Ooredoo Q.P.S.C. (ORDS) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Sorry, I think we're experiencing a bit of issues with the sound with Andreas. Hopefully, it will be resolved in the next few seconds.

[Foreign Language] Apologies for the slight delay at the start. We're just sorting out some echo issues here, but I hope we are good to go now, and you all can hear me. Great, thank you very much. So welcome to the Ooredoo Financial Year 2021 Investor Call. My name is Andreas Goldau, I'm in charge of Investor Relations, and it's a pleasure welcoming you together with my colleagues. Let me start by introducing our panel. We are joined by our Managing Director, Aziz Ahmad Fakhroo, who we all know from the previous calls; and we also have Sheikh Mohammed Al Thani with us, deputy CEO and CEO of Ooredoo Qatar; our Group Chief Financial Officer Abdulla Al-Zaman; and Rene Werner, our Chief Strategy Officer. All the bios are in the deck. We are also joined by a new colleague in the Investor Relations team. I'm pleased to have met Ahmed [ El-Hennawy ] with us who joined us from our Treasury team. As usual, Aziz will start the presentation with the consolidated results. He will mention some highlights of the year, and he will discuss the Indonesian merger, as well as the outlook and the guidance for 2022. And then we move into the opco section. Sheikh Mohammed will start with Qatar, Kuwait, Tunisia and Algeria; and then Abdulla will cover the remaining 4 opcos. And as always, at the end, we will leave ample time for your questions. This session is being recorded. So by joining, you agree to the transcription and the recording as well. And I would also like to remind you on the legal disclaimer with regards to any forward-looking statements on Slide #2. So to begin, I now hand over to Aziz. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us, and we're actually extremely pleased to present the sense of result. We've had a very strong year. If I can have the first slide, please. What you have seen probably already in our release is that we've managed to grow our revenues by 4% year-on-year to QAR 30 billion. That's actually excluding FX, is a 7% growth at the top line. If we look at the EBITDA level, we've increased our EBITDA margin for the full year from 42% to 44%, taking at EBITDA at QAR 13.1 billion. This is a 7% growth of EBITDA for the year and 11% growth if we exclude the effects of FX. One of our strongest performance and a reversal of previous trend is for -- since -- for the first time since 2017, we've actually significantly improved our free cash flows. That's an extreme performance where we've increased our free cash flows by up to 30%. And I think this is a true statement to the group-wide transformation initiative. we started at the beginning of the year. I'll touch a bit more on this. For the net profit, our net profit actually for 2021 is of -- attributable to shareholders is only up QAR 47 million. If you adjust this for non -- if you adjust this for all one-offs and noncash impairments, this is mainly driven, if you remember, we took a big impairment in the Q2 for our Myanmar operation. Our actual normalized net profit has grown 61% for the year. This is also allowing us to increase our dividend yield per share by 20%, taking up from AED 25 to AED 30 per share. We've also achieved significant milestones, which we announced, which were quite aggressive. One was the disposal of the tower sales remaining of our towers in Indonesia. And more importantly, we've actually completed and closed the merger with CK Hutchison, creating changing Indosat CK Hutchison Ooredoo as a very strong #2 player. Can I have the next slide? So as I touched on, these strong results were driven by 5 core pillars, which we embark on, which were at the center of our strategy this year, and will be -- well, in 2021 and is still the core focus of our strategy for 2022. One is excellence in consumer experience. We've embarked in a strategy of being first, a data leader in every single market we operate. We've been ramping up 5G across most of our markets. 4G coverage has been extended in Algeria and Iraq. And we've won across different markets as -- multiple awards for the fastest network. But it's not just about network and being a data leader. We're really trying to be the operator of choice for our consumers by enhancing the customer experience. We've focused a lot during the year on strengthening the core, the basic of our operation, and you've seen this in our result. This has been led by program transformation program we call internally Braveheart. And this has yielded the results you've seen. Focus on top line growth initiative, focus on operating cost initiative and as you'll see, also focus on CapEx rationalization. None of this would have been possible without a focus on our people. We want Ooredoo to be an employer of choice. We've actually pioneered certain work environment as such, we were the first employer in Qatar to open up work-from-home freely for the year. We won the award of Best Place to Work in 2021. We've also strengthened and enhanced our management team. We've done quite -- at the group level, if you look at our CXOs, we've promoted a lot of people internally into senior position, but we also were able to hire and attract senior talent at the group level. We've -- also embarking in what we call a smart telco, so it's evolving beyond the core and the peripheries. And there, we have seen extremely strong performance. We had more than 20% jumps in our net revenue from digital services. We've signed a number of significant agreements, digital partnership with fintechs, Visa, MasterCard, but as well with major players such as Google, Microsoft and also in the gaming space. And the last point is we're still focusing -- we focused, delivered and continue focusing on rationalizing our portfolio. And this is consolidating our position in Indonesia, disposing of our tower sales -- of our -- remaining of our portfolio of tower in Indonesia and going forward, looking at the Tower Co. initiative and other initiatives to rationalize our portfolio. Next slide. So I think this is one of the landmark transactions for the year. It's the Ooredoo Indosat and CK Hutchinson 3-merger. This has created, as we've heard before, a strong number 2 player in Indonesia. We went from probably 17% to 18% revenue market share to 25% to 27% revenue market share on a combined basis. It's a transaction with an enterprise value of $6 billion, which should yield tremendous value for our shareholders. I think the belief in it was the resounding confirmation at the AGM for validating this transaction in Indonesia where 98% of shareholders voted for this transaction. We're looking at run rate pretax synergies of close to $300 million to $400 million per year to be realized from year 3 to year 5. Next slide, please. This is a very strong impact. As we said, we also believe that IOH will benefit from a number of things. One is the commitment from 2 very strong shareholders, anchor shareholders. Ooredoo group on 1 side which operates in 10 countries, and CK Hutchison which is also a very strong telecom operator across Europe and Asia. The combination of -- both of the strengths that these shareholders can only benefit CK Hutchinson. Actually, in the first months of the completed merger, so in the month of January, the working environment and the way the teams have been working and delivering is actually exceptional. We also believe that this will bring a lot of value to our shareholder. As I mentioned, $300 million to $400 million run rate synergies from year 3 going forward. And this comes from optimizing our network, rationalizing our network, we estimate close to 25% of duplicate sites that can be rationalized, rationalizing also our spectrum, which will enhance the consumer experience and also the scale. We're looking at more than 100 million subscribers on a combined basis, and this gives us tremendous scale. As mentioned, we were able to close and have all the regulatory approval of this transaction on January 4 of this year, and now it operates as a combined entity. Next slide. So the numbers in a bit more detail. What you've seen is we're close to 30 billion in terms of revenue for 2021. That compares to 28.8 billion in 2020. It's a 4% jump in revenue. And if you adjust it for FX, it's actually a 7% jump. We've been consistent quarter-on-quarter with that growth. As you see, Q4 is very consistent. On the EBITDA, we've been slowly improving our EBITDA margin. What you've seen for the year is an 8% growth in EBITDA from QAR 12 billion to nearly QAR 13.1 billion. That's a very significant jump. Actually, if you remove the effect of FX, we're close to 11% growth in EBITDA. Q4 was actually a very strong month where we've seen significant improvement where we're nearly 11%. This has been driven by increase in profitability across nearly all our markets, except Oman. Next slide. Net profit, as explained, as you know, we had a series impairments this year. These were noncash events, but significant one-offs. The biggest was the impairment where we took a full provision for -- a full impairment for our Myanmar operation given the circumstances in the country. That means that our net profit attributable to shareholders actually dropped by 96% year-on-year. But if we normalize it and remove these one-off effects, which is on one side, the impairment of Myanmar and on the other side, the sale of the -- the proceeds from the sales of the towers in Indonesia, which is QAR 1 billion to the group, we actually see a significant improvement in the profitability jumping to 61%. Next slide, CapEx. So in CapEx, again, I think this is the fruit of the Braveheart program. We've been driving much more CapEx efficiency. What we've seen is an overall drop in CapEx utilization by 16% for 2021. And in Q4, it's slightly more pronounced. It's 20%, but that's due to -- 23%. It's due to its the cyclical nature. This translates in a significant uplift in free cash flows. As mentioned before, our free cash flows have jumped by 30% year-on-year from QAR 6.2 billion to QAR 8.2 billion. A big part of that is CapEx enhancements, which nearly account for half of this free cash flow enhancements. But the other half of the free cash flow enhancements is actually driven by the EBITDA uplift of 8%. We're extremely proud of this performance. Next slide. Our total customer base has slowly and truly been growing. We've gained 1% to 121 million subscribers. This is mainly driven through Indonesia, Iraq, Algeria, Qatar, Oman, Maldives. We've had strong momentum across all our markets. Next slide, please. Net debt, in line with the Board guidance and given the free cash flow generation, we've seen that now our net debt ratio is actually at the bottom of the range given by our Board of 1.5x, and this is far below all the bank covenants. This is a drop of net debt to EBITDA of 6% for the year. Next slide. Now in terms of guidance for next year, at the back of this very strong performance, what you'll see, first of all, is as the pro forma numbers are actually adjusted for the deconsolidation of Indosat. As you know, Indosat will now be considered as a joint venture as its joint control with CK Hutch. We're looking at -- on a pro forma basis at the revenue of nearly QAR 22 billion, excluding Indosat. That's -- and with a guidance of 2% plus or minus. EBITDA, a guidance of 9.2 billion pro forma for the year, excluding Indosat and a guidance of minus 3% to 1%. And CapEx, what we're looking as just as a comparison, if in 2021, we did a pro forma of 3.1%. We're looking at a slight reduction in CapEx to QAR 2.75 billion to QAR 3.25 billion. Next slide. I'll now hand over to Sheikh Mohammed for the operational review.

Thank you, Aziz. Now we can start with Qatar. Ooredoo Qatar maintained its position as a leading operator in both market share infrastructure with the fixed-mobile network. The business of Qatar contributed to the growth of the group, with a revenue increase of 6% to 7.5 billion, a healthy margin EBITDA level. From a growth perspective, Ooredoo Qatar, the main contributor for that growth in revenue coming from postpaid, Ooredoo TV, B2B revenue, mobile financial services, which is part of our digital service. Also from digital strategy, we have been through e-gaming, and we have been proud to announce a major partnership during the year with Quest. It is the first and largest Qatar company, specializing in the e-sports and e-gaming, branded as Ooredoo Nation Gamers' Land. Additionally also, we launched a different portfolio of products and one of those successful product and service is called the Aamali, and that's enabled us for a small business to customer their services, voice data, et cetera. In September, also, we've been very proud to announce a partnership with F1. And recently, also Ooredoo Qatar has been recognized as a Microsoft's Qatar Partner of the Year and for MoneyGram's Partner for the Decade. If we move to the next slide of Kuwait. From Kuwait market, COVID-19 has an impact and continued that negative impact on the economy. And we have expected a pressure on our revenue to that pandemic from low pricing and economic, let's say, slowdown. Also there have been lockdown on and off, which affected also the business itself. However, Ooredoo Kuwait stayed resilient and reported slight revenue increase of 2% with also enhanced EBITDA margin and absolute value from EBITDA margin from 25% to 29%. Customer base reached 2.5 million as the company also continued its deployment of its 5G rollout and strategy. A testament to our commitment also to our customers through providing the world-class service. Ooredoo has been -- Ooredoo Kuwait has been reorganized as the fastest network in Kuwait by a leading independent research company. If we move to Algeria. Algeria company or our [ Ookla ] Algeria showing a slow recovery despite the continued depreciation of Algerian dinar with -- which was depreciated 7%. Our revenues stood flat at QAR 2.3 billion. Local currency revenue increased by 8%. Driven by company focus also in efficiency, cost optimization, they have really increased their EBITDA margin by 6%, and it was a quite healthy of 35% EBITDA margin. Customer base also increased by 2% to 12.8 million customers. Part of our [ 2022 ] strategy from the group, Ooredoo Algeria has launched their app, which is -- it's Yooz, that -- which is a prepaid digital offer targeting for Yooz segment. There has been quite successful downloads and also subscribers. If we move to Tunisia, next slide, please. Ooredoo Tunis reported also a good result despite a COVID-19 impact and some turbulence from the politics and political situation there. Our revenue increased by 7% compared to 2020. EBITDA has decreased by 4% due to some transformation initiatives, which is part of our transformation journey and global [ effort ]. Customer base also decreased to 6.9 million. That's due to a change in the prepaid definition from customer life cycle of [ what ] it is. And the [ methodology ] is not only restricted to Ooredoo Tunis, but applied across all the mobile operators in Tunisia. So customer number by that, regardless or regarding this -- across all the mobile operators, if we take that away, our customer number increased by 12% year-on-year. I will hand over now to our group CFO, Abdulla.

Good afternoon, and thank you for being here today. I'll be covering Indosat, and Iraq and finally, Myanmar. From Indosat perspective, Indosat Ooredoo continued to deliver a stronger growth reporting 14% increase of revenue to reach QAR 7.9 billion. And EBITDA also increased by 22% to QAR 3.9 billion, and this is mainly driven by solid topline growth and cost optimization. Healthy customer base growth by 6% approximately. The good things in 2021, we have done a launch of 5G in several cities, one of them, for example, Solo and Jakarta. And also, we've been utilizing the LTI -- LTE 4G. Ooredoo and CK Hutchison, as you are aware, have approved the merger by January 2021 -- 2022, actually, creating a strong #2 telco operator in the market. This is -- will have -- this will be a very good, I would say, a merger that will position Ooredoo and Hutch in #2 in the market. Also, I want to remind you that we have concluded a successful tower deal that generated approximately QAR 750 million to the company. Next slide, please, Iraq. Economy was impacted by weakened purchase power following by approximately 20%. Devaluations of the Iraqi dinar affected the (sic) [ affected by ] COVID -- and by effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, we see a decline in QR as obvious, you see it. But in the local currency, we see revenue increasing by approximately 9%. In Iraqi dinar or local currency, EBITDA improved by 13% and EBITDA margin by approximately 46%. Customer base also increased, and there is also a significant increase on the consumption of the data after Asiacell extended its 4G coverage to approximately 90% of the cities. Next slide, please. Oman have [ been ] impacted heavily with (sic) [ by the ] COVID-19 pandemic, which has impacted, overall, their macroeconomics. And this is -- we can see it obviously on the prepaid revenue which has been also offset by the postpaid revenue costs. EBITDA for the period decreased by 10%, mainly due to lower prepaid revenue, as I mentioned earlier. And EBITDA margin stood at 52% level. The third mobile network, which is Vodafone, has launched during the quarter 4 of 2021, which is impacting overall telecom in Oman. There is also further 5G rollout in Oman. And in October, Northern Oman was also hit by a tropical cyclone which has impacted our 400 sites, which has got a recovery within 7 days. This is just for your information. If we can go to the last slide, which is Myanmar, authorities in Myanmar, as you are aware, has pre-claimed a 1-year state emergency in February 2021, which has significantly impacted Ooredoo Myanmar. With the slight [ easing ] of the data restriction and uplifting of the price floor by regulator, business improved in second quarter, I would say, of the year. Ooredoo Myanmar reported 9% decline in revenue to QAR 1,068 million, impacted by FX depreciation. But in local term, revenue was up by 8%. A 20% increase in EBITDA to QAR 376 million supported by cost control. Ooredoo had over 2.7 million monthly active user, and this is a very good sign to us, by December 2021. And the company also launched a new game called Oomanji, on My Ooredoo App, which has been played over by 25 million times since its launch. This is also will be contributing to My Ooredoo App revenue, hopefully, by 2022. Thank you very much.

All right. Thank you very much, Abdulla. If we can move on to the next slide, please? We are very much looking forward to hosting our next Capital Markets Day, and we are now looking at a date in September. At the moment, in Qatar, there is still some COVID-19 related restrictions. From some countries, you would have to stay in a hotel. And I think if we push it out to -- after the summer, we are very much looking forward to seeing you IRL, in real life, without Zoom microphone issues and seeing you face-to-face. That should be great, very much looking forward to that. But yes, now we are coming to the part where we have a Q&A session, and I would like to open up the floor. [Operator Instructions] And Ahmed, my colleague is going to start the Q&A session. You might want to read out the first Q&A question from the chat if you want to.

Hello, everybody. We have a few questions from an anonymous attendee. First question is, what will be your pro forma debt cash for full year 2021, assuming deconsolidation and net leverage guidance for full year 2022 after the consolidation? Second question will be, given the improvement in market share in Indosat this year, which markets resulted in decline in your customer base this year? And what is your strategy in this market? Third question will be how do you plan to manage FX risks and volatility, given it's impacting your EBITDA ultimately? Fourth and final question is do you plan an ESG reporting? Any tangible ESG targets that you are monitoring in your near medium term?

I suggest we take them one by one. Regarding the pro forma debt, and I'll let Abdulla Al-Zaman, our CFO, expand on this. But if we take pro forma debt, our net debt-to-EBITDA ratio, excluding, as a consequence of the deconsolidation of Indosat, is roughly at 1.25x. Abdulla, if you want to expand, please.

Yes, Aziz. Actually, also the leverage in terms of the proceeds that will be received in 2022 will be helpful for us also to improve the leverage on that. This is what we also have highlighted in our presentations that today, our EBITDA level or the debt ratio level is 1.5. And I hope I answered the questions, or if there is any clarification on question number one.

Perfect. Can you repeat question number two, please, Sara?

The second question, again, is given the improvement in market share in Indonesia this year, which markets resulted in decline in your customer base this year? And what's your strategy in these markets?

So we've experienced customer base expansion in nearly most of our markets from Indonesia to Iraq, Algeria, Qatar, Oman, Maldives. In some markets, we've experienced stagnation. We're still focused on every market to become a strong #2 player or #1 depending on -- or consolidate our position as the #1. In certain markets this year, there was a small attrition or stagnation on the customer base. Part of it was due to reduction and the expatriate population of these markets.

And for question number 3, how do you plan to manage FX risk given the impact on your EBITDA -- on the EBITDA. Today, we can -- one of the main market FX risks that we are today observing it's coming from Myanmar. What we see in quarter 4, this is coming to our favorite by positive, I would say, FX impact on us. And hopefully, we are trying to manage this risk by improving the top line in order to offset any -- what's -- any FX impact on us. This is the only thing that currently we can do for certain markets.

We also, just in addition, a couple of points. We also try to have as much as our contracts, especially on the vendor side or on the service side from service providers in local currency, and we also try to have as much as possible leverage at the opco level in local currency. They are the only mitigants we can have against FX. And last point on that on 2022, if you look at our forward-looking assumptions, they seem quite conservative versus the performance we experienced this year, is because we've taken actually a very conservative approach to FX impacts in most of the markets, which have strong volatility.

And on the fourth question for ESG reporting. Do you plan in ESG reporting? Any tangible ESG targets that you are monitoring in near or medium term?

Yes, I'm happy to start on this one. Actually, we published an ESG report already. The first one was published last year, and we are currently in the process of updating that together with our annual report. The next edition will be published at our AGM on the 8th of March. We are planning to focus more on ESG. We're actually working together with a couple of investment banks and are looking into further defining our ESG strategy. But we're already quite active in all areas in the environmental space. We have many programs looking at limiting the use of environmental emissions and reducing energy consumption. We're using more lithium batteries. We connect more base stations to the grid and the various other initiatives. In the social space, Ooredoo is very active sponsoring incorporating with various ministries offering certain products for minorities, working heavily on reducing digital divide, has been very active in supporting disaster zones with recovery support. And on the governance side, we actually have an award-winning governance team and a very transparent disclosure when it comes to decision processes, governance process and various committees in place, risk committees and so on.

Thank you, Andreas. We have another question from [ Syed Al Thani ]. He's asking why is the dividend payout at the lower end of the range and close to 30% of normalized EPS? Why the [ DPS ] increased, plus 20% year-on-year, lagging the normalized EPS growth 60% plus year-on-year. You are already at the lowest end leverage target, net debt-to-EBITDA at 1.5. Any M&A plans or heavy investments in the pipeline, EX, CapEx and target given?

So we've increased -- as you've highly noted, we've increased the dividends per share by 20%. We are at the -- we are 40% normalized earnings per share. And this exclude the effects of -- the effect of FX. At the same time, we're at a very -- as you highly noted, we're at the low end of our debt threshold. We're still holding cash. As you know, we're embarking on the strategy of creating a Tower Co.. This might require some investments on our side given some -- one, the friction cost. But also, we have minority shareholders in a lot of our operations which might need to be taken out. We also reserve some of our cash to further invest and expand in strong areas of growth, which we see important for the group, which are [ ancillary ] areas, whether it's data center strategy and also ancillary services in what we call the smart telco realm.

Thank you very much, Aziz. We have another question from Jonathan Milan. It's a multilayer question, so I'm going to be breaking it down in 2 parts. The first part of this question is what you receive payment from Hutch of USD 387 million, do you plan on paying a special dividend, especially since your net debt to EBITDA is very low, and your cash flow generation is very strong?

So the proceeds will come in Q1 of this year. We currently have no plans, no immediate use of proceeds. We're looking at different strategy, what would be the best use of proceeds for this. And to the event, we do a dividend, we'll announce it. But right now this would take a Board resolution. And at this time, there is no plan for it.

Okay. Jonathan's second question is, should we expect the dividend to grow stronger going forward because your net debt to EBITDA is now very low versus regional and global players, and cash flow generation is strong? You can thus pay at the higher end of your dividend policy range.

We retain our guidance to be between 40% to 60% for the -- for looking forward, it will depend on the performance, we're confident in our performance. But we'll revisit this question toward the same time next year.

And the third question is, are you looking into acquisitions in new countries?

For the time being, we have no acquisitions in plan or are announced.

And his final question is why do you have so much cash on the balance sheet? Why don't use some of that to settle outstanding debt?

We are -- it's a bit conflicting. You're asking why is our debt so low? And why do we have so much cash? And why don't we reduce outstanding debt? We're constantly looking at optimizing our debt profile and also reducing our debt servicing costs. So to the extent there's a negative carry between our cash and the debt position, we'll redeem -- to the extent it's possible, redeem positions of that if we don't have better use for the cash.

Thank you, Aziz. And moving on, we have another question from Vikram, this -- he's asking, are you planning to pay a special dividend from the stake sale in Indonesia?

I think we've already covered this question earlier.

Yes. Moving on to a question from [indiscernible]. What is the rationale behind the dividend increase? And how does management look at dividends moving forward?

Again, I think we've covered this question quite extensively. Dividend increase is driven by the increase in performance and the normalized net profit target. We always had a guidance of 40% to 60% payout ratio, and we're sticking to this target.

Thank you, Aziz. [Operator Instructions]

I think we have 1 question from an anonymous investor there asking about if we are looking actively at M&A opportunities in any of our existing markets. So maybe that's a question for our Chief Strategy Officer, Rene.

In general, as a comment, we always look -- we remain open to any M&A opportunities to the extent they are value accretive to our shareholders and to our businesses. Currently, we have no M&A announcement and no position there.

Great, very clear. Thank you very much. I don't see any more questions at the moment. And as Ahmed said, you can still type or raise your hand virtually. All right. If there are no further questions, then I would like to thank you all for joining this session. Please refer to the Ooredoo Investor Relations site where you can see the investor presentation and follow us on Twitter and feel free to contact the Investor Relations team for any follow-up information.

I saw a hand raised.

Oh, sorry. Yes.

This is Madhi. I have a few questions. Thanks for taking them. Firstly, I just wanted to understand the competitive landscape in Algeria. I understand [ GG ] is right now facing some shareholder action, right? So are you on probably looking to use the production there? Have you seen any change in the behavior from [ GG ] in the markets -- marketplace, more aggressive? Less aggressive? And in that respect, how do you see your outlook for the next year or so in the market? That's the first question. I have 3 more. We'll do one by one, I think.

Okay, I can take that. So from Algeria perspective, as explained earlier, there has been a slight recovery. There is no major, I want to say, change on the competitiveness of the market. However, our Ooredoo Algeria management remain resilient during this situation with the macroeconomy also from COVID-19 as well as what the change happened from the competition. However, there is no major shifts. The market's still competitive, and we have seen a sales recovery from Ooredoo Algeria because of the transformation journey that they have taken alongside the group initiatives and program that we're having, as well as being efficient on their cost initiatives they have been delivered. From digital also, they have been quite successful of also launching some digital applications for BP, which we also see that there has been good uptake on this offer, but it's still our journey to go ahead with that under the umbrella of the strategy of Ooredoo Group.

Great. So second question I have is on the strategy in Indonesia. Post merger, how should we see the commercial strategy of the business? I understand that historically, you have had a few changes from volume, to value, back to volume. So where we are now in terms of commercial strategy in the market? And just trying to also understand the general control of the business, because now you have joint control with Hutch. So how would the day-to-day operation -- how much influence Ooredoo will have on those things? And then if, briefly, you would also talk about your network strength in terms of number of towers, population coverage together with the Hutch compared to the market leader, Telkomsel.

So maybe in terms of governance for Indonesia, we've spent a lot of time in the shareholder agreement. And if you recall, we actually delayed the announcement of the merger to actually fine-tune the governance of the structure. As you highly noted, joint control is not always the most evident and could be disruptive if not planned and thought through carefully. Actually, what I can tell you is, as the month of February, we've now been operating as a joint control company for close to 1.5 months. The business is operating extremely seamlessly. The teams on the different sides of the business rules have been attributed between each function, depending on who was more efficient in each opco. We're currently enjoying quite a good cooperation and integration. At the working level, it's going very well. In terms of alignment of interest between both shareholders, Hutch and ourselves we're extremely aligned in terms of the performance we want to see out of the business, and also the fact that we want to see the realization of the synergies. One of the reasons of having joint control was to ensure that no one got paid in advance for the synergies, and therefore, there was a dis-alignment of interest at the shareholder level. In terms of commercial strategy, we can't comment too much on it for competitive reasons. We now have 2 very strong brands with different positioning. We have Indosat, which is more a high-end brand, and CK Hutch, which is more a youth brand, and these are extremely complementary in terms of market targeting.

And if you would talk about the network strength compared to the market leader, population coverage, if some statistics is available there.

Someone can take it. I know a high level, the combination of our spectrum, in terms of both entity, gives us one of the best spectrum coverage in Indonesia. We're probably the leader in the Java region in terms of coverage. Ex-Java, Telkomsel is quite strong. The combination of both networks and of the spectrum enhances this value proposition, but also, there's a lot of synergy coming from the duplication of network and decommissioning of sites.

I mean, I appreciate that because I was indeed thinking about the coverage outside of Java itself, yes. So then my third and fourth question...

Maybe to touch on that, the combined strength and the synergies and the decommissioning of sites between our core networks within Java, because bulk of it comes from Java, gives us additional investing capacity outside Java.

Okay, that's very interesting. And the third and fourth questions are -- should be quite quick. Just wondering about your long-term plans in Myanmar. Do you have plan to -- like, your competition, I think, is planning to exit. So what are your views there? And quickly on the fourth question is about towers. There is a theme right now about tower monetization within GCC as well. So wondering what is your view on that. Is there any tower sales in pipeline at all, monetizations?

So on both sides, we -- I'll start with Myanmar. Myanmar, currently, we have no plan to exit the market. We're managing the operation. It is hard to have a long forward-looking view in Myanmar. We're managing the business to maintain one, its profitability; two its performance to our customers, but also the safety of our employees. As you can imagine, Myanmar has a very dynamic situation given the political situation in the country and also the fluctuation in terms of currency. We've taken quite conservative assumptions in terms of impact of FX, and for instance, for Myanmar going forward, even if we noticed a significant uplift in FX on Q4 from Myanmar. In terms of Tower Co., we've -- this is one of the 5 pillars. If you remember the slides which we call portfolio optimization. We are looking at our full portfolio of tower across the remaining of our footprint. We have close to 22,000 towers across our footprint, ranging from Qatar, Iraq, Algeria, et cetera. We're looking to optimize the situation, we've engaged a process to at least do an internal carve-out. This is a very lengthy process given the different regulatory constraints of each market and some of the markets we operate in are -- have never seen any of these tower sales or carve-outs yet.

Thank you, Aziz. In the meantime, a few more questions came in. Jonathan Milan is asking, would you consider buying back shares since they are so cheap?

No, we're not considering a share buyback. Actually it would create some shareholder value, of course, but at the same time, it will also limit the liquidity of our shares in the local short market, and we're trying to enhance our liquidity versus restrict it.

And it Ankit Bansal is asking, are you planning to make more heavy CapEx into data centers and mobile money related projects?

So as you've seen our guidance in terms of CapEx, we're looking at a CapEx, which is actually slightly reducing for next year. We are putting a focus on our data center's infrastructure. We have, for our own uses, a lot of data centers, which we can enhance the yield and the profitability by actually using them in co-location transaction with hyperscalers. One of the typical example is the partnership we've done with Microsoft and the one we've done in Google and Qatar. We're trying to leverage the group enhance this footprint, these types of partnerships across our footprint. Going to MFS, MFS is an area of strong focus. Again, this is part of the Smart Telco initiative. As you know, we have MFS at different level of new maturities and most of our opcos. In Qatar, we actually have a very successful Ooredoo Money proposition. We represent close to anywhere between 20% -- 17% to 22% of the monthly remittance market. And this is in a very big area of focus for us as we can see strong growth. And at the same time, we see some different markets. We have the GCC market, we are mostly remittance based. And then we have our ex GCC market. If you look at Iraq, Palestine, Algeria and Tunisia, where generally, these are markets which are under-bank-ed -- so have a very -- an MFS is a valuable proposition for these markets.

More questions coming in from Nishit. He is asking, will Myanmar currency impact on ForEx income continue despite the impairments undertaken? And how much is the intercompany dollar loan to Myanmar? And the second question is, what was the reason for EBITDA margin pressure in Qatar in Q4? How is the outlook for full year 2022.

So I'll take the Myanmar, let Sheikh Mohammed to take Qatar. Myanmar, I think we've covered. It's extremely hard today in the current environment to predict fluctuation in the Myanmar currency. We're trying to denominate most of our contracts -- supplier contracts in the local currency to mitigate that risk as much as possible. At the same time, looking forward, we've taken a very conservative assumption in terms of FX for Myanmar. As you'll appreciate, it's hard for us to predict, and it's something we look at on a daily basis. Moving to Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed.

Thank you, Aziz. So regarding the pressure on the EBITDA margin in quarter 4, there has been some costs booked in Q4 due to some transformation projects within the company and part of also a group transformation, as well as there have been some activities in partnership, which includes also, as everyone knows, the Arab Cup, which is part of the FIFA World Cup that we are sponsoring. And this has been booked in Q4, which -- where the period started end of November until a change of December when that event happened.

And just to clarify, by the way, there's no intercompany loan with Myanmar, sorry. I forgot to answer that question.

Ahmad and Aziz, final 2 questions. From [ Douglas ], he's asking, how do you intend to enhance the stock's liquidity in the market?

So we're working well by doing more and more investor outreach, also trying to enhance the appetite for foreign investors for our stock. At the same time, Ooredoo has appointed direct market makers, this is not a new practice, by the way, to enhance the velocity of our share in the local stock market.

And the final question in hand is if you can elaborate on the impact of the third operator in Oman.

I'll take that. So the third operator started in Q4, any strategy for a new entrant for its price war, and we have been quite conscious looking for value creation and not to have any price war. However, there has been aggressive offers in the market when the third operator started. Hopefully, with our innovative and initiatives that we are having from product portfolio that we have and product -- and service that we are having in Ooredoo Oman, we try to minimize any price war. We have seen quite slight, let's say, a recovery of consciousness among the market for the last -- or beginning, let's say, of the year. And hopefully, that healthy sign can continue. We are watching the market closely. We are being honestly conscious of being healthy and we do our best to be innovative and bundling and create innovative products and service for our customers and to stay competitive in the market.

Excellent. I'm afraid we are running out of time now, but I'm glad that we could answer the additional questions. Sorry that I didn't see the raised hands there. So I started bit late, I wanted to finish early, but I'm glad we had this very interactive discussion this time. And I'm looking forward to your further participation in our next event, namely our Q1 results, which are due at the end of April. We have the AGM coming up on the 8th of March and then the Capital Markets Day in September. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feedback, do reach out to the Investor Relations team. And thank you very much, again, for your continued interest in Ooredoo. This concludes our call for today.

Thank you, everyone.