believe it's worth a lot that we have the right people with the right culture and building the foundation. So hopefully, you obviously all make your own assumptions, and that's the whole point about this day is to give you a sense of how you think about the company. We think about it in a very positive sense. And then obviously, finally, we're remaining committed to our medium-term guidance. After we get the question, are the headwinds are coming? And as you heard from Karl, we will get some headwinds on Nigeria because of FX devaluation and so forth that we know will come in time and we have a frame, you will have a frame on. But there's an engine that is very powerful that over the cycle, will hurdle some of these, we've got opportunity for revenue expansion. We've got opportunities for cost optimization and so forth. But being #1 and #2 gives you the ability to push that. And hence, we are confirming our guidance, we're confirming the 3.30 cents for FY '23 and because we believe that the cash generation engine in reasonable stress scenario, base case stress case, we operate the business on base, stress and shock. And every month, Dineo knows, we're asking it to reforecast continuously, show us how your year-to-go is looking s,o that we're going to communicate responsibly to investors. So the medium-term guidance, we're confirming that it remains intact as 3 to 5 years, 3.30 cents for next year obviously is also confirmed. I also want to thank a person who is often not thanked too much or 2 people who will be behind everything when things work like this, you wonder what you know. We also maybe want to thank Eskom because we haven't felt any load shedding because that's been one of our big concerns. But I want to point out Thato, he doesn't like to take much credits. He just gets things done. And I know you guys engage with them a lot. And Nompilo and the team, they've been very instrumental in what you've seen today and to them and their teams. Andile, thank you so much again for being MC. I hope, as you said you use the MTN phone. Please keep -- we need -- Charles aiming for [ 46. ] So the more use, so I just want to thank you. And again, for those who we cannot see who are joining us via webcast, I really want to appreciate the time. And as we said, any questions that you have ongoing, please pass them to Thato. We will look to respond, and it'll help us to think through some of the things we need to communicate with you at the half year. And so thanks so much. Thank you for taking the time to travel here. Really, really appreciate your time. And we know that to spend 2 days is a lot of time in current capital markets is always tough to read. Appreciate and hope you found the 2 days insightful and a vindication of the investment case that we put out there. Thank you very much.