MTN Group Limited ($MTN)

Ladies and gentlemen, a warm welcome to you here in the room and of course, our virtual audience. My name is Nastassia Arendse, and I'm absolutely honored to be your host for the Capital Markets Day today. Today represents an important milestone in MTN's journey. It's an opportunity to share not only where we are today, but where the business is headed. And to give us a little more context on this and the business of today, I'd like to welcome on stage Roy Mutooni, who is the Group Executive for Investor Relations at MTN Group. Roy, please join us on stage.

All excuse my nerve because I usually would be sitting among you criticizing the girl on the podium. So welcome to everyone. Welcome to everyone in the room. Welcome to all the people on the webcast to all our MTNers and especially members of the Board and the executive who are here. Today is a big day for us. Today is our Capital Markets Day 2026. Before we get into the business of the day, I think maybe a few hygiene matters I'd like to clarify. In case in the unlikely event of an evacuation, the door is there and right there. For those of you who would like to post and communicate during the time, we have our Hashtags. This is actually our disclaimer, which applies to all the presentations and interactions that we have over the course of the day. You'll be able to connect to the WiFi and also post. When you post, please include our corporate Hashtags so that we can all be in touch with that. The agenda and selected executive deep dive videos are already available on the micro site. You get to the micro site through the main MTN website or actually through the invites that you all got. Please feel free. It will actually inform quite a few of the presentations here. You'll see on your seats, there are charging stations. You can use a USB or your normal plug. And finally, for those joining us here, but it's going to be a long day. There's going to be lots of PowerPoint, lots of talking and everything. So please join us for drinks afterwards. And when you get a chance during the breaks and everything, there's a fantastic exhibition outside. And there's also the Sifiso Dabengwa Exhibition Center just inside the building that Ushers will show you, that showcases everything that we talk about here, all the technology, all the experience and everything makes it come real. I absolutely recommend that you go there. So looking at the business of the day, like I said, it's a big day for us. Big day for me, big day for all of us. We're theming this day driving growth, delivering returns. It comes at an important point for MTN. We've come through one ambition -- our Ambition 2025, and now we're looking to Ambition 2030. And that's what makes us so proud to be here communicating to you. We will first take stock of 2025 or Ambition 2025. We'll be honest, where we want, we won, where we didn't, we'll tell you, and we'll tell you why. And when we speak about Ambition 2030, we'll tell you what we hope to do, what we aspire to do and what we believe we can achieve. We will start with Ralph. But instead of me going into those details, I think I'm much better off letting the program director go into the agenda for the day and everything. So everybody, welcome. Please feel free. We're going to have a lot of Q&A and everything. Corner, the executives. I've made them promise they'll be there for drinks and during the breaks and lunch and everything. So please feel free, you are our guests today.

Thank you Roy. And as he mentioned, he is quite correct. Today is going to be a big day. So I'm going to give you a brief outline in terms of what you're going to expect. We're going to be unpacking the three core platforms. And then we'll hear from the leadership across the key markets. We'll have a conversation a little bit later on where we explore the role of artificial intelligence, especially at a time where we want to talk about it in terms of how it's shaping MTN's future. Then we're going to conclude, put it all together with a financial framework on capital allocation principles that will underpin the strategy. So ultimately, today is about understanding how MTN intends to convert Africa's structural growth opportunities and sustainable value and of course, create sustainable value for customers, communities as well as shareholders. A reminder once again that you are more than welcome to populate your questions throughout the day as the speakers come on to stage. We will allocate a time to have those questions answered during the various Q&A sessions. With that said, ladies and gentlemen, let's begin. To set the strategic context for the day, it is fitting that we begin with the person leading MTN's next phase of growth. He'll introduce Ambition 2030, outline how MTN's three platform strategy is designed to unlock long-term growth and, of course, value creation across the continent. Please join me in welcoming the Group President and Chief Executive Officer of MTN, Ralph Mupita. [Presentation]

Nastassia and Roy thanks very much for the introductions and behalf of the MTN management team and the Board, welcome to all our stakeholders, particularly to our shareholders the ones who actually own the company, we appreciate all of you for joining us. We see a good group here, and I've had the opportunity to greet several of you. Also extending welcome to those who are joining us virtually on the various media platforms. We're looking forward to two days of engagement. It's not just one day. We do have today the formal CMD program where myself and the executives will tell you about how excited we are about the next 5 years. But what we've done is also to include an additional program tomorrow. So tomorrow, we are hosted by Investec and we've got our broader leadership around. We bought them from the various markets. You'll be able to interact with them not only today, but tomorrow so that you get a sense of the depth and the quality of the management that is actually running this company, but also our excitement about the opportunities that lie ahead. As Roy has mentioned, we are framing Ambition 2030 as unlocking growth and delivering returns. We think that's a very unique proposition for us to be focused and executing and committing ourselves to shareholders more broadly. I'm going to set the scene by just firstly reminding us a little bit about what who MTN is. I don't think it needs too much introduction, but we will give a bit of that. I'll then focus on Ambition 2030. What did we deliver? And to Roy's point, what were some of the issues that we had to navigate to get to where we ended off at the end of last year and then the results that we delivered. I'll then move to framing the six big structural opportunities that we believe shape the next three to five years and how well positioned we are as MTN to take advantage of those opportunities, then talk about Ambition 2030, how we've organized ourselves under the One MTN three platforms and take you through the key and salient elements of that strategy. Before I conclude, I will then talk to the near-term priorities. What are the issues that we are seized with today. There's quite a bit, and I'll try and navigate the major ones that we think are important to deliver on the value. And then I'll close off at the end before I pass on to Selorm to talk about connectivity. So just a reminder of who we are as a group in the end of the third quarter last year, we crossed over the 300 million subscribers served, and we're well ahead of that as of the end of quarter 1. If you think about the kind of growth drivers that we still have, particularly if we think about data and fintech, we only have 176 million subscribers that are regularly using data. So that's over 130 million people still stuck in the voice era across MTN markets who are our customers, again, underpinning the growth opportunity that's already inherent in the base before we even see a base growth. In terms of our mobile money business, we have Serigne, who's going to be talking to us a little bit later about our strategy to really accelerate growth there. Again, if you look at the breadth of our footprint, we probably have the largest footprint in terms of kind of mobile money users. We still see significant growth there. Data is approximately about 45% of our service revenue, so not even 50%. Quite yet you see there is ZAR 101 billion equivalent of data revenue against service revenue of ZAR 218 million. And our EBITDA margin that we have been on a constant currency basis been generating as of the end of last year at 45%. So kind of strong performance all around, but that's also underpinned by a very strong brand that we have. We've been over many successive years, been voted the most trusted and the most valuable brand, and we're operating across 19 markets. Just looking at the portfolio itself, I mean -- I guess these are numbers that many of you will be familiar with. We just arranged them in a form that we hope is interesting. Just looking at subscriber growth conversion to active data subscribers to mobile money subscribers to earnings. And I think if you look at the top three markets, South Africa, 14 million odd of our 313 million subscribers. data, active data users, 22 million. Mobile money opportunity, we're still very small there, 2 million. We have aspirations for higher. We know South Africa is very well served with financial services. But we think that there is an opportunity that's there, particularly at the very low end and in the merchant ecosystem. And South Africa is delivering about 18% of EBITDA, if you look at last year's numbers. Nigeria reached 90 million. Karl and his team are here all the way from Lagos and Abuja, where the folks variously are. So with 55 million active data users. Again, the mobile money opportunity for us screams a major opportunity. There's a bit of a reset on our strategy. We announced yesterday the Alipay opportunity, which will launch in Nigeria. So with 3 million, and we think that there's significant growth, particularly off the base of Nigeria's connectivity base. And Nigeria is delivering 1/3 of the EBITDA of the group and then you can also see Ghana, SEA and the Francophone market. So a broad diversified portfolio, which gives us resilience during some of the more challenging times. Before we go and talk about Ambition 2030, let's recap a little bit about what happened in Ambition 2025. It was a period of a very challenging macro. The strategy was executed, started actually in the midst of COVID. We're executing the strategy in the midst of the end part of COVID, dealing with a variety of forces that are all kind of interplaying and having secular order effects that are pretty significant, whether you name the geopolitical, the macroeconomic shifts in technology as well as kind of the regulatory environment. So we had to navigate all these forces and these forces that we've spoken about at previous results presentations. And within that kind of context, we thought we delivered a fairly resilient set of results. We saw growth in our subscriber base. Effectively, we're growing 10 million subscribers per year. Active data, the conversion was a little bit higher, more like 12. And then mobile money, more like 6 million growth on a per annum basis. On the expense efficiency, the finance team, Tsholo and Co did a fantastic job of organizing and rallying the troops, to always focus on expenses. We always say MTN expenses are like nails, you've got to keep trimming them. The job is actually never done. So we ended up with over ZAR 16 billion of expense efficiencies, which underpins the strong margins we delivered. We saw improving returns. The ROE, I think in 2017 was like 11%. So good to see that, that has grown. And then on the asset realization program, I think we did pretty well given that the two biggest assets that have been in that program, IHS being one of them, and we'll talk about IHS and the other was further sell-down in Nigeria. We didn't sell down. We're aiming for 25. So we managed to get to just under ZAR 23 billion of asset realizations without actually meaningfully progressing with Nigeria as well as the sell-down of IHS. You know by now our strategy there on IHS. And HoldCo leverage, I think we brought down the component of dollar debt quite significantly and also brought down the HoldCo leverage to give the balance sheet resilience and strength, particularly during these difficult times. One of the KPIs that we have, which is in our LTI is the TSR. We'll talk about our KPIs at the end. I think if you -- this is data from FactSets -- if you take the TSR from day 1 and the dividends or the cash is assumed to be reinvested, I think we had a pleasing delivery on the TSR on a 5-year basis coming out at 315. We compare ourselves to the MSCI Emerging Markets Telco Index, and that was 119. So good growth. But as you can see, we had to navigate some choppy waters in that period, particularly with the significant devaluation of the Naira in Nigeria. And you could see that underlying the strength of the franchise was there. And as the environment improved, we saw that strength coming back in the returns. So how was this all delivered? This is a management team that's pretty much been delivering the last 5 years. A few people have moved here and there, but substantially, the core of the team is there. Many of them will speak today. So Karl will speak, Ferdi will speak today. Serigne, Mazen will also have Tsholo, Selorm and Charles. But the broader executive team, they're all here in the room. And so many of you who are here at 14th Avenue will have an opportunity. This is a team that is -- understands the continent well, understands how to navigate some of the complexities that I spoke about. And I think look forward to working with this team over the next 5 years that lies ahead. We do have some new members. Lwazi Bam is sitting in the room. So he's all of 10 days in Lwazi as our new Group Chief Risk Officer. Paul Norman who spent 29 years here or still 29 he said he doesn't want to spend 30 years. So Paul will be retiring before the end of the year and Mitwa will be taking over his place on the ExCo in the second half of this year. So let's talk about the future because that's all about the past. What are the structural growth opportunities we see at MTN as they pertain to Africa. So we think about our world of sub-Saharan Africa, where the opportunity set for us remains significant. And if you think about where we are as the end of 2025 to end of 2030, you can look at different data sets. There's going to be 150 million more people out there to serve. And that's obviously underpinned by the demographics of the continent, a very young continent, median age around 19. So a very young and fast-growing continent we happen to be on. people accessing mobile Internet. That's both voice and data, 200 million. So this is not just data, it's people coming first time into accessing mobile services, voice and data, another 200 million. On financial inclusion, it's a very specific findex definition where they talk about adults who have access to financial services. So that's a much narrower band. And their viewpoint is there's at least 100 million people who will be moving from being unbanked or not having financial services to being provided for financial services. So there is this demographic effect across our continents, which underpins the growth that we see. So we think that there are 6 big structural growth drivers for us going forward. The first one I've already touched on a little bit is the GDP growth of the continent. I think it's the fastest-growing economic region, if you want to think of it in that way. We think that data will accelerate. We take a view that consumption of data will be 2x before the end of this decade, and we'll make our case with regards to that. We believe home is the next big structural connectivity opportunity. We see workloads moving more and more increasingly to the home, and we are positioning ourselves over the next 3 to 5 years as being the leader in home connectivity. I'll touch on it a little bit, but Selorm will cover it, and you'll hear further also from Ferdi, Karl and Stephen around our excitement around the home opportunity. The African enterprise has been an area that we believe will increasingly become more sophisticated and we'll be able to serve some of the customers that we have, particularly the small, medium enterprise. So we're calling enterprise out as an opportunity, particularly around the growth of converged services, IoT, cloud, cybersecurity, services that will make our relationship with enterprises a lot more sticky, and we think that's an opportunity. Financial inclusion, I think it goes without saying Africans are still dealing predominantly in cash. And the conversion of customers using cash much more digital for us is a big opportunity of growth. Now there's obviously a lot in the headlines around AI. We take a view from an MTN perspective that AI is another leapfrog opportunity. I think if we all go back 30 years ago when the mobile phone came on, everyone said the mobile phone is too expensive. Some of you remember those days of the car handset market and nobody really thought until a breakthrough came with prepaid and all of a sudden, there was mass adoption. I think there's another point of adoption, particularly around the smartphone that enabled more and more Africans. So we are taking a medium to a very long-term view that this foundational technology is one that creates a leapfrog opportunity. We're not seeing ourselves as MTM, as builders of frontier models, of builders of 1 gigawatt data centers and all of that. But we think there is a place to participate in this foundational technology, and we'll cover some of our thought processes, and we're putting financial commitments out to our shareholders about the value creation potential that we see. So these are the six forces that we see, and I'll go through them fairly rapidly. My team will do a better job than myself. I think the first, as I said, is really the economic growth opportunity as well as the demographic opportunity, particularly in markets that are commodities driven. I think we've seen a significant level of resilience in those markets, Ghana and Nigeria come to mind, but also in markets where there's critical minerals. The more there's beneficiation in these markets, I think we'll see economic growth expanding. The youth the median age being 19, these are born digital. These are digital native consumers that are beginning to work through the Gen Z's and so forth. And we believe that there are many reasons why we're very well positioned to capture, particularly given the brand strength that we have and the extensive network customer base and the network positions that we have. Again, data acceleration. Some of the data sets, I think, very well known. There is a usage gap. Coverage across Africa, the job to cover, the population has gone very well. What's at stake right now is usage. So there's still a 65% usage gap. And the big issue to unlock here is smartphones, the cost of data capable devices at price points Africans who have $3 to $4 ARPUs can afford. And our estimation is that you've got to be south of $35, ideally much more in the 20s to really unlock that growth and bring many of the -- our customers who are still stuck in the voice era to come through. As I mentioned, we anticipate that the current data usage will more than be 2x by 2030. What will drive it? We think providing raw data is not enough. What we need to do is to provide some of the services on top of that connectivity. And you would have heard that we launched the One TV solution, which we're beginning to roll out to markets is to try and curate. We're not going to be deeply in the production of some of this content, but to curate it and put it on a platform at price points our customers can afford. So some of you would have read the headlines that we're trying to compete with Netflix. That's far from the truth. We see ourselves as very complementary and going to a part of the market that is much, much more at a lower price point, but very focused on local content, bringing in the African content creators and creating a platform for them to be able to kind of sell their product. So data consumption will be -- will go beyond just connectivity but providing the services that sit on top of it and some we are looking to own. Again, many reasons for us that we are well positioned to be able to capture this opportunity. The third is home, and I'm super excited by home. And previously, the way we thought about home was in Ambition 2025, we spoke about 10 million homes. And that was on mobile broadband MBBs, a bit of FTTH and FWA. We're saying, going forward, we really need to focus on home connectivity with future-facing technologies. So MBBs, we kind of discount that now. Yes, a lot of our customers kind of move around with their routers from work and home and when they're home, they use it. But that's not a future resilient strategy if we look at the technologies. And we're putting a call out here that we think that there is 70 million to 90 million home opportunity across our markets. If we get our fair share of that, that's probably 20 million to 30 million homes that we are pursuing. And Selorm will take us through a bit of that. And we are taking almost a technology-agnostic positioning. We want the technology that best fits the customer base that we can monetize. So you will see us talk about mixture of FWA and FTTH and FWA, there is Airfibre, some people call it unlicensed band radios, UBR in some geographies. We think that there's space for all of that in our markets. And ultimately, we will have to embrace LEO satellites. They're not going to go away. It's a technology that's here and the partnerships, and we've already started one or two partnerships we have spoken about, particularly in Zambia with Starlink. So we are embracing the technologies. We're not running away from them. We're not pushing back, a person connected at home will be using any of these technologies. And Selorm will take us through a bit of that detail. The other opportunity that I raised is really the enterprise. And I think the way we've got to think about enterprises across our markets is that they look quite different from Europe. It's much more the small, medium-sized enterprises. They are largely informal, but they still need the technologies and the tool sets of today's kind of much more commerce environment. So we have about 6 million SMEs that we're serving across the markets. So that's about 12%. We think there's 50 million. Probably the number is bigger because documenting all the informal economies is not -- you don't capture everything in that way. So we think we can move up the stack in terms of serving these SMEs. What's going to really drive this growth is going to be the converged services. Mobility will still play a part, but I think these enterprises need more than just raw connectivity. And you'll see from Selorm's presentation that the categories of converged services that we see growth. And with David Behr and his team, I think we are arranging ourselves well to capture on this opportunity. Financial inclusion, Serigne will cover this in a lot more detail. I mentioned the fact point, which is 90%, there's still a lot of cash in the market. And as we drive a more digital set of solutions, I think we see an enormous opportunity for us to continue to grow. I think that data point at the bottom of the slide is quite important. 90% of our existing customers call them approximately 70 million. Their journeys are still USSD-based journeys. I always give Serigne a hard time, why aren't they moving to the app more quickly. And he will answer himself. But we believe that the amplification of services and getting our customers to move, it also increases discoverability of all of our services. Many of you use USSD menus. It's actually quite a confined space, very limited discovery other than when you contrast it to appified services. So we think, again, we're pushing very hard. And again, as part of this partnership with Alipay, we really want to accelerate to the future so that as our customers are catching up with smartphones, use of more appified services, we're there and ensure that the moat and the scale advantages that we have, we don't lose them over the next while. As I said, AI is very nascent, and we at MTN have our feet on the ground. We don't have them in the clouds. But we do recognize, particularly around inference, that there is an opportunity here as we look medium to longer term to -- and Charles will speak to it a little bit later in the way that we think about the opportunity, AI inside the company, that's already something that we are progressing and working at. AI to consumer AI to business. And we also have a philosophy and the thought process, AI for social, how do we help our communities more. So we're not at the bleeding edge, but we're not standing still either. We have to move with this technology, which is moving very rapidly. McKenzie have a view that by 2030, there is this $100 billion of economic value that could be unlocked and they give a sense of where the industries play. I think the key thing is that these industries are all connected by technologies and connectivity. So as these opportunities emerge with our strong networks and our strong market position, we should be. And I will leave it to Charles and Mazen to give you our thoughtful approach around these technologies with this mindset around the leapfrog opportunity. So with these six forces, how we are framing the next couple of years. We kind of introduced this at the results of our FY 2025 in March. We spoke about the MTN three platforms, Connectivity, Fintech and Digital infra. Most of our capital today and most of our returns is being generated from Connectivity. But as I said, we still see growth in scaling data with digital services on top of that to drive usage growth and obviously, we have to do it profitably, given the CapEx we've put in there. Selorm will take us through that detail. Accelerating home, I gave you a sense of the growth opportunity that we see. As I said, this is the next big thing in connectivity is connecting African homes. We've seen the trends. We've seen it in Europe. We've seen it in Asia Pacific. You've seen it in Latin America. That's the direction of travel. And we will be looking at our CapEx envelope and ensuring that there is enough CapEx allocation towards home to capture this opportunity. And different markets will use different technologies, as I mentioned, and I spoke briefly about empowering enterprises. Serigne will talk about the two big areas that we focus at the group level for Fintech, which is really about expanding the ecosystem. We think the ecosystem of users, agents, merchants, has still got a long runway of growth and then deepening these advanced services. Some of the basic services are beginning to get commoditized or they're on path towards being commoditized over the medium term. So there's a big push from our end to increase the proportion of the advanced services we've spoken about. And again, Serigne will give us an update on where we are and our plans for the future. On digital infra, two boxes that are firmly in our control right now, open access fibre and an open access approach to data centers. In the build-out of these particular verticals, we are going to tap not only partner capability, but partner capital. We can't fund all of this opportunity off our balance sheet. So the -- much of what you'll hear today and Sulu will reinforce is the growth opportunities, the funding and the capital will come from -- partially from our own balance sheets, partially from debt being raised in specific of these verticals and then using partner capital. But the underlying thing on digital infra is open access. They are third-party customers beyond MTN who are here, but also bring in third-party capital. And we put in Unlock Towers value, the IHS transaction is still going through the various processes and subject to be completed will be a building strategic block that we will place under Unlock Towers value. All of these strategic pillars have three common themes that run through the organization. leading customer experience. We're pushing ahead with that. I think the expectation of customers what good looks like has changed quite significantly because of how customers are engaging in appified experiences. Much of Telcos is still USSD today, and that's pretty much not just for ourselves, but actually for the peer group that we compete against. On AI for growth, we'll give you our framework and how we're thinking about it and how we're embedding it, real use cases that are alive around SIM registration and et cetera, which will be covered by Charles and the team. And we have a view and a philosophy position that for us to be sustainable, the creation of shared value is important across our markets. We can't be growing and successful in an environment where the success is not equally shared. That has driven our approach to localization et cetera. And we think that is the right approach for long-term sustainability. How are we going to market? Pretty much going to market for the one MTN three platforms, three brands. And I guess if on the digital infra, we have the IHS being concluded, that will sit as a brand. It won't change shape. We won't rename it. It will remain IHS. But for now, connectivity, we use as the mother brand, MoMo strongly endorsed from MTN and Bayobab, another open access company, an MTN group company for our fiber as well as our data center assets that we will build over time. Strategy has to be underpinned by people, culture and values. And we at MTN are very proud that we have like -- and Paul Norman is in the room. We have an attractive value proposition for our people. Our people are passionate about the continent. They are passionate about this whole notion of giving Africans dignity, hope and opportunity. And we've had accolades in the past coming through as one of the few African companies in the Forbes World Best Employers. We are applying our minds for a world that has got human and agents in the workflows, in the work processes. We're not standing still. And we think that this is -- that the human AI ecosystem is going to be what is at play. It's part of our design and thinking about the AI inside. And we're increasingly focusing on acquiring talent that's fit for the future. And you'll even see when -- so speaks about IT, you see an increasing amount of our CapEx spend is going to IT. We need to build software engineers inside the company. The history of telcos was basically build the network and outsource everything. And we're saying, actually, we need a lot more software engineers inside our own company as we're developing our own service. So talent acquisition and upskilling and reskilling is a big part of kind of our workforce planning and building ourselves for the future. And we're guided by our Live Y'ello values. These we launched about 2 or 3 years ago. They underpin how we work here at MTN. The capital allocation framework, Tsholo and I spoke about this with the full year results. We've kind of simplified it. The organic growth remains focus. Order of magnitude, we're saying CapEx intensity at a portfolio level, 15% to 18%. Nothing has really changed. We've got to figure out how we leverage our own capital, other people's capital. The balance sheet, we've got focusing on HoldCo move from HoldCo leverage to group leverage in anticipation of IHS. And we have this new shareholder remuneration framework, which is on dividends and buybacks. Inorganic opportunities still in the picture. If we can find compelling value creation opportunities, we'll present them in front of our shareholders, and we think IHS is one of those. And obviously, we're going through the process. Just touching on the last two. On shareholder remuneration, and during the roadshows, I think we interacted with many of you just to give us -- to give you our sense of confidence behind the new framework. And obviously, a big part of that is buyback. What we would like to communicate to investors is that the buyback program, we are kicking it off. And I think one of the things we've committed to is to report on it on a quarterly basis. So that share buyback program will be initiated no later than Q4 2026. So anticipate that with full year results when we come up, we will, as we've committed on a quarterly basis, report how that has -- and that's a kind of a voluntary disclosure that we will make from Q1 going next year. So it is 6 billion that we've set out. to be executed before the end of 2028. And we're signaling here that in the second half of this year, we'll commence on that one. Talking about Pillar four on capital allocation, IHS acquisition. The transaction, I think all the detail we've provided Su will cover some of that again, I think the strategic rationale, as we've communicated, bringing operational and strategic positioning. Mazen will speak a bit later about the parts of value creation that we see going forward with the business under our control and that we see meaningful synergies and efficiencies coming through, financing synergies, our rating is two notches above IHS and that creates an opportunity for some financing synergies. I'll leave that Solo to talk about how we kind of frame that. And we believe that this is a transaction going forward that will have -- will be value accretive on all the key KPIs. The debt stack will pick up for a period, but given the earnings profile of the business will get us back into range in a pretty short period space of time. Before I conclude, I just want to talk about near-term priorities. Much of what I've spoken about is looking 3 to 5 years out, but what are the issues that sees us as a management team today. There's quite a lot on the chart, but I think I can navigate through it fairly quickly. So on connectivity, first thing, sustaining the commercial momentum that we saw coming out of Q4 and Q1. We obviously are dealing with diesel mostly price issues, not so much supply issues. And the nature of our contracts is that the diesel pricing lagging a quarter behind. So wherever you see diesel prices today, you're going to see these in Q3. And as we've said before, H1 will be relatively clean because of the lag effects. But starting Q3, you'll see what has happened in Q2. And then for Q4, you'll see what has happened. So for example, in Nigeria, we used to have -- to mitigate the supply risk, we used to have two months of diesel cover. We're now working with three -- three months. I think some of the IHS colleagues are sitting in the room somewhere. So during the tea break, you can confirm. So the commercial momentum is there. We keep pushing it. And you saw with the Q1 results, the signal would be really the diesel pass-through coming through into Q3. South Africa, I don't want to steal Ferdi's thunder. I think he has a couple of key messages. One would be prepaid recovery progress. We've said the recovery, you should start seeing the green shoots in the second half of the year, Q3 going to Q4. Don't see green shoots in Q2. We've taken some tough medicine and will take some time for those results to come through, but Ferdi will update where we are. Wholesale strategy for value, Ferdi will again talk about the approach that we're taking with regards to wholesale. That's all I'll say for now and leave it for him to talk about what that really means practically. And the SA business is going a structural cost reset where the team will take out between ZAR 4 billion to ZAR 6 billion worth of expenses on today's basis, completely out of the expense stack going forward. So we call it the structural cost reset of ZAR 4 billion to ZAR 6 billion. So that's seizing us today. And I spoke about the CapEx mix within the envelope. There's wireless, there's home, there's network, there's IT. We have an envelope. We've got to try and make our choices within an envelope. CapEx capital is not infinite. So we're trying to be as disciplined as possible to keep the CapEx envelope in that regard. Areas or markets like Nigeria that are growing very quickly. So you'll see them at the upper end of the CapEx intensity. So that could be at the lower end of the CapEx intensity. So these are some of the issues that are keeping us focused. Fintech, I spoke about the growth side, structural separations, Ghana is complete. Nigeria, the shareholder vote is done. We're going through all the regulatory approvals with the Central Bank of Nigeria. We're pretty much there with Uganda. I think before the end of this month, the one outstanding set of areas to get us there. So the 3 big markets of Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda will have made progress. Now these separations are complex. And the M share structure, which enabled unbundling in Nigeria, it's a novel thing. So the authorities are looking at this, trying to understand the same structure that we have in -- pretty much the same structure we have in Uganda to effect in the most tax-efficient way, the separation. There are many ways to separate quicker, but there's a lot of value leakage. So we are very mindful of minimizing value leakage in the separation. And therefore, there's been extensive engagement, and I think that it's come through. We are looking at new licenses. We are looking at new licenses that enable us to provide our customers with the suite of products that -- and Serigne will talk about that. I think most importantly, Nigeria is one of those, but it goes beyond Nigeria into other markets where we believe that fit-for-purpose, different set of licenses, given our size and scale, given our desire to monetize, float better, et cetera, the license is inefficient. So this is a big area of focus, and we are already in train with that. And I'll leave Serigne to talk more about the Alipay partnership announced and how that will play out across our markets. And again, on digital infra, IHS acquisition, big top of mind. As I said, we are actually engaged on the LEO strategy. Our approach is a fit-for-purpose strategy. So we are doing a POC now in Zambia on direct-to-device with Starlink. So in that market, we have established that, that will make sense in Zambia. It will help us grow. That's not a strategy that makes sense everywhere. So every market is different. So I anticipate that we will have a LEO strategy that's fit for purpose per market. We're not having an umbrella approach of saying there's kind of a global partnership. We're already partnering on backhaul. And the question is how do we partner and compete. And I think that's kind of the world we're in. And then obviously, as I mentioned, the way we think about AI radio access network, AI at the site. We have a very valuable real estate at the site. Can there be inference workloads at the site? Can we do them profitably? That's the big question we're asking ourselves, and we've made a small investment into the ODC partnership, which Mazen will cover. All of this is underpinned by a focus on what are these initiatives. We want to take AI from kind of POCs and explorations to embedding them deeply across our business. And again, Charles will talk a bit about that. And then obviously, this free cash flow and return on capital employed focus. These are parts of our KPIs, and Tsholo will cover that in some bit a little bit later. As I close, I think we have an investment case at MTN, which I trust between today and tomorrow, we'll be able to convince you as shareholders and broader stakeholders that we have a case that's about unlocking growth and delivering returns. We've got to deliver both. Delivering one is insufficient. There are significant growth opportunities across our portfolio as we are today. And we want to be able to communicate these clearly to yourselves, and that's why we appreciate you taking the time to be with us. There are these structural growth opportunities. The six that I spoke about are the ones most compelling for us. We are well positioned pretty much most of our markets. We have scale. We're #1 or #2 across pretty much of our markets. Networks are well invested. We have, in most markets, sufficient spectrum, gives us a good base for us to grow going forward. The financial framework, which Tsholo will take us through and remind you, it has not changed much, but it's what disciplined us around decisions we make, particularly around how do we allocate capital. And we deeply believe in this thing about shared value, localization, the import of those -- some of them, we've done them because for regulatory reasons, some of them we've done them because it's the right thing to do over time. And it also is a form of risk mitigation for us. So our investment case would like to position as it's unique, it's unlocking growth and it's delivering returns. And at the end of today and for those who are with us tomorrow, I'm hoping you take out the following key messages. There is the structural growth opportunity across MTN's market. The Ambition 2030 strategy is the best way to capture this. We've got a track record as a business and as a management team to be able to execute to manage through the macros and the challenges that we face in pursuit of these opportunities and that we have as a business an approach around discipline to capital allocation and we're also giving shareholders both growth and returns, something that we think is quite unique across our markets and positions MTN as best positioned across Africa to enable digital and financial inclusion. So ladies and gentlemen, thanks very much. I'll pass on to our MC, and I think the next speaker will be Selorm. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ralph, and we're going to catch up with him a little bit later on during the course of the day. And I did take a moment to have a look at the platform that we're using for the questions. And some interesting questions coming through very detailed. However, a reminder that we're going to set aside time as the program unfolds for us to get through all of those questions. We're loving that engagement, that is exactly what today is for. So what we've heard here is a strategy that remains anchored in MTN's core purpose of enabling digital and financial inclusion, but also at the same time, evolving the operating model to reflect on changing customer needs, emerging tech as well as the new growth opportunities. So we're going to move on with the program. And in this particular segment, we are going to be hearing from the leaders that are driving our growth strategy, particularly within the platforms. And we're going to begin with the first of three platforms, and that is connectivity. It is the foundation upon which everything else is built, enabling access, powering digital services and, of course, connecting millions of individuals and customers across the continent. To take us through how MTN is scaling data, accelerating home connectivity and empowering enterprises. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage MTN Group Chief Commercial Officer, Selorm Adadevoh.

Hello, everyone. Great to see all of you and great to be here today. It's an honor to be in front of you today. I'm going to build on from where Ralph left off and walk you through the connectivity business, talking about our three priorities and how we're seeking to execute on our plans for 2030. Some of you may be surprised not to see voice here under connectivity. Our three priorities are Scale Data, Accelerate Home and Empower Enterprises. Now let me just talk a little bit about voice. Ralph touched a little bit on that before. Voice obviously, is our flagship product and service, which has delivered significant value over the last 30-plus years. Today, voice contributes about 30% of our total revenue, but we're seeing on a forward basis, declines in its contribution towards our total revenue. However, with things like voice, AI agents popping up recently and the demand for some of these services, it has been thrown some sort of lifeline. However, by 2030, we will still expect voice to be much less than 30% as it is today, and Tsholo will talk a little bit more about that. In terms of our core growth drivers, scale data, accelerate home and empower enterprises give us quite a lot of excitement. And if you're not already excited after Ralph's presentation, I'm hoping that by the end of the day, you'll be extremely excited. There's a lot more to come, and I'll walk you through the first layer of this. Why is scale data so important to us? And why do we see so much opportunity over the next five years? Less than 30% of Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa today access the Internet. Today, we have about 90% coverage -- but within that, we still have a 65% usage gap. And that presents in itself a fundamental opportunity for us to bring Internet services to the continent. Structurally, there is demand. We're seeing traffic patterns growing. If you look at 2020 to 2025, a 400% increase in traffic consumption. That's a fundamental structural driver of growth. However, some of these are driven by an evolving customer behavior. We're seeing youth over 70% or close to 70% of the population under the age of 30. The way we think about this opportunity, though, is to continue to sustain the demand for traffic, it requires quite a bit of investment. And it's quite key that we're able to define the basis for investment on monetization and margin management. We look at KPIs such as data yield, which allows us a discipline around capital that basically says -- for my incremental traffic, I need to generate an incremental revenue to justify that investment. And that gives us the capital discipline that we need. But that does not necessarily give us the margin management that we look at as well. So fundamentally, we also look at our cost of production, what it takes to deliver a gigabyte of data and what it takes to compensate for that gigabyte of data from our revenue equation using pricing to support our balance and the health of the investment into data. That gives us the economics that allows us sustainability going forward. I was making a joke recently that my grandma used to say to me, Selorm, if you have a bucket with a hole in it, increasing the size of the bucket doesn't give you any more water. So fundamentally, before we scale data, we need to get the economics right. And that's what we're doing with these KPIs to manage data yield and the margins. The next slide sets the ambition. Over the next five years, we expect to grow our active data users by somewhere between 60 million to 70 million on the chart that you see. Again, a lot of this will be driven by the youth that are coming online. But if you think about our business today, smartphone penetration in the upper 60% active data user penetration upper 50%. So there is a gap. Bridging that gap is the first opportunity to convert marginal users or dual SIM users into smartphone active users. They already exist on our networks. They already have the device, but are not using data. The second opportunity are the data users -- sorry, the nonusers who do not have smartphones at all. Today, we have 300 million-plus customers, of which about 175 million are active data users. There is a gap of at least 100 million. We all know that there is an affordability challenge for devices. So that second point on accelerating and growing 4G smartphone devices will get us there, but there is a challenge. Customers can't afford to buy a smartphone. And there are a number of initiatives that we've put in place to try to address this challenge. The first is to work with ODMs, device manufacturers to design devices that are fit for purpose for the continent and for the pockets of our customers. What we do here is we think about the screen size, 4.5-inch, 4-inch. We think about the processing capacity, we think about the memory size and we say what does a typical African customer need? And how can we design down to suit that customer. Of course, ODMs today are looking at profitability. They're looking at high-end devices because the margins on those devices are a lot more attractive. But our goal is to lead digital solutions for Africa's progress, and we have a different problem to solve than may be the priorities of ODMs. The third is to actually work with different organizations to think about different ways to finance devices that will be out of range from a pricing perspective for the customer. Today, we don't have all the instruments around credit that exist in other markets, but we have a lot of data from fintech and from our mobile networks. And we're able to use that to create credit relationships and profiles for these customers to be able to partner to finance them. And in fact, last year, about 20% to 25% of new smartphones on our network came from device financing. There's a third element, which is driving usage and we are seeing some very interesting trends when it comes to driving usage. If you look at 2020 to 2025, there's been a significant shift in the behaviors of our customers when it comes to what they do on the Internet. Social media and messaging were primarily the bulk of what customers did five years ago. Today, we're seeing new trends. We're seeing gaming, we're seeing video streaming, and we're also seeing e-commerce. All the work that Serigne and the team are doing on fintech, driving the behavior of online commerce, and that's driving significant growth on the commerce side. Gaming, again, we think about the youth and what they do on a daily basis, and that's become a significant segment for us. We're seeing gaming as one of the big drivers going forward as well as streaming. You think about user-generated videos, TikTok, Instagram and what we do on Facebook as well, but also other platforms that are gaining significant traction within our consumer base. We expect to see usage go from where we are today, 14 gigabytes at the end of Q1 to about double that size going forward. And we're seeing this as a general trend on the continent in general. You would have seen about a 3 to 4x growth in the previous five years. So we expect to continue to see quite good growth. But how do we tap into this opportunity? This trend that we're gifted by the youth. Our content-led approach is that solution, and that's the catalyst to bring content and to drive usage amongst our base. Different solutions for streaming, lifestyle services. Today, education is largely online. A lot of education content is gamified. We're seeing solutions that are locally produced that customers are consuming today on some of these platforms. However, there is a gap in the market for hyper local and local content that these global platforms are not addressing. Ralph talked about this is not in competition with the Netflixes of the world. Our ambition is to connect the ecosystem and to bring local and hyperlocal content into our environment. And that's what MTN One TV is designed to accomplish. The second thing is local producers have no local distribution. This platform allows us to bring a solution of distribution and aggregation to local producers. That changes the investment case for local content investments. So our belief is if we get this right, and we should get this right, that you will see investments in production. We're seeing a thrive in production industry in Nigeria and some of our other markets as well. And we believe this brings all of that together. It also reduces our dependence on bringing significant volumes of traffic through Mazen's pipes on undersea cables if we allow local production and consumption to grow, and that also affects the economics of the overall business. Now let me take you to our next opportunity, accelerating the home. Ralph already talked about how significant this is for us. It gives us a significant opportunity today. Today, 70 million to 90 million we estimate households addressable on the continent. And these households do not have high-speed Internet as we speak. Again, our ambition is to solve that problem and to deliver high-speed Internet services to 70 million to 90 million homes addressable. Today, we're at about 2.8 million. Most of you may look at this number and think, we saw a number of 10 million some time ago. What has changed? So let me address that before I go into our ambition forward. A few years ago, we defined home to include mobile broadband. Our decision today, as Ralph mentioned earlier, is that fixed networks reflect more the behaviors of customers when it comes to high-speed Internet and the limited mobility also reflects better on fixed networks. So this 2.8 million excludes mobile broadband, and that's the difference between the numbers you have seen before and what these numbers represent. Our goal, though, is to increase that number somewhere in the 8x range to get to 20 million plus across our markets. We expect to use different technology types to do that to achieve about a 30% penetration into the addressable base that I mentioned earlier. And of course, Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and Uganda are the key markets that will drive the scale of this ambition forward. But this is not just going to happen on its own. But let me share a few trends that we're seeing and why home is so important. Again, in the West, we're seeing 80% to 90% of data consumption on smartphones delivered through WiFi networks. 80% to 90%. Africa has the fastest opportunity and growth on international bandwidth, but we're also seeing consumption in households to be 10x, 15x and in some cases, up to 20x what it is on mobile. So a significant opportunity for growth, but it does require the investment and the diligence to deliver operationally. So how are we doing this? To ensure that the investment delivers the right return profile for the economics to be positive for us. First of all, we have a variety of technologies to deliver, FTTH, FWA and complementary access technologies. So how we think about FTTH, of course, dense urban areas, premium customer base, very reliable solution, but of course, it requires a premium to justify the investment. Less dense semi-urban areas, 5G FWA, fixed wireless access, and that allows us to be fast to reach the customer. And over time, when the economic profile justifies a different technology, we can migrate into FTTH. There are other areas that are less dense and the economic case and the viability becomes a lot more challenging than the first two areas. Here, we look at complementary technologies. LEO, for example, allows us to penetrate the rural areas. you can also use technologies on licensed bands. We're doing this in South Africa today. And there are other technologies that may come up online as we continue to evolve. This allows us to put capital discipline as an anchor in our decision-making on how we execute on home. Operationally, we need to develop a model. Most successful home deployments have a model. And my grandma used to say to me, you can't just be born and start walking. You need to go through the steps, crawl and start walking. And I promise you that will be the last quote for my grandma. We look at a variety of KPIs, homes passed, the cost per homes passed, homes connected the cost per homes connected, the conversion ratios of our homes passed into homes connected that gives us the license to monetize that investment. And those ratios allow us to gain confidence in returning the profile that justifies the investments. And we're doing quite well if we compare ourselves to these more advanced markets, LatAm and Asia. We're building an operational excellence framework that will be MTN's way of delivering home. And our goal is to use the economic framework here to actually build something we can replicate in new markets and accelerate the scale. To go from 2.8 million to 20 million, it would require an operational engine that's working at peak performance, and that's what we're putting in place to be able to deliver that. Let me bring the presentation quickly to an end by ending on enterprise, how we empower enterprises. Today, we see a massive opportunity in converged solutions. We've built some solutions in South Africa, where 15% of enterprise revenue today comes from converged. Converged represents something like 5x our fixed and mobility where today over 80% of our enterprise revenue comes from. In Cote d'Ivoire, we have about 20% of enterprise revenue again that comes from converged solutions, replicating the success of the models here across our business gives us an opportunity to increase enterprise revenue by somewhere in the 2 to 3x range going forward. A significant driver of enterprise growth is SMEs as a segment. Today, we have a 12% penetration in the SME base and delivers close to half our total enterprise revenue. We see continued opportunity in this space. And if you look at the verticals on products in terms of unified communications, cybersecurity, great growth opportunities in all these segments. From a segment perspective, on an industry perspective, again, trade and commerce, agriculture, services constitute a significant industry opportunity, and that gives us an approach that allows us to start to think about some fundamentals, aligning vertically to these industries that have very unique needs and require specific propositions will allow us to start to gain traction in delivering converged solutions. Moving away from infrastructure into solutions would also start to lead us into more sophisticated propositions and the role we play within these operations and customers will also change over time. But we can't do that without fixing certain basics. What it will take to win talent for status, absolutely critical. And of course, really thinking about the technology solutions and how we build the base for those solutions would also matter quite significantly. But capability and localization, making sure the relevance of the solutions makes sense for these offerings will be quite important. In summary, let me bring the connectivity presentation to an end. There are a number of things that would allow us to unlock growth and deliver results as far as connectivity. The first of which incrementally over the next five years, 40 million to 50 million new mobile users. Second, 60 million to 70 million new active data users. And then third, in terms of our home ambitions, 20 million to 30 million homes connected. And finally, growing our enterprise business 2 to 3x. We're excited about these opportunities, our pivot on the youth, our pivot on home and ensuring the acceleration there give us a lot of excitement, but also the confidence that we will grow this business significantly and deliver growth or unlock growth and deliver results over the next five years. I will now step up the stage and hand over to the next speaker, Serigne at the right point. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much.

Thank you, Selorm, for sharing those perspectives, especially around MTN's connectivity business. Now Selorm, I must say to you, I've attended many Capital Markets Day, and this may be the first time we've seen an investment case that's not only supported by market data, but also grandmother wisdom. So we love it. And judging by the reaction in the room, I think the grandmother may have been a persuasive source here. So we do appreciate those anecdotes. So what we've heard here is the fact that connectivity growth is being driven by data adoption, expanding lifestyle, but also not forgetting that growing demand for reliable broadband and enterprise solutions. We now turn to what has become one of MTN's most exciting growth engines, and that is fintech. Over the past decade, MTN has built one of Africa's largest financial services ecosystems. The opportunity now lies in deepening engagement, broadening services and accelerating monetization. With that said, I'm going to welcome on stage MTN Group FinTech CEO, Serigne Dioum. He's going to walk us through the MoMo ecosystem, including the market opportunities, the current performance as well as fintechs road map to 2030, that is. But he'll also take a moment to explain to you how yesterday's exciting announcement is a step change for the business. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Serigne Dioum. [Presentation]

Good morning, everyone. Ralph introduced to you earlier Ambition 2030 and talked to you about 1 MTN 3 platforms. Selorm presented to you the connectivity platform, and I'm going to take you through the fintech platform. So -- we started almost 2 decades ago, and our ambition was very simple. It was to help people to move money safely. But we have done much more. And today, we help families to receive money from Diaspora. We help merchants to receive payments. We help entrepreneurs to get more working capital by getting credit from us. And we help partners to participate more into the digital economy. And the story I'm going to tell to you today is more about a fintech story. It is about how we help to accelerate Africa growth by allowing more people to participate into the digital economy. And also, I'm going to explain to you how as MTN, we are the best positioned to capture the opportunity that lies ahead of us in terms of fintech. Before I go to the -- talk about the future, I'm going to take a pause and talk to you about what we have achieved since we started our fintech journey. So we have built one of the largest fintech platform in Africa. I hope that you're all convinced about that. And also we -- back in 2021, when I introduced to you our fintech business, I introduced to you Kafui. So Kafui Win is one of our customers that her life has been changed by Momo services. She now participate more -- she is more closer to her family, sending money, receiving money, but also she can pay bills, buy airtime and do so many things with our fintech services. And we have so many kafuis around our countries where we are operating. And beyond Kafui and beyond consumer, I'm going to talk to you about what we do for one of our merchants, and I'm calling her here Miriam. So Miriam has a small business, but we help her to receive payments. We help her to increase her working capital by giving to her capital, but we help her to grow because we expose her services within our platform to more people digitally. And that is what we do for so many partners, so many merchants. We have more than 2 million of them across our footprint. And we do the same with our agents. We do the same with our partners. And also, most importantly, is the impact that we have been having for African people. If you look at -- we've moved more than USD 22 billion from cash economy to a digital economy just for last year. And every day, when you wake up before you go to bed, we help more than 1 million people to -- we empower more than 1 million people to take a loan from us. Some of them are taking a loan to buy tomatoes or vegetables in bulk to sell them and create more value for themselves, for their family. Some of them are paying hospital bills, saving lives that by taking a loan from us. And also, we help creating more than -- created more than 1.4 million agents, and it is more than 2 million jobs because most of the agents have 1 or 2 people working for them. And very important, we also create connection between our partners to our broader ecosystem. So only last year, we processed more than 1 billion API calls. That means that we processed more than 1 billion time we help to people, our partners to get access to our 70 million customers to propose to them their services. So this is bringing us to become to get into the platform era, which is -- I will talk to you about it later. So we've created big impact since we've started. And also the business we've created has generated a lot of values, a lot of value. So last year only, we generated more than USD 28.8 billion as a revenue. We also processed more than USD 0.5 trillion transaction value. We also generated more than -- processed more than 23 billion transactions only last year. But all of that was done with very attractive margin that makes [ Hulu ] very happy. And -- but our journey started back in 2009 with very simple services, sending money to each other, paying bills. And back in 2015, we started doing merchant payment, allowing merchants to accept the payment and to digitalize cash transactions and cash and use cases. Later when we introduced Ambition 2025, we introduced as well our bank tech offers and API platform that I talked about earlier. And we have expanded our ecosystem, and we are now fully a platform business, and we are moving to what we call AI digital-first platform, and I will talk to you about that a bit more in detail later. So we have created a scaled business. We have diversified our verticals from wallet to payment to international remittance to lending, to insurance, and now we are moving to digital-first AI native platform. So we have done all of that. And by doing that also, we have built unique assets. And we have licenses in more than 14 markets. We leverage MTN connectivity assets that have been built over the time with more than 300 million customers. We're yet to get all of them to be fintech customers. We, as MTN has the most trusted brand in Africa. And also, most importantly, we have the best people who knows Africa and who knows fintech also. And also, we have an agent distribution network of more than 1.4 million across our footprint. One fintech can build products and services, but it is very difficult to scale them. And us, we are able to do that by leveraging the assets that we have built all over the years, not only from fintech, but only -- but overall from our MTN overall business. And that is very important, and it will -- I will show you in the next slide how we will leverage these assets to be able to tap into the broader fintech opportunity. We have -- as I said already, we built a very scaled business, but I'm more excited. I've never been as excited like I am today because of the opportunity we see ahead of us is even bigger. So in the next 5 years, we think that fintech opportunity, fintech revenue pool will be multiplied 13x. Despite all we have done, only 10% of transactions are digital -- have been digitalized. More than 90% of transactions today are cash-based. So we can say cash is still king. And also only 5% or 4% of adult population have access to credit. So that gives you the potential we have, the potential that fintech represent in Africa in the coming years. So in the next coming slides, I will show to you how MTN we are the best position to capture that opportunity. Our business, fintech business has been, since we started a transformation journey. So we started with what we call -- what we can call the access stage, where our ambition, as I said earlier, was to get people to the formal financial services and to be able to register to mobile money, to send money to others, to pay bills, to buy airtime with us. Later, we moved to a payment stage where we started digitalizing payment, helping more than 2 million people to receive payment from mobile money. And after that, we started getting into a platform business, where we offer more than basic services. We started giving lending to our customers. We started connected partners using our API platform. And also, we started doing enabling e-commerce. But now we are moving to what we call the intelligence stage, where we are leveraging AI to do a couple of things. First thing is what we call AI for our customers, for our merchants, for our partners. We have been using AI to target better our customers, to manage better our distribution network. But today, we use it also for fraud detection to protect more our customers. And we are also using AI to be more efficient in terms of exploiting and/or managing our platforms. And the third one is AI with our people. With the people we have, we think that AI can help us for each of us to do much more using AI, and we have a full program to help us implementing that. And also, I will talk about how we will leverage also Alipay platform to be -- which is AI native platform as well. So how we're going to really win in Africa when it comes to fintech in the next coming 5 years. We have a strategy that can be summarized in this slide. Our ambition is to create seamless digital and financial solutions that empower individuals and businesses to thrive. And also, we are building Africa's largest future together. We are unlocking growth and opportunity for everyone, consumers, merchants. And we want to become digital-first platform. So Ralph talked about it earlier. And every day, he is putting pressure on me talking about why everyone is not using the app. And we are working on really delivering to our customers an app experience, which is first-in-class, world-class, but also we are working to help people to move from USSD to app. And our ambition is each of our customers that have smartphone to interact with us using the app. And also, we will be defending or deepening our leadership in the markets where we are operating already, and I will talk to that about -- I will talk later about that. And how are we going to do that? First of all, technology is very important, and it is in the center of our strategy. And we don't intend only to improve our technology platform, technology ecosystem, what we will be -- really want to leapfrog. And I will show you later how we are going to do that. BankTech has the largest growth potential for us in the next coming years. And I will show to you how we will accelerate access to credit, but also how we will be climbing more into the value chain when it comes to bank tech. Also, the other verticals, I will show you payment, international remittance, how are we going to continue scaling them further. And -- but all that, we can do everything, but I'm confident that we, as MTN will be able to execute against our strategy because of the people we have. And that is very important. We will be -- I will show to you the management team earlier -- later, but also we have the best people who understand fintech, who understands the continent. And we have identified some -- how we need to also improve the team and to be better positioned to deliver against our strategy. And also execution will be key. Our strategy is very clear. what we need is to be excellent when it comes to execution, and we are working towards that. So I will start by talking to you about technology. As I introduced earlier, technology is in the center of our strategy because it is the biggest enabler for us. And yesterday, so we're going to implement our technology transformation with 3 more changes. The first one, which is the most important one is what we announced yesterday is a partnership with International Alipay. So Alipay has built one of the best and sophisticated fintech platform across the world. And it is used by more than 2 billion people across the world. So partnering with Alipay will help us to deliver the best customer -- digital customer experience in the continent to our customers. We will also benefit from an operating model framework that has been proven to be very successful to how we can deepen our ecosystem. And also, it will help us to get people that understand more AI, understand more fintech platform that will help our own people to also be ready to use the platform to deliver a better customer experience in Africa. So we are very excited about the partnership with Alipay. And we think that it will change the way we deliver services to our customers and also the customer experience we will be delivering to our customers. The second change is around API. So I talked about API earlier that last year, we processed more than 1 billion API financial service API calls. But we think that we need to improve the platform to allow us to -- for our partners to integrate to us faster, simpler and more seamlessly. And that is ongoing. The last one, which is very important also is team augmentation. So we are augmenting our technology and product team, so that we will be able really to leverage the Alipay platform to deliver world first-in-class customer experience and value propositions across our markets. And the outcome will be that we will be offering to our customers in each of our markets, a super app that will be an engagement platform that will help us to engage much better with our customers, but with more frequently with our customers. Instead of engaging once every week, every month with customers, we will be engaging with customers several times in a daily basis. So technology is very important, and it will be the key enabler for us in the next coming 5 years to deliver against our strategy. Banktech evolution. I talked about it earlier. We believe that Banktech has a great potential. And we have already built a very successful and scaled banktech business, but the opportunity is so big that we need to do things differently to be able to accelerate our journey and to position ourselves. So how are we going to do that? First of all, we'll be implementing -- accelerating the implementation of our banktech lending road map across our footprint. We will be providing access to more people when it comes to credit, we provided more credit access to more people. But also, we will be repositioning ourselves when it comes to the bank tech lending value chain. So Ralph talked about licenses earlier. Where needed, we will be augmenting our license to be able to use our own license to deliver loans to our customers, but also to lend against balance sheet. So we will be doing it in a controlled way, making sure that we control the risk, but this is ongoing, and we have started working in a couple of markets already. And we think that it will help us to capture the lending opportunity, which is still very big in Africa. Payment, so as I said earlier, we've helped only last year to move more than USD 22 billion from cash-based transactions to digital payment transactions. But we think that the opportunity is bigger than that. If you look at our customer base, less than 15% only are paying to our 2 million merchants. We can increase that. If you look at also payment transactions in general in our markets, more than 90% is still cash-based. We think that we can accelerate adoption for our customers to pay digitally to our merchants. We think that also we will be able to get more merchant SMEs to accept payment with us, and that will really deepen our payment game. We also will be leveraging our Mastercard partnership. We have started already and we will continue to really for our customers to get access to international commerce, international remittance. So international remittance is one of the biggest also opportunity. If you look at it closely, more than 80% of international remittance transactions are still going through informal channels. And also, it will be growing in the coming years to USD 500 billion by 2030. So the 2035. So the opportunity is very big. But MTN over the years, we've built also unique assets and operating model that we think that will allow us to capture the value of remittance in the coming years. So only last year, we've processed more than USD 6 billion remittance transactions. And also, we have started also internalizing most of the value chain in terms of remittance so that it can allow us. Imagine tomorrow, you have a Ugandan that lives in London. He will be able to download what we call Diaspora wallet and to transact as he was still in Uganda. And it will help us to control the remittance value chain and to consider to be more inclusive with our customers who are not in our countries, but in the Diaspora, but still needs to be connected to their families back home. Also, here, I'm giving a few opportunities that we think that will be the next wave of growth when it comes to fintech. So I've explained to you how we will be continuing scaling payment, international remittance lending that will be providing to us the immediate growth for the next 5 years, but we have also services we are working on that will be the next generation of growth. And to execute against our strategy, we are relying on the leadership when it comes to fintech. And I have a very diverse skilled team and coming from different part of the world and coming from also -- we take people from where we think that we can when it comes to having the relevant skills and to be able to integrate to our teams. And we think that with this team, we will be able to deliver against our strategy. But I would like to emphasize on something. As fintech, we are not being successful just because we leverage on fintech team. Every single MTN participate into that journey from connectivity, digital and fintech, we are one team, and it is what makes the difference compared to others. And here, I'm giving to you like example of 3 markets, which are among the best fintech markets in Africa, starting with Ghana. So we've scaled Ghana. And also what is important and interesting is that we have developed center of excellence in some of the market with different services. Ghana, for example, we scaled lending. Banktech, we scaled the same also in Uganda. Rwanda, I talked about earlier that across our footprint, only 15% of our customers are paying with mobile money. But in Rwanda, you can see that it is more than 60%. So we are working on making every single success in one country to become a global success, and we have been successful on most of what we are doing. It's just a matter of maturity when it come who started first. But if you look at lending, it is scaling in Uganda, in Ghana and other countries. Payment is scaled -- has scaled in Rwanda and also is scaling in other countries. And it is how also we make sure that we use different teams to serve all our customers globally. So Nigeria, so as I, Ralph explained that winning in Nigeria will be very important for us in the next 5 years. So we are not -- we do acknowledge that we are not where we should be in Nigeria. But for us, we learned a lot in the last 5 years in Nigeria. And we do understand why we didn't deliver against our expectation. First of all, the license have some gaps and doesn't allow us to do international remittance, doesn't allow us to do lending and some sort of payment. Secondly, we didn't have the right platform to win in Nigeria. And also, thirdly, you have some digital native fintech that got the license before us and scaled the like of OPay and PalmPay. But the opportunity is still big when it comes to fintech in Nigeria. You have a population of more than 200 million people. Payment is still cash, more than 90%. Lending credit is underpenetrated. And at MTN, we have a customer base of more than [ 80 million ] people. And now we have the Alipay platform that have been -- we've started deploying it in Nigeria since some time, and it will be live in the coming weeks. And we think that with that platform, we'll be able to deliver the best value proposition in country when it comes to fintech. And also, we've augmented our team to make sure that we have the right team to win. We'll be announcing very soon the new CEO for Nigeria when it comes to fintech. And also, we are pursuing a dual strategy. That means that we think that in the North, we have a lot of more underbanked or unbanked customers, and we think that we can leverage more our connectivity assets there to bring those people into the formal financial service space, and we have started already. So the strategy we have in Nigeria, we call it research strategy. We have already started implementing it. We have started seeing some benefit, and I'm very excited to really continue implementing the strategy, and we are sure that it will deliver meaningful results for us and to capture the value of full potential of fintech when it comes to Nigeria. So our Ambition 2030 fintech part will allow us to first of all, accelerate our advanced services. So by 2030, advanced services will be much more than basic services, more than 50%. That will position us to -- our business to be more sustainable, and it will be much more difficult to disrupt us. Secondly, we will be also delivering with us with a very attractive margin, which will be low 40s still. And also our CapEx intensity will be less than 10%. We will be -- we have started already investing more in technology with the Alipay platform, augmenting our team, and that will deliver attractive also economics from the fintech business. To summarize, -- we've talked to you first about how we have scaled the fintech business to become one of the largest fintech platform in Africa. Secondly, we've talked to you about how we're going to scale further the advanced services. Thirdly, we talked to you about how we are going to expand further our ecosystem. Fourth, we've explained to you that we are going to win in Nigeria and how we are going to do that, and we are going to maintain our leadership and deepen our leadership in countries where we are already successful. All of that will deliver between 40 million and 50 million more active customers additional to our base by 2030. It will add -- we will add more than 2 million merchants also into our -- we'll be doubling our merchant base by 2030. And also, we'll be increasing the participation of advanced services within the revenue mix. And this really gets us very excited. We've done a lot, but it's like we are starting a new journey in fintech because of the transformation we are going through to deliver these values to you in the next coming 5 years. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Serigne, for that presentation. And I think what we've taken away from that conversation is that the focus is now on building a richer ecosystem, increasing customer engagement and not forgetting to create that sustainable value through financial inclusion at scale. So most of you would have noticed at least people in the room that typically, we would have been breaking out for lunch right now, but we've adjusted that time a little just to accommodate for the presentations, that Q&A engagement. And we are appreciating those questions that are coming through. And I have not forgotten about those of you who are in the room with us. So we're going to move on with the rest of the program. We are going to get to the third strategic platform, and that is the one that is also underpinning Ambition 2030, and that is digital infrastructure. And I would like to welcome to the stage MTN CEO for Group Digital Infrastructure, Mazen Mroue. And here's what you can expect from him. So he's going to unpack the infrastructure that is going to be underpinning MTN's strategy. He'll talk about fiber expansion, tower co-ownership, including AI-enabled data centers. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage, Mazen Mroue.

Good morning, everyone. I'm here to present the third strategic platform for MTN Group. It's a growth engine within the Ambition 2030, focusing on the details on how we intend to unlock growth and delivering sustainable results. Again, to remind ourselves that digital infrastructure is one of the 3 platforms. You've seen how -- Selorm and Serigne are very much excited. For me, I'm super excited. And the reason for that is -- the open access philosophy and model in the digital infrastructure present for us a strong investment case underpinned by 3 structural drivers. And back to the excitement, we've seen how MTN internal plans to grow the connectivity business. Let's speak directly to the first driver about how we are going to benefit from the embedded demand base supported by the 300 million-plus subscribers and ambition to grow the internal business or the connectivity business, leveraging from the internal wholesale model and that's creating a predictable contracted revenue streams. The second driver for us is we are well positioned as a pan-African infrastructure, capturing the demand that's coming from the cloud adoption, the AI and the digitization across the continent. And third driver back to the open access, drive third-party growth that enable us from one side to monetize our infrastructure from third parties. At the same time, it create a platform for investors to directly co-invest in our programs. In addition to the 3 structural drivers, there are also 4 key advantages for our digital infrastructure strategy. One, Fibre Co structure in form of an integrated backed up by the backbone that has been built during the last 30 years by MTN across all the markets with the access to the subsea cables with direct investment at least in 6 of those cables in collaboration with international consortiums like Meta and Google, create an opportunity for us to continue expanding our reach beyond than just really the MTN footprint. And that's what we have already established at least 9 incorporated Fibre Co's in 9 markets, and 2 of them are currently outside of the MTN connectivity footprint. The second advantage -- we strongly believe we are also well positioned to participate in growing the Africa data center business, leveraging the growth that we see in this space that we think according to the old reports, the data center business is anticipated to grow between 2% to 5% during the next 5 to 10 years. And for sure, that will be enabled through strategic partnerships we decided to go to reduce the pressure on our balance sheet and cash flows. The third driver, we are unlocking values from Tower Co's, subject definitely for the approval that we are anticipating and we are working on it for the IHS transactions, creating value realization benefits for MTN and for all the customers. And fourth, we are well aligned on the strong demand that is continue to be expected from the cloud adoption, from the digitization, from the IT workloads across the continent. For executing the strategy, we need a solid team. We are proud to say we have assembled experienced team currently driving all those 3 interventions across the 3 areas that among the digital structures within the Ambition 2030, including the fiber, the data center and potentially the towers. Our digital structure journey is going to evolve from what we have today as 3 separate pillars for sure, subject for the Tower Co or the IHS transaction to be concluded, we have 3 pillars, creating at this stage opportunities for revenue diversification and leveraging existing partnerships. We are moving into having in 5 years from now, fully integrated AI-enabled infrastructure, generating multiple revenue streams across the structure, aiming to grow revenue on average between 7% to 10% with margins expanding between 50% to 55% -- and all those can only be delivered, again, with strong partnerships moving and shifting from pure commercial relationship to co-investment models. And the reason for that is the direct benefits on our financial in terms of reducing the pressure on balance sheet and definitely the scalability where we can execute simultaneously in multiple markets in agility. In addition to that, the integrated platform has -- is the second biggest differentiator. I spoke about the open access. It's one key differentiator for our strategy. The second biggest differentiator is the integrated structure that we are putting on the ground, combining the Fiber Co with the Data Centre Co and leveraging the Tower Co in the future. All those 3 assets together create a distinctive story for growth and providing reliable, resilient propositions for the players or for the customers who are looking to use our infrastructure, leveraging the open access model. When we look at the Fiber Co, our fiber footprint is expected to grow or increase from what we have currently around 140,000 kilometers, increased by 3x during the next 5 years. Backed up by subsea capacity that is important to connect the African continent to the rest of the world. We expect the subsea capacity to be doubled. And with the data center, plan, the aim to complete the build and the construction, starting with the ambition of having 80 to 150 megawatts, which is a scalable ambition, leveraging joint ventures opportunities that currently we are putting in place, aiming to capture the demand that we see strongly in our footprint and across the continents, making sure that we are aligned with the overall growth that we see in the Data Centre business across Africa continent. Tower Co present the other pillar, which is really complement all the other 2 pillars to provide and generate an integrated approach where it can cement and improve our integrated proposition when it comes to the overall commercialization. Also, we see that our digital infrastructure strategy is well supported by the regulatory ambitions and priorities. On the Fibre Co case, we see, again, the open access provide a need for lowering the cost, which is really important to really ensure that there is an efficient deployment of our capital put in place. In the Data Centre, the data sovereignty and the AI governance expectations and priorities from regulators present a strong case to generate local demand. And across the towers, we see that the push from the regulators for efficient utilization really drive the multi-tenant expectations, which should really add more value to the business to make it more sustainable on the medium to long term and as well the coverage targets that the regulator are putting for all the telcos across all the footprint in Africa also present another supporting factor for the Tower Co business. I want to go a bit in details on the 3 areas that are part of the Ambition 2030 for the digital structure, starting with the Fibre Co. You can see that Africa currently has around 18% of the overall world populations, but it's less than 1% share of the global fibre infrastructure. So it's clear there is a huge gap, and we are well positioned as a pan-African leader telecommunications company to fill that gap on the medium to long term. And that's why it's the right time to restructure ourselves and move and continue the investment that we started, leveraging the open access model and the integrated approach that I spoke about. So we believe with this ambition, it's an opportunity for us to continue our work that we started with a structural separation of our fibre assets in selected markets to support the open access model and definitely backed up by the subsea capacity and as well leveraging the partnership that we announced 3 years back with Africa 50 to complete the East-to-West fibre that will create another level of resilience and as well complement the overall fibre footprint that what we are aiming to complete, creating a much more level of resilience, redundancy and capacity. On Data Centre Co, again, we see that the demand, as I said, continue to grow. We cannot sit idle. We have already agreed internally on the best approach to participate knowing that this business continue to grow between 3 to 5x and looking at the capacity relative comparison between us and the rest of the world, it's clear there is a huge potential in this space. And our approach is governed by 3 drivers: one, really focus on greenfield, do it in partnerships and start from the markets where we already exist and there is a high demand. And potentially, we can scale this to the other markets the moment we really put the right foundation and we start showing the real results. This is -- we look at the data center business as a real estate business. And that should be driven by demand-led structure. So we don't sit on idle properties or real estate. That's why there is a balanced approach between putting the right structure, acquisitions of the land, having the right partners and having the effective commitment from the customers so that we can really ensure scalability and monetizations moving at the same time. And most importantly to mention here that we are not alone who are thinking about the Data Centre business on the continent. But what is differentiating us, we are not only providing real estate. We're not providing an apartment or a house. We are providing a complete infrastructure suite, starting with connectivity leveraging the fiber footprint with the subsea capacity, with the access to the satellites, all those together provide a huge amount of advantages to the hyperscalers who are looking to have end-to-end solutions for hosting their own systems and solutions in the continents. And as well, that also presents another opportunity for governments and for enterprises. And that also presents a big opportunity for Selorm when he spoke about empowering enterprises because we believe strongly that up the value chain, what we see here on the table, that is going to be driven by the enterprise team to fulfill the demand that's coming from the cloud and the applications and the other services. And again, let me put it again in a bold statement here, the approach that we are taking, we are doing -- we are building the new Data Centre, the new greenfield in partnerships, again, reducing the pressure on our financials, derisking and as well accelerating and creating scalability advantages. When it comes to the towers and again, subject to the approvals that we are currently actively working with, 10 years back, we decided to sell our towers. We didn't have the expertise and we maintain equity in the IHS. We didn't have the right expertise to run the tower cost. But now we saw that there is a huge opportunity to buy back and not only to acquire the towers back, but also to leverage from the talent that has been built by the IHS teams. And for that, we believe there is a huge amount of synergies that's already identified, and we are preparing ourselves from day 1 to have the right team directly responsible to drive all those synergies. And I know there is a question in your mind that what are the benefits? And here, when we talk about the benefit, it's not only the benefit for MTN because I want to speak the Tower Co language, we have customers. MTN is one of the customers. And the benefits are a lot. Giving some examples vary from operational to strategic. Examples, if we have on average 1.5 tenancy ratio at this stage, that means there are operationally multiple teams, multiple vendors are really accessing the same site for maintenance. That's a basic opportunity where there is an opportunity to optimize from security, passive infrastructure, generators, batteries, ending up with the active maintenance, all those together. And many times, we find the same vendor, the same team is being contracted more than one time. That's operationally. Another also example of other opportunities, we speak about the scale of combined procurement advantages. Another example we see is the -- currently, there is no incentive enough for the Tower Co's to work on the direct cost pass-through when it comes to the power, because at the end, the telcos or the customers are paying the bill. In our approach here, there is much more stronger incentives for us to invest in alternative energies that can create an additional factor to reduce the cost and create much more reliable infrastructure for the future. And many and many examples, ending with another example, the site by itself in many of our footprints are equipped with generators and batteries, but only feeding into the sites, and feeding in a fragmented way to the active equipment. So there is another also opportunity to start thinking about the Power as a Service as another strategic opportunity that can be added on the top of the Tower Co business. And finally, we took a bold step recently to go beyond than just the traditional pillars to start thinking what can we do on the top of our network, leveraging the AI evolutions. We decided to invest in ODC along with other international players to bring solutions that can be hosted at the network edge by simply proposing and installing GPUs, cost of resolution can run workloads that can really address the enterprise needs. And again, this is a unique opportunity for our enterprise teams under Selorm to monetize and create new revenue streams, leveraging the existing infrastructure that's currently only connecting customers, but becoming a pool to generate additional revenue by hosting AI workloads on the top of the network. So our ambition by 2030, it's really going to be governed by several factors. A few of them are on the screens. On the non-financial side, our aim with the plan to triple our fibre footprint to double our subsea capacity to build as a Phase 1 scalable demand and that demand we can see is going to grow driven in relation to the demand we can see, connecting, providing capacity internal and as well for the Pan-African demand that we can see and as well for the hyperscalers who are looking as well to come and expand their own services across the continent. Financially, again, our aim is to grow the digital structure revenue on average of 7% to 10% with margins vary between 50% to 55%. And to recap, all the information that I have just shared with you are summarized in 5 statements. One, we are building a differentiated integrated open access platforms. There are many players on the continents are playing in different ways, but there are very few that have that integrated proposition or structure in place. And MTN is one of them, and we are at the leading edge. Our pan-African fibre infrastructure is going to continue to deliver scalable capacity and resilience and will continue to be a demand-led model, leveraging all the partnership that we already put and all the consortium that we are participating in. Our greenfield data strategy is well positioned to capture the ongoing demand and scalable enough to go beyond than just the capacity that I have shown on the previous slide in multiple markets, starting from the markets we already exist and we see high demand. And number four, our Tower Co approach in terms of owning back these assets create significant amount of economics, efficiencies and value to the overall consolidated business of MTN Group and for our customers as well who are benefiting from the infrastructure leveraging the open access model. And finally, our bold investments in AI RAN speak to the fact that we are continuing to play a leadership role in bringing the latest cost-effective technologies and hosted at the edge level to present a strong business case for our enterprise business to run additional services on the top of our active equipment. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attention and looking forward for the Q&A.

Thank you, Mazen. So we've had 3 gentlemen on the floor this morning who were very excited, and they highlighted that at the outline of their presentations. And there are some very exciting questions to match that excitement that you showed on stage. So gentlemen, if I can have you on stage, Mazen, please can you join us, Serigne and yourself,Selorm. And just to mention, there are quite a lot of questions that have come through, not just online, but I can imagine in the room as well, people wanting to engage. So in the interest of time, I'm going to try and manage it as best as I can. So online, I'm going to take 2 questions and in the room, I'm going to take 2. But I do want to mention that this is not the only opportunity you have to be able to engage with the leaders you're going to see here. There are different parts of the program where we will again open the floor for that Q&A engagement as well as during the networking session. So we have not forgotten about you. So I do see -- do we have microphones? -- wave at me. There we go. I can see you. Okay. Perfect. So let me take 2 questions. I'm going to take one on this side and one on this side, and then I'm going to take the 2 questions online. So if you have a question, please raise your hand, give me your name and the organization that you're representing and then fire off your questions. So do you have any questions in the room? -- handing okay. We've got a question over there. I'll try and get a mic over to you.

From Standard Bank. Just a question for Serigne on fintech. I just would like to better understand your strategy with Alibaba in Nigeria. Are you looking to become more of a Neobank similar to some of your competitors like OPay and Palmpay in the market?

Should I answer now?

Yes.

Thank you very much for the question. So I think there is front between Neobank fintech is narrowing more and more. So -- and I think for us, the most important is what services are we going to provide to our customers to fulfill the needs of demand that we have in Nigeria. And in Nigeria, actually, we have a banking license, which is called a PSB license. But as I explained in my presentation, we are seeing some gaps. So we're going to do lending today directly. We're going to participate into international remittance directly, and there are some other many services that we're going to do. So we are in the process of augmenting our license to be able to provide those services that become an ecosystem of services for our customers. And I mean, OPay and others, I'm not sure if they're positioning themselves as Neobank, but what is sure is that they are proposing services that are aggregated through a super app that we are going to provide to our customers. But we think that the platform we have will be having a much better way of proposing it to our customers and also taking into account the deeper ecosystem we already have in Nigeria with MTN Nigeria, we think that those together will help us to be better positioned in that market.

Okay. So while the microphone finds its way across the room, so I do see you. I'm going to take a question online, and I'm going to read it. And in between the 3 of you can decide who wants to answer that. And the question is as follows. What is the plan for transitioning away from 2G, 3G if you have to take a view? Do you think MTN Group will be able to move on to 4G, 5G only by 2030? There we go. I'm hoping you might get a grandmother anecdote. Let's see how it goes.

No, no grandmother anecdotes. No, thank you. No. So there are a couple of things. I mean, thanks for the question and quite an interesting one, and I still tended to get Charles to join me on stage. So the way we think about our network infrastructure today, I mean, 2G is still a technology that we see as quite relevant into the future. There are different types of services that continue to run on 2G. Obviously, from a consumer standpoint, that's becoming less and less relevant. But from a regulatory standpoint, 2G does have some legacy and some residual value that we're trying to preserve. 3G on the other hand, has an economic equation that's not very promising for us. So the focus today for us is really on 3G shutdown, and we have identified a number of markets that we're trying to work through to try to migrate that agree with regulators to put in place a plan for 3G shutdown. We should have quite a robust plan between now and 2030 to shut down some of our 3G networks, but there's a lot of work that's required on the regulatory side. From a technology and commercial basis, we actually do have readiness in some of our markets. But from a regulatory standpoint, that's not necessarily in place. The final piece of that is a device compatibility where we need to shift the final the final legacy of our 3G devices onto 4G and then we can free up that space. We can also leverage the spectrum much better in markets where we have the ability to leverage spectrum across different bands or neutrality to give us a lot more benefits on the technology side and to drive 4G usage. So that's absolutely part of the plan, but there are some limitations we need to work through.

All right. So you have the microphone. Please give us your name and organization.

The name is Sunil Varghese from the PIC. Just a point of clarification on your announcement with Alipay and [indiscernible] can you clarify, can you use the Alipay on your USD platform? Or do you need to have a smartphone? And then if it is the latter, how does one differentiate from a Google Pay or Apple Pay, et cetera, and wouldn't be better to have a more of an open access?

Thank you for the question. So we use -- we -- with our Alipay platform that the way we are deploying it, it is why also I talked about augmenting the team. So we are taking the best of Alipay platform, but we are adapting it to our markets. So in our markets, USSD is still relevant. So for example, what we are launching in Nigeria, we'll be offering the app channel, but also still the USSD channel. So the USSD customers will be able to get access to services through USSD, but we will be pushing, as I said, for everyone who has a smartphone to engage with us using the app. But to answer to your question, it allow USSD channels.

Okay. Mazen, I'm going to take an online question. This might be for you. So the question is, given how the IHS deal is likely to be structured, what benefits the -- what are the benefits of the Opcos are going to get post deal? And is the operating leases likely to be amended to, let's say, local FX based? If not, why not?

Thank you very much. And again, this is subject to the approvals that we are currently working with the different stakeholders. So when we say Opcos here, again, I need to repeat the approach that we're taking that this transaction will be run independently to create equivalent room for quality services to all the existing customers, including MTN and others. So the same amount of benefit that is going to apply for a customer 1 will apply to the customer 2. And example of those benefits, I think I spoke about some of them and the biggest opportunity there is to accelerate the process to find alternative or infuse the infrastructure with alternative energy supply that can really speak directly to the direct cost pass-through to the customers. Another also angle, which is more on the operational side on how we can really combine and consolidate and optimize some of the operational activities on the site through -- by looking at the different players who are really operationally involved in the maintenance of the sites. Another example is how can we really bring an opportunity for the existing active equipment on the site to allow active sharing where we can enable much more pool of revenue monetization for the existing customers. So this is a few examples. But as I said in my presentation, there is more than 12 -- we have identified more than 12 different distinctive value unlock opportunities, and we are well positioned to kick them immediately. We have the approvals and many of them has direct impact benefits to the end customer or to the customers.

Okay. So in the interest of time, can I squeeze in one last question? I know I'm standing between you and lunch, but I'm just going to squeeze in one last question just for this section. If there are any other questions that pop up, we'll get through them throughout the day.

Thank you very much. I'm very conscious of the last question just before lunch. This is [ Hassnain wariwala ] from Absa. In the presentations today, both in fintech as well as on digital infrastructure, you did speak about introducing new partners, financial partners into both those businesses. I'm presuming that's both for technology as well as risk sharing as well as financing. Is that a first step towards MTN considering actually separately listing these businesses, the fintech and the digital infrastructure business as some of your competitors have chosen to do?

This is a shareholder,. I think the team have been well trained. No, look, I mean, I think the thing that's driven our thinking is -- the connectivity business, we can fund that growth completely from operating cash flows and the mix of debt that we may have in the market. So that does not require really any third parties. This is how we're going to connect the homes and all of that. I think on the other 2 platforms, I think on fintech, we already said that we're open to minority shareholding all the way up to 30%. On the digital infra, it's CapEx heavy. It's capital heavy. So you've heard the framing of Phase 1 of Data Centres, 80 million to 150 million. We'll be a minority shareholder in that business as an example. So we're looking for capability as well as capital within our finite envelope. So you can quite see in those numbers, we will be a minority -- so the issue of listing is not something that's front and center for us. I mean, obviously, we're watching it. We think the real important thing is to capture the opportunities that we're speaking about right now. And then if we ever -- it becomes the right thing to do, we would look at it at that particular point in time. We have listed businesses before. Listing businesses is not a panacea to value unlock. So what is more important for us is to capture the value. And if it's captured within MTN, I'm sure many of you will say that's good enough. So we are not driven by deadlines of we must now IPO a particular I mean we're still doing the structural separations. We want to mature the business. We want to capture the value, and you might even do it prematurely. So we want to be super clear. That is not our intent. These things may happen in time to come, but we're not driven by IPO time lines.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for your time. Let's give them a round of applause. Fantastic. So we're going to take a 40-minute lunch break, and we're going to reconvene back here at 13:10, that is Ten Past One, and that also includes those who are watching us online, and we'll see shortly. Thank you.