Telkom SA SOC Ltd (TKG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, colleagues and esteemed guests. On behalf of the Telkom executive leadership team, it's my great pleasure to welcome you to our FY 2025 results presentation. Thank you for joining us today as we reflect on our performance over the past year and share the progress we've made in advancing our OneTelkom vision. This gathering is not just about numbers, it's about the people, the purpose and the momentum that continues to drive our transformation. Today, we will hear from our Group Chief Executive Officer, Serame Taukobong; and our Group Chief Financial Officer, Nonkululeko Dlamini, who will take us through the strategic and financial highlights of the year. We will also hear from our leaders across our business units who have played a pivotal role in delivering this performance. To all our speakers and teams behind the scenes, thank you for your commitment and preparation. And to everyone attending, especially our Board members, your presence and engagement appreciated as we look ahead with confidence and renewed focus. Let's begin. Okay. So your standard disclaimer applies to all the results and the presentation today. If you go to just the order of the agenda for the day. As mentioned, our CEO will take us through the strategic overview as well as the key highlights from each of the business units as well. Nonku will take us through what -- how that stacks up and unpack the financial results and also introduce our new guidance. Serame will then close off with the outlook and priorities for the year ahead. Thank you. Over to you, Serame.

Good morning on this rather chilly day. Hopefully, today, I'm not wearing my name, but I shall carry my surname. In 2023, Telkom embarked on a strategy to pursue our vision of serving as the backbone of South Africa's digital future as an InfraCo. Since then, as OneTelkom, we have relentlessly focused on delivering hard results through this clarity of purpose. We reshaped our business to make the most of our strengths. We refocused our leadership and management structures to deliver on our commitments to our shareholders. We set clear goals and key performance indicators for the group and its operating divisions. Today, our 2025 full year results demonstrates that the competent execution of our data-led strategy is meeting and in some instances, exceeding our expectations. And yes, we still have some challenges. Most encouraging is that there is a wave of momentum for Telkom to thrive in this challenging environment in which we operate. We have a good reason to be proud of our results today and are quietly confident about the future. I will start on the journey that we have embarked and are continuing to drive the underlying operations. Firstly, in building on the InfraCo, we started off with, firstly, divesting on our noncore assets. A critical milestone was the execution as to the expectation of the disposal of our towers business in Swiftnet. What is most critical with this exercise was that; one, it demonstrates Telkom's commitment to executing on our strategic imperatives; secondly, contributing significantly to the impact of our balance sheet, which Nonku will touch on in the future shortly. Secondly, we continue to transform our network assets, evolving rapidly from legacy to fiber and equally from voice to data, and I'll touch on later on this as we go through our operational detail. Thirdly, but most critically, is what lies in the engine, which drives our continued operations impact. Firstly, our sales force focusing on efficiency, data-driven, highly efficient sales force, underpinned by continuous network expansion, both in fiber and our mobile network. Thirdly, our disruptive, flexible, tailor-made data-centric propositions from your weakened x propositions right up to tailor-made value propositions for small, medium to high-value customers, all supported by proactive pricing and service. Fourthly, our OneTelkom ways and our OneTelkom way of culture is yielding results. Last but not least, we have the cash to ensure that we are fit for growth. What is pleasing is that all of these have not compromised our commitments to sustainability. We have reduced our fuel usage by 47%, reduced Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 11%. I am particularly proud and passionate of the work that Telkom Foundation continues to have in the societies and the communities that we serve. Nearly 1 million people have been reached with social, digital and educational support. These outcomes reflect our continued commitment to inclusive low-carbon growth. In essence, we now have 3 business units operating with shared purpose and momentum. Telkom Consumer, driving the first thrust. Openserve, strongly entrenching our thrust and fiber; BCX driving the focus on our IT services across the country. I will now look at the highlights. Significant and positive impact in revenue, looking at a 3.3% growth in our top line revenue. EBITDA growing ahead of revenue, a significant improvement in free cash flow by ZAR 2.4 billion and most importantly, returning ZAR 1.3 billion to our shareholders. If we look at the journey, our data-driven strategy is yielding results. A key driver to this positive growth in revenue has been the 9.5% growth in data, resulting in this financial year growth of over ZAR 1.4 billion in revenue, double of what we saw in the previous year. As I mentioned in the previous slide, supporting the double growth in EBITDA. Equally, the continued focus on structural cost improvement showing up not just in EBITDA growth, but as indicated there, the cost-to-income ratio coming down, and Nonku will touch further on this, resulting in the significant improvement in free cash flow coming through from cash generated from operations. So not just a focus on generating revenue, but ensuring that we have continuous improvement on efficiency from our operations. Let us go into the various operations and see how they performed. Starting with Telkom Consumer. The mobile business continues to be the star in the Consumer business. 10 consecutive growth of leading the market. Top line revenue growth in service revenue of 10.2%, unparalleled in the market. Key driver behind that, prepaid over 2.7 million subscribers added to the prepaid base, while successfully maintaining an ARPU of ZAR 60, a significant performance by the team. Equally, continuing to drive data growth aligned to the positive data propositions. Equally impressive, a significant improvement in the EBITDA margin, maintaining the focus of not just driving top line revenue growth, but ensuring that we have operational efficiency as premised by the improvement in the EBITDA margins. Supporting the network growth has been continued investment in our mobile infrastructure. Over 400 4G sites integrated into the network, supporting the strong growth that we see in the mobile network. Equally impressive is that with the growth in the data traffic, we've also seen the continued reduction in the cost of roaming, which has also contributed to the improvement in the EBITDA margin. Coming to Openserve, our fiber business. Revenue holding steady, and what is encouraging in Openserve, we have reached the inflection point. Fiber revenue growing well ahead of the decline in legacy business. Fiber revenue now contributing quite significantly to the top line growth of Openserve. Despite almost a 20% decline in legacy revenue, we have seen a positive improvement in the EBITDA margin of Openserve. There, again, a continued focus in looking at next generation or fiber revenue growth aligned with cost efficiency, which is showing up in the improvement in the EBITDA margin again. The same theme of focusing not just on top line revenue growth, but ensuring that we have a key focus on operational efficiencies across all our BUs. As we saw a market slowdown in the growth of homes passed, Openserve continued to expand our market growth in a more responsible expansion, maintaining our homes connected ratio above 50% and ensuring that as we pass the homes, we ensure that we keep the connectivity rate above 50%. Equal to the expansion and also cost efficiencies is maintaining the highest levels of service quality, premised here by ensuring NPS levels of certainly the highest levels of above 70%. Assurance visits measuring the effectiveness of the fiber expansion. Here again, a decrease in assurance visits indicates the effectiveness of fiber as well as the fact that our average time to install becoming far and far faster, indicating the extreme focus to customer service in the Openserve team. Touching on BCX. BCX has seen a tale of 2 halves. In the first half, the key focus was on the 189 process where the team was looking at, as we indicated to the market, the focus on changing the shape of the organization. What is most pleasing is that; one, post the execution of the 189 process, the follow-up of that was a strategic shift to move from a less reliance on the low-margin, high-cost hardware services and focusing on the higher-margin IT solutions. And in the second half, we saw a positive improvement in the EBITDA margin, almost up to 13%, and that is a good indication of the future of BCX. Equally impressive as well, the intentional focus, once again, applying the OneTelkom principles on slowing down the decline in the Converged Comms business, whereas this year, we saw a 1.4% decline in the Converged Comm business, a mere ZAR 79 million compared to previous years, applying once again our own internal OneTelkom solutions showing that if we apply and when we come together as OneTelkom, we can resolve the challenges that BCX faced, and this is further encouraging in what lies ahead for BCX. In Gyro, the focus not just on ensuring the Swiftnet execution, the speedy disposal of our noncore properties had a significant impact on the profitability of our organization, but equally, the Gyro team driving our key focus on our ESG activities. I will now hand over to Nonku to break down the financial impact. Thank you.

Thank you, Serame, and good morning to everyone in the room, everyone online. Ladies and gentlemen, I'll be taking you through a bit of a detail in relation to the ratios that Serame highlighted in an earlier slide in a bit of detail on how the performance really came together. And I think as you would have noticed in the actual presentation of all the ratios, they are all pointing the positive direction, which has really been the hard work of the operations team in the building. And I would just like to start by thanking everybody that has been operational and making sure that we deliver the results that we are delivering today. And in terms of the financial, just highlights, we did see a great momentum in terms of the underlying financial performance, which talks to what has been highlighted by Serame in each of the operational business units. And that led to a very comfortable level in that our balance sheet right now is robust and is probably investment ready for where we require ourselves to look at opportunities to grow. And we did this through a very focused and intentional smart deployment of capital expenditure. And you would see that we speak about our capital intensity, and how we've utilized all the assets and the infrastructure of OneTelkom. And with that, we saw a very strong conversion of our operations into cash. And we'll talk in detail about that. But also importantly, has been the focus on ensuring that we successfully execute on all the significant projects that we have been driving. And Swiftnet was probably the one big one that was tracked by the markets over a period of time and has actually contributed significantly to what performance we are reporting today. And the focus on exit of noncore properties so that we can focus the business in its core assets and in line with our long-term strategy and the momentum we want to focus on. And indeed, that has then helped in us ensuring that we deliver value to our shareholders, and I'll unpack that a little bit later. Maybe just to start is the guidance that we had given to the market, and we are pleased to give feedback that we have met and exceeded the guidance in some instances. So if we look at the revenue growth, which was the guidance, we actually met that with the 3.3% that we are reporting today. In terms of the EBITDA growth, we exceeded the performance from the guidance we had given and capital expenditure, we stayed within the guidance. And net debt to EBITDA was quite a focus area because we needed to move it to the levels that we are comfortable. And I think for the longest time, we indicated to the markets that we wanted to get well within and below 1.5x, and we have also achieved that. And I think later, we'll then be talking about new guidance in line with where we are and the performance that we are seeing coming through. So just to unpack the details and if you look at our financials that we have released this morning, there is probably 3 elements that we need to unpack. We talk about the total operations. But in there, we've got an element of what we call discontinued operations, which caters for 10 months operations of Swiftnet as we got the effective date of its exit from the Telkom Group as 31st January 2025. So its 10 months performance would be included. But secondly, it is the gain or profit that we made on selling Swiftnet, which is a ZAR 4.4 billion number. And therefore, if you look at the EBITDA in the discontinued operations of ZAR 4.925 billion. There is about ZAR 4.4 billion in terms of the gain we made on the sale of Swiftnet, but also the profits in relation to the operations of Swiftnet as they were part of the business for a 10-month period. But the rest of the presentation, ladies and gentlemen, we'll focus then on the continuing operation as it was highlighted by Serame in terms of the underlying business, which is the continuing operations. And in there, the only thing I would like to highlight is that as part of our focus in exiting noncore properties, there is a profit that we made on exiting some of the properties that we had set aside for development of ZAR 654 million. And in the core of our business, we do exit properties in trying to simplify and consolidate, but probably 2025 had the biggest numbers as we were exiting a significant part of our properties. Now I will focus most of the presentation on continuing operations, and how we delivered the performance we're talking about today. So in the comparison year-on-year to 2024, what we have done here is to take out the Swiftnet operations. In 2024, you would recall that in the profit after tax number we reported, it was ZAR 1.881 billion, and we are today reporting ZAR 1.454 billion because we've excluded Swiftnet last year for comparability. And in the year 2025, we are reporting ZAR 2.7 billion, and that also excludes the 10 months performance of Swiftnet. And therefore, if we look at the delivery on the underlying performance and the continuing operations, we have seen, yes, the 3.3% growth in revenue. And in other income, the ZAR 1.5 billion is including the ZAR 654 million in relation to the properties that I highlighted earlier. But again, we do see that, that is an area that has contributed to the performance. And we have monitored our operating expenses closely, and we have mentioned to the market that we are driving a cost optimization program, and that is to make sure that as we deliver on revenue, we are as optimal as possible. Maybe the last element I would like to just highlight on this slide, the finance charges have also shown an improvement compared to the prior year. And this has been driven by repayment of debts, and we didn't have to refinance as we were able to get cash from the operations. And that is how the overall picture of the operations came together. And if we look at revenue, Serame has touched on it per business unit, but maybe to just highlight that our focus on CapEx and smart deployment has been about making sure that in relation to the data-led strategy, we focus on improvement and growth in the mobile data, which shows 12.3% compared to the prior year as well as the fiber-related data, which has contributed a growth of 10% in the revenue that we are reporting. And yes, in other areas, fairly flat and on the sunset areas, not a significant growth in relation to legacy elements. But our focus is in that 11.6% growth, which is the data-led strategy impact. On the cost management, we have focused indeed in ensuring that we live within inflation levels, and our cost total has grown fairly within inflation. And that has contributed to the adjusted EBITDA number that we are reporting at the top there. But maybe the focus is on the approach of ensuring that we improve the cost through cost optimization while looking for revenue growth opportunities. And what that has done is that from 2023 to 2025, we see a significant improvement in our cost-to-income ratio, which has been driven by the focus on cost optimization, but also growth in -- cost optimization and growth in revenue opportunities. And we are monitoring this bottom-up because each business unit has had to focus and contribute in line with their stature as a business. And therefore, at the bottom there, we are indicating that Openserve, largely, the mobile business and BCX have contributed to the 75.1%. And when we talk about the guidance, we will expand a little bit on how we are taking this forward to ensure that it continues to assist the momentum that we are going to build into the guidance that we'll be giving today. Maybe another view in the EBITDA picture, which talks again to the cost optimization as well as the revenue. We've seen the margin expansion from the levels of 22.2%, and we are reporting today 25.1%. And that is if you don't adjust for some of the one-off costs and a further growth to 26.9% if you take out the one-off costs. So it's been a pleasing improvement in the expansion in terms of our margin. And again, the data-led strategy showing impact and the cost optimization focus in the business. On the next slide, because of the activities that we were focusing on this year, we thought let's just highlight the effective tax rate. What you will see in our financials is an effective tax rate of 19.1% in comparison to the prior year where it was 25.5%. And the driver there really has been some of the significant transaction, and how they are treated for tax versus accounting, and the impact led us to delivering a 19.1% effective tax rate. And that's critical because as you model us forward, some of the ones-off may not repeat and the effective tax rate will then normalize back at some level. And critically, the elements that we are highlighting there is the Swiftnet, which is a significant contributor to the change in calculation as well as some of the sale of properties. So colleagues, and ladies and gentlemen, in conclusion, what we then are sharing with the markets today is a very strong quality of underlying earnings because if we take off the one-off items and the activities of this year, we still see a very significant improvement in our headline earnings per share on continuing operations. And it is quite pleasing to see that growth because it's basically talking to the impact of this data-led strategy and the focus that each of the business units at Telkom has driven. Capital expenditure, we've stayed within the guidance we've given, delivering today 13.3%. But I think importantly is the focus in terms of the return on our investment where we've seen that the return on invested capital over the past 3 years has been improving from the levels of 3.5% to 11%. And just to highlight that the 11% is not using the effective tax rate, but we've taken it back to 27% so that in terms of like-for-like, it represents the normal tax rate impact. If you were to use the effective tax rate, it's even a higher number for this financial year. So this has really been driven by the focus in the operations in fiber, in mobile, and we can see the improvement in the number of homes connected, fiber to the home, and the mobile sites that we have had to integrate over the past year, which indicates our spread and footprint that has delivered the performance. If I move then to the balance sheet picture, we have a number of things to highlight on this slide. Our cash balance is ZAR 11 billion, coming from ZAR 3.7 billion last year. And really, the drivers there is that we received the proceeds from the sale of Swiftnet on the 27th of March. So they -- I incorporated the ZAR 6.6 billion that Serame referred to. But secondly, we also had proceeds from the sale of properties, which have also contributed to a strong cash balance. Secondly, in terms of debt and funding, we were able to repay a total of ZAR 2.6 billion in the year, and we didn't have to refinance. And maybe the last thing to be highlighted with Swiftnet now being external to Telkom, in line with IFRS 16 requirements, we've then built in the lease liabilities in relation to the Swiftnet being external. And what you then see there in the IFRS 16 impact, you see a ZAR 2.9 billion from ZAR 1.7 billion. All that is included there is a total of about ZAR 1.4 billion as we now have to include that and there's an element on the right-of-use asset side. We have also been focusing on cost effectiveness of our debt and our maturity profile is at the level that we are comfortable to deal with over the coming years. But in relation to fixed versus floating, where the markets are and interest rates are, we are quite comfortable that we are better off with more variable than fixed, or rather floating than fixed rate. On the free cash flow, again, just to highlight a few things, the focus was to ensure that we improve the free cash flow, which is basically a conversion of our earnings to cash. And at the bottom there, we do indicate that we're moving from last year reporting ZAR 424 million and this year reporting ZAR 2.8 billion. So the ZAR 2.4 billion has been driven by some of the elements that I have highlighted earlier. Cost optimization has meant that we ensure that we are optimal in how we spend the money. The improvement in revenue has also contributed, but also the interest and finance charges have gone in the right direction with the repayment of debt, even though there is an impact from the reduction in interest and finance charges from the Reserve Bank announcement. But maybe this next slide highlights it a bit better in the waterfall picture where you can see that in terms of the EBITDA that we reported, it is ZAR 11.8 billion. And we take off items of noncash and other items. We see a working capital improvement of ZAR 376 million, and this has been our focus to ensure that we are optimal in inventory management. We collect from our debtors and our customers as efficiently as possible. And this has been a focus and continues to be. And maybe just to highlight is we've managed to cater for the capital expenditure requirements within the operational performance that we are delivering. And therefore, the ZAR 2.7 billion that we are mentioning today is really coming from the operating performance of the business. Now with that performance, ladies and gentlemen, as Serame has indicated, the Board of Telkom reinstated the dividend policy last year. And the policy says we will pay out 30% to 40% of the free cash flow. But it's important that we observe the balance sheet strength so that as we pay the dividend, we are comfortable that it will be sustainable going forward. It's also important that we cater for CapEx requirements, and there may well be future obligations. So the dividend that was declared and approved by the Board of Telkom is 30% of our free cash flow, which translates to an ordinary dividend of ZAR 833 million, a dividend yield of 4.4%. With the Swiftnet conclusion, the Board also took a position to declare a special dividend, which will be a once-off of ZAR 500 million, and that's ZAR 0.98 per share. And therefore, in total, for the year 2025, we are declaring a total of ZAR 1.3 billion in dividend. And important is that the special dividend will be subject to exchange control approvals, which we're going to work through. And therefore, the finalization dates will be driven by that, but we will try as far as possible to work with the normal time lines. In summary, therefore, the Swiftnet impact, as I indicated, its effective date on 31st January 2025, a cash consideration of ZAR 6.6 billion and a gain of ZAR 4.4 billion. When we started with the circular in terms of the Swiftnet, and what we were going to do with the proceeds, we had indicated that we would pay debt to the level of ZAR 5.750 billion, but with the improvement we've seen from the performance, we were able to take a position to only pay debt to the level of ZAR 4.75 billion, which has not happened at year-end, but it is a matter that we've worked with after year-end. So it's a post-balance sheet event that we've paid already to the value of ZAR 4.750 billion. I've mentioned the dividend from the Swiftnet proceeds. And importantly then is, as we had also indicated in the circular, the remainder of the proceeds remain preserved for prudent allocation towards growth in the business. With that, in summary, we are quite comfortable that we've got adequate liquidity. So the ZAR 11 billion that I highlighted earlier in the financials has actually after year-end, been utilized to pay the ZAR 4.75 billion, which creates a headroom as well from the debt perspective to be able to still raise the facilities in future. We've returned ZAR 1.3 billion to the shareholders. And from the committed facility, we've created room for about ZAR 4.8 billion, which allows us in the future business requirements to have availability of ZAR 9.8 billion in a combination of cash and liquidity in the bank and the headroom that we would be able to go and raise from our financial institution community. So before I go to the actual guidance, in terms of the priorities to support our strategy, we will continue to focus on expanding the EBITDA margin, and that will be driven by a focused process in terms of improving operations and keeping or growing on the momentum that we've mentioned today. We will continue with capital deployment in a smart way. And with the good infrastructure that we already have in our business, we are in a good space to build on that. In terms of prudent financial sustainability management, it will continue to be a focus because we do want to keep our balance sheet resilient. We want to ensure we've got flexibility for growth through investments, but also maintain a leverage that is prudent as we move forward. And with that, deliver the shareholder value that is required of us. And lastly, then, if I can just talk to the guidance that we are putting out for the next 3 years, we are still looking at 4 elements. In terms of the revenue growth, the previous period was looking at low to mid. We've changed it to mid-single digit as guidance. And again, it will be driven by all the focus that we will be driving in the business performance. The second one was EBITDA growth, but we've changed it to EBITDA margin. Because that actually keeps us in check in terms of the revenue growth and the cost optimization, and we want to see that margin expanding. And I think in the various conversation we had with the investment community, we spoke about challenging the mobile business to get to 27% by '27, 28% by '28. So that margin will be then delivered the overall group margin will then be delivered by us challenging the mobile business to grow towards 28% by year 2028, Openserve to move towards about 35-65 split and the BCX business towards 12.5%. And again, it's driven by the stature of the businesses they are in. We are keeping the capital intensity at 12% to 15%. And with net debt to EBITDA, we are opening the range between 0.5% to 1.5%. And currently, we are at 0.6%. And that is the guidance that we will be working with for the next 3 years in matters within our control. And yes, if there are any significant changes, we'll then come back to the market and engage. And that is my last slide. And in conclusion, I just would like to thank everyone for the year that was, including the challenge that we received every time we engaged the market to really reflect and relook at ourselves, the Board for the oversight and guidance for us to be able to have the year that we are delivering. But the operations teams, for all the efforts to be here, the finance team that has put together these financial statements and the auditors that have confirmed that these financial statements fairly present. Thank you very much.

As always, Nonku steals the show. In closing, as we go to our outlook and priorities for the year, we talked of our culture. Our shared values foster a united culture. Key to this has been building a culture for execution and innovation. Underpinning this culture has been a strong focus on effective talent management, really driving a key focus on gender and particularly our female talent. Training and development has been key to this. And in driving this testimony and focusing on this particular area, it is a proud day today that we announced the appointment of Beauty Apleni as the new CEO for Openserve effective of 1st July. Beauty brings on board key skills and talent, having been with Telkom for over 25 years, joins an already strong bench in the group ExCo, a team that is strongly aligned and focused to drive OneTelkom. The team that has been key to focusing on passionate execution, relentless focus on maintaining our say-do ratio, ensuring that our focus on execution, particularly on costs, but now critically on the journey ahead on maintaining revenue -- top line revenue growth and also ensuring that the commitments that Nonku and I have made to the market and sustaining continued value for the shareholders remains our North Star. If we look at what we promised to the market, we said we will drive new revenue growth, new generation revenue growth. Nonku touched on cost optimization. We did focus on cash generation, smartly deploying CapEx and maintaining our commitment to our ESG strategy. The key focus for the next 3 years is to build on the momentum that we've driven for the past 3 years and in 2025. We do understand that the markets are rapidly changing. Our response is to leverage our strengths to focus on our infrastructure assets and to capitalize our resources, to continue to grow our full potential as OneTelkom, to drive new revitalized focus on top line revenue growth ahead of inflation and to invest and innovate for growth and efficiency. In closing, we have unrivaled infrastructure, which gives us the results for momentum. We strongly believe that we are the backbone of South Africa's digital infrastructure. We are passionate and relentlessly focused on delivering results. Execution of our data-led strategy remains our key focus. We will maintain the wave of momentum for the growth and return to our shareholders. And as Nonku said, I would like to thank all the OneTelkom team members. This one is for you. Thank you.

Great closing, Mr. CEO. We are now going into the Q&A session. We have questions from the online community through a webcast as well as Chorus Call. But firstly, we're going to focus in the room. I see Louise's hand is up and Nadim's hands are up. Can I ask that they please keep their questions to 2 each for now, and then we'll come back to them.

Congrats on a great set of results. I can attest it has been a strong struggle from the investor community as well to understand some of Telkom's ambitions and delivering on that. I think maybe a few questions on the medium-term guidance. The leverage ratio guidance seems very wide. Are you keeping some powder dry for some potential M&A or some big CapEx injection or spectrum auction because I'd like to see it. I think a fair amount of us would like to see it below 1x. And then on the EBITDA margin expansion per BU, can you maybe unpack on how this exactly will be achieved, the breakdown on the revenue growth per BU and specific cost-saving initiatives that you are targeting to achieve those margins by FY '28?

Nadim?

Should we take Nadim as well, and then we'll field the questions.

And well done on a fantastic set of results. Just -- I'll keep it at 2 for now. On your mobile business, we see -- if my numbers are right, we see an acceleration in Q4 to double-digit growth, both on the mobile data side and the service revenue side. Just hoping you could unpack that. Are you seeing, let's say, an improvement in your competitiveness in the market relative to your peers? Is there anything else driving that like a bit of a weaker base? And then secondly, just in terms of the shape of your CapEx going forward, so that range of 13% to 15%, I mean, when do you expect to see CapEx intensity closer to the 15% mark? In other words, when you start seeing yourself get the upper end your headroom sort of get lower and get to a point where you need to invest more to expand that headroom. I know you've done massive MIMO. I would like to understand how much further it can take you.

Thank you, Louise. So in terms of the -- let me start with the EBITDA growth that we are working with. We've got 3 very different businesses in Telkom. If you look at the Openserve business, the focus has been indeed growing the footprint in terms of the revenue elements and driving the connectivity above 50%, and we are seeing that coming through. So that will be very critical. On the cost elements, probably there's 3 or 4 elements that we would want to mention. It's been a focus on ensuring that we are first as optimized as possible in terms of the footprint in our properties that they are utilizing. We are still getting out of the old exchange approach, and there is still some properties that we think we will exit, but probably not at the level that we are mentioning today, which had an element of investment property. But with those, we will see other costs being impacted positively, whether it's rate and taxes, security costs and all the elements that relates to owning a property or a building. So there is that focus in the Openserve business. If you then look at BCX, it is the focus that is going to be -- again, BCX is in a particular industry, and we've looked at the range at which the industry is operating at. We started a program where we said let's restructure the manpower force of BCX that was part of the year before. But what they've been focusing as well is a very focused and intentional mix of what we call hardware and the service business, which will be part of their strategy to ensure that they drive towards the levels that they are working at. And thirdly, if you look at the mobile business, there is going to be still an intentional focus on growing the revenue. But critically, if you look at the mobile business, it's always been ensured that there's a right balance between roaming costs and using your own sites, and that actually does cause a shift in your cost base. Secondly, it is around the customer base that we bring in as we expand regionally where they have gone and strengthened their vetting processes to ensure that we reduce the risk in relation to the impairment requirements of their customer base, which is a cost if you do not manage that. So there's a number of programs that we'll continue to drive. And I think the last to mention just in general across the business is optimizing on the IT space and Sello has come into the business and is helping us to look through our cost of IT across the business, and that is an area that is going to be a focus in the coming years. So with regards to the leverage, and indeed, we have had a strong debate internally to say what is the right range to look at. We will be very prudent on the expenditure. But it was quite important for us to say, given that we have been looking at coming below 1.5x, we keep at it. And I think Serame will speak about our outlook, and what we are intending to do as a business to continue delivering on our strategy. So yes, it's a bit wide open, but we are going to be very prudent in the utilization. So it does not mean that it goes to 1.5x. We will recklessly go towards the 1.5x range. And if there's a need to narrow it down, we would come back and say, having gone through a period, we think we are comfortable to narrow it further.

So Nadim, I think on the mobile, I won't put Lunga on the spot. It's a function of 2 things. I think it's the continued momentum, particularly in prepaid. As I've said, you saw a good recovery in the second half. Pricing differential maintains that data growth, which is important. I think further to Nonku's point of that bandwidth of the 0.5x to 1.5x CapEx, part of the enablers for that high revenue growth will be us having to invest in capital expenditure, not just for expansion in mobile infrastructure, but also in the fiber. And also, if you look at BCX, for instance, we have traditionally been rather lower end of that investment. So if you're looking to go into higher services such as cloud, et cetera, we're going to need some capital expenditure in the near future for that. So it's really looking at our own. But I think that 13% to 15% range will be dependent on the revenue mix. And I think you saw in Nonku's capital allocation framework, it has to meet the numbers to meet the revenue growth and the EBITDA. So that allows us that ability to self-fund the capital growth. I hope that covers you and Louise as well.

We're now going to check if there are any questions from the Chorus Call.

[Operator Instructions] It seems at the moment, we have no questions from the conference lines.

All right. Thank you, Judith. I'm just checking if there's any other final questions, burning questions. Another burning question, Louise. Okay.

One of my questions that was partly answered was a lot of staff turnover at Openserve. And maybe I think with the appointment of Beauty, I think it's a great hire. But I mean, some of the previous staff at Openserve has ended up at your key competitor. I mean, what has gone wrong or what has not -- what haven't they agreed upon with regards to the group management? Or is there any disagreement? Or if you can maybe touch on the talent retainment at Openserve specifically?

I think if I can comment broadly, we have, as I said, focused our organizational drive on key parameters of revenue growth, operational efficiency and also OneTelkom. And I think in that organizational drive, there will be changes.

I hope that covers you, Louise. I'm sure we're going to continue that conversation later on. I'm just checking for any other questions, and I'm not seeing any in the room. I'm not seeing any online. I think that then means -- yes, you can go to your closing remarks, CEO. Thank you.

Thank you. I think thank you to all the board members here present and to all our shareholders for your continued support. And to the OneTelkom team, today is day 1 of [indiscernible]. Let us continue to deliver as OneTelkom and tomorrow is a bigger day. Thank you.