Thanks. Good morning. It's my great pleasure to welcome you to our Investor Day, celebrating Telecom Argentina's thirtieth anniversary of listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Today is a significant milestone of our company, and we are truly grateful for the presence of our investor community as we celebrate this remarkable journey. We are delighted today to count with the presence of representatives of investment firms, law firms, banks, multilateral agencies, the GSMA, and the Deputy Consul General of Argentina, Mr. Nelson Martin. I would like to extend our special thanks also to our distinguished guest speakers who are joining us today and will be presenting besides Roberto, our CEO, and Gabriel, our CFO.
We are honored to have with us Federico Semeniuk, Director and Economist from Ecolatina, and we also have the privilege of welcoming the Chairman of Argentina's Securities and Exchange Commission, or Comisión Nacional de Valores, as we call it in Argentina, Roberto Silva, who will share his valuable perspectives. Today, we have a well-rounded agenda. First, Federico Semeniuk will present an overview of Argentina's economic outlook. Following that, Roberto will take the stage to provide a comprehensive strategic review of Telecom's performance and vision for the future. Gabriel Blasi will then deliver a detailed business outlook, offering insight into our operational goals and long-term objectives. Finally, we will hear from Roberto Silva, who will share his thoughts on the evolving regulatory landscape. Once again, thank you all for being here and for your continued support for Telecom Argentina.
We look forward for a day of meaningful dialogue, and we are excited to share our vision with the future with you. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over the floor to our first speaker, Federico Semeniuk. So thank you very much. A little introduction. Federico holds a BS in Economics and a Master's in Finance, both from Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He's an economist specialized in finance, and counts with 20 years in consulting for multinational companies, both in local institutions such as Estudio Bein and Banco Mariva, and Ecolatina, and international firms such as Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. In Ecolatina, he is responsible of the economic research team and client presentations on topics of economics and finance, with focus on forecast modeling and economic analysis. Federico, thank you very much.
Thank you. Good morning. There we go. Well, thank you. Good morning, everyone. Always a challenging task, talk about our economy. But in this case, I put over my shoulders a further challenge, which is considering the 30 years of Telecom at the stock exchange, talking also about the last 30 years of Argentina. In a couple of slides. Okay? But of course, this is not a history class. We want to look at the future. So I'm not gonna talk about Argentina for the next 30 years. That would wouldn't be appropriate, but try to look forward at least until 2030, in terms of the potentiality of Argentina. And to do so, I thought, well, we have to go, like, into a time traveling machine, right?
In order to make this time journey, well, we are getting into the DeLorean of the Back to the Future movie. So we are hitting first, going back to 1994, okay? Telecom at the NYSE. And in terms of our economic stance back there, in terms of inflation, quite low with the convertibility, but also quite low per capita GDP in Argentina. And that changed a lot during the last 30 years. And of course, as you probably are aware, the first years of the convertibility were successful in terms of battling against inflation, but in the second part, well, problems started to arise, and we ended up in the famous crisis of 2001, 2002, and then rebounding with the twin surpluses in the first part of the Kirchner's era.
We started to see, after that, the first signals of problems in terms of inflation. Rising inflation, but at least increasing in terms of per capita GDP. We hit the peak in 2011. What happened in that specific year? The first currency controls. Currency controls, which we'll be discussing a lot during this presentation. After that, of course, it's an oversimplification to say that currency controls are the cause and only cause of our economic problems, but higher inflation and lower per capita GDP, and so on, and so on. The COVID shock, the rebound of the COVID shock, but the trend is going to a lower stance in terms of per capita GDP and higher inflation. In 2023, things started to get really, really interesting, and we were the highest inflationary country in the world.
A couple of months, I could say, the first one, because we didn't have the figures of Zimbabwe yet. Well, they are taking that away from us. We are the second highest inflation in the world in 2011, and things had to change in some way. Because in the last 30 years, we had 13 years of recession, 19 years of annual inflation above 10% - way, way above that figure, but two-digit inflation and 24 years of fiscal deficit. That is why, with the current government, there's a nominal anchor in terms of the policy approach towards the fiscal deficit.
But if we talk about the inheritance of the last 30 years, we have to specify the one of the last year, of 2023, because it's not only a matter of contraction of GDP, a matter of increasing inflation, but also we had the highest gap in the exchange rate market between the blue market and the official rate 1960, almost 200%. A poverty rate, which was 45%, and nowadays is closer to 50% or above that figure. Multiple exchange rates, and I'm not talking here about the difference between the blue one and the official, but also within the official market, we have several exchange rates, no access to credit market, negative reserves, a real effective appreciation. So you name it, you have it. And lastly, the controls over the economy that you are probably aware.
Price controls, import controls, and we are gonna focus in the last one, currency control, which is the remaining one, which we believe they are gonna be gone. The discussion is when, not if, and how, but not if, okay?
So that explains not only the inheritance of 2023, but of the last 30 years of Argentina, that Argentines are voting for this total different approach in terms of the economic policy, what I call a U-turn in that sense, that if I had to summarize, would be the following: a geopolitical realignment more towards the U.S., a greater commercial openness, the elimination of all these controls, in which we are advancing at a different pace, the central bank balance sheet normalization, which is increasing again the reserves and eliminating the high liabilities, the elimination of the fiscal public deficit, to the regulation of the private market, the structural reforms, labor, tax, pensions, et cetera. But the thing of this is that none of them depend upon the executive branch.
A bunch of them depend on the support over the Congress, a Congress in which Milei is quite weak, as you probably know. If we take into account the percentage of deputies and senators in the Congress, well, that 14%, 10%, respectively, which goes up to 30 and 18% if we consider the allies, mainly from the party of Mauricio Macri. Mauricio Macri, which was the first one since the return to democracy in Argentina in 1983, with minority in both chambers. Milei is the second one, and even in a worse situation. That's why it took more than 200 days in order to approve this omnibus law, but with a lot of changes against the original project. That was done, given that Milei has a political asset.
Maybe only one, which is the social support towards his government, with a positive image that might be lower than the negative one, but considering the adjustment over the economy, the contraction of the GDP, of the purchasing power, et cetera, is quite high, okay? It is quite high because people are still blaming the outgoing government. When we ask the population who is primarily responsible for the current economic situation, well, most of them are saying, given the imbalances of the previous government. That high positive image that we are seeing here in terms of confidence over the government eventually is gonna fade away if economic positive results do not come along, as it happen every time. It doesn't matter if it's Milei, if it's Cristina Kirchner, if it is Mauricio Macri.
Honeymoons are always there, and they always fade away without economic results. In fact, we had the last figure of this specific index a couple of days ago, and it show a great contraction. So things have to go a little bit better in terms of consumption, in terms of activity, in order to be sustained over time. But despite of that, given the social support, the government was able to perform some initial measures, which were quite costly in social terms, with the support of the population, given the acknowledgment of the need to do this surgery, which we can summarize in the following. Of course, the announcement of the fiscal adjustment, which is going on. We are already seeing that since the first month of the mandate, the fiscal stance is already on surplus.
And here, I'm talking about the fiscal financial, not only the primary, surplus, after a deficit during the last two years of around 5% of the GDP. The correction of the exchange rate, we had that hike of 118% in one day, and the very positive news about that was... And the fear of the market was of an increase in terms of the FX gap, and it happened the other way around. It decreased, to the levels of 20% or around, those figures.
The release of the regulated prices, which are not over, so still there's a remaining of an inflationary effect, but most of the job has already been done in that sense, if we consider the ratio between the regulated prices and the overall or headline CPI, and the flexibilization of import controls, which is an ongoing process. At first, we had a four installment access, 25% every 30 days. Now, it's more flexible towards two installments, but to put in clear figures, by the end of last year, companies were accessing around 17% of the dollars needed to Pay the imports, and now that figure is above 90%. Still a lot to do, but we are going there, but of course, this has an impact over the economy, over the society, a positive one and a negative one.
Just to summarize, GDP contraction of around 6%-9%, depending on how you measure it. In fact, if we look at GDP, the first chart, it says 4% negative year over year, but this is considering the effect of the rebound of the agricultural sector, in which we had a climate shock last year, so it has a quite important rebound. If we take that aside, well, the economy is contracted more on the order of 9% nowadays. Construction, 30% down. Manufacturing production, 17% down. Retail sales, 20%-25%. And purchasing power or real wages, wages discounted inflation between 15%-20%, depending if you take the overall wages of the economy or just the formal ones, which are not that shocked against the level of inflation. But of course, we have the other side of the economy.
The battle of inflation is there, and we moved from the initial shock of 25%, 20% in December, in January, given that initial shock over the effects and the release of the regulated prices, and now moving more towards the level of 4%, which is being quite challenging for the government to cross that line, but it's happening. Also, the recovery of those central bank reserves, which were in negative terms, the ones which are freely disposable for a central bank, around $11 billion. Well, a big recovery in that sense, but that already ended. So that's again an alarm signal in terms of the evolution of the effects. The improvement of the financial variables, the decrease in terms of the country risk, we had a country risk around 2,150 points.
Nowadays, it cut four thousand points. The improvement in terms of the stock market in Argentina, measured correctly against the Merval, of course, and the contraction in the FX gap, which is the thermometer in terms of the pressures in the exchange rate market in Argentina, which already is giving some noise despite the recent days in which for some specific policies, is in a downward trend. But still holding for this. So the government is in this position of, "I'm gonna do this, but keeping currency controls," which was not what we expected. We expected by now to be talking about another thing and the dismantling to be certain, but the government is not willing to take that cost, at least for now.
Hence, they are sustaining this 2% crawling peg of the official exchange rate, which is moving way below the level of inflation, hence accumulating effects, appreciation, and all this risk in terms of the capability of accumulating reserves. This is only possible in a scheme of currency controls. You cannot move a price such as the official exchange rate way, way below the level of inflation. Despite, we have some concessions, but still, inflation is doubling apace in terms of our local currency. Given that, what we gain in terms of exchange rate competitiveness is getting lost. Here, in fact, we are looking at the accumulated depreciation of the exchange rate in Argentina.
First, in December, we had that 118% hike, which month over month was this 124%, and then the crawling peg of 2%, while inflation is moving closer and closer, okay? So if the government keeps doing the same thing, keeps the 2%, even with the moderation of inflation, we expect most of this gain of competitiveness, in terms of our currency, to be lost by year-end, or for sure, by the beginning of 2025, and the market is also reading this, and it's worried about this.
It's saying, "Well, until when are you gonna hold this strategy, which might not be sustainable in the long term?" Given that the 80% gain in terms of real exchange rate, which is part of the explanation of the accumulation of reserves in the first part of the market, nowadays, is only 6% above the previous levels or the levels previous to that exchange rate hike. And that is aligned with evolution of reserves, which is the other point of worry for the markets. We had a big accumulation at first, given this gain in terms of competitiveness. We have a big increase, given the previous scheme in terms of access for imports, but since May, since June, we are not accumulating reserves anymore, and in fact, we are going down.
That's why the challenge in terms of keeping this strategy for the government. But the government has an answer for this. What are they saying? They are saying, "Do not ask me to move the exchange rate, because this is gonna have an impact over inflation, over employment, so I need to be more competitive, not in terms of my exchange rate, rather in terms of reducing taxes, reducing tariff-" ... in terms of deregulating the market, new rules for the economy, basically. And on a theoretical basis, we might agree with this. It's the correct approach, but it goes against time, because our economy still, sadly, is far away from being competitive. So we should be more competitive on a systemic basis, but it requires time, and probably more time than the market is willing to wait for.
So we have a second answer for the government in this discussion between the market and the government that I'm trying to show you, which is, okay, I'm gonna stop losing this competitiveness in terms of our currency through this nominal downward conversions, trying to catch up between the level of the monthly inflation and the level of the FX depreciation, okay? In order to stop a further appreciation of my real exchange rate. And this does not goes against time, but it goes against experience, against history. In fact, there's a famous paper, The Aftermath of Appreciations. And there's a lot of economic literature on this, that every country that suffered big processes of appreciation in terms of their exchange rate, they finally ended with nominal hikes, nominal devaluations. It is the case not only for Argentina, but for the world.
Can this time be different? Of course, but unlikely to be the case. We are not that different. This is interesting because this specific paper was written by Goldfajn and Rodrigo Valdés, and Rodrigo Valdés was one of the officials from the IMF in the negotiation for the new program, and he was removed from that. So this might explain a part. There's another political explanation about that, but maybe this explains a lot. So the big question is, who will get there first in this discussion in terms of the strategy in order to be more competitive and in order to be able to accumulate reserves again? Because if we think in terms of this value race, the structural reforms are on the back in order to gain this systemic competitiveness, but they are far away.
As the process of this inflation, which is happening, but still way above the pace of nominal devaluation, and the effective appreciation is an ongoing process. The bottom, it's already passed, and the market is already reading this process and the challenges that it might represent. But despite of that, despite of that, the market consensus is buying that the government is gonna still be forcing this 2% crawling peg, in which we are always asking ourselves, when are we gonna exit? And in fact, this was not always the case. What we are seeing here is the evolution of that monthly pace of devaluation.
The dotted line, the solid line is that 2.3, is the current one, but you can see at every previous month, that always the market was expecting a hike in the next two to three months, and it did not happen, and so on, and so on. So now the market is convinced that this is gonna be sustained over this 2024 at least. And that is why we had all these changes in terms of expectations about the rates and about inflation. With this previous hikes that the market was expecting, the market consensus was saying, "Well, by year end, by December 2024, the official rates will be at that level, 1,700." And nowadays, the market is saying, "Well, maybe I was wrong.
Now, I think it's gonna be one thousand by December, on average." That explains also the changes in terms of inflation expectations. Companies reporting headquarters, inflation in Argentina is gonna be 200%-227% by year end. Now they are saying, well. Now, the consultants are saying that we were wrong. Now, consultants are saying, "Well, we expect only for Argentina 123% by year end." But this is all based on this long-lasting strategy of an official rate at a 2% crawling peg. Hence, the 2% is sustained in terms of market consensus for October, for November, for December, but this is not the case by the first month of 2025, in which on average, and this is a problem of consensus, we are taking average.
So, maybe if one puts a specific hike on a specific month, it faces when between the average of the months. But you can see that the abandonment of the 2% crawling peg, it's still among market consensus expectations, and mostly in the first two months of 2025. And this is because we will see some new windows of opportunity in order to perform this hike, which would not be the announcement from the government saying, "Well, guys, from now on, the new level of the exchange rate is the following." It would be the consequence of eliminating or dismantling on a further basis, the currency controls. And the FX hike is only the consequence of that. It's the negative part of the positive announcement of a further dismantling of the currency controls.
Windows of opportunity in order to do so, that the government took on December with the beginning of their mandate, but did not take in Q1 or in Q2 of two thousand twenty-five, which was not a bad moment to do so because we had, for seasonality reasons, the big inflow of dollars from the agricultural sector but back then, we were having the congressional discussion among this omnibus law, the deregulation of the market, still a quite high inflation so we had a new window of opportunity during this September, that also the government is not taking and why I'm saying it's another opportunity in order to do so?
Because we had the reduction in terms of the import tax, what we locally call Impuesto PAIS or PAIS tax, which is not gonna cancel the effect over inflation, but that still works as a buffer for that. Again, the government prioritizing the moderation of inflation. And given that, we do not expect, as the market, a further realignment of the exchange rate for the remaining of the year, but again, as the market consensus, we do expect that possibility to happen with the new window of opportunity in Q1 of 2025. Why is that? Because that import tax is gonna be eliminated. In fact, it's not eliminated, it expires legally. It's also the end of the current program with the IMF, so we are gonna need a new one, and the government is pushing for fresh funds.
Typically, the IMF is not willing to give fresh funds in order to control artificial level of effects. So that's why it's another opportunity that the government might or might not take. And if it does not take it, well, there's a window, but not of opportunity, a window out of opportunity in order to perform a new announcement in terms of currency controls and in terms of the level of the exchange rate, given that we are having the midterm elections, with a starting point quite weak for the government. So they cannot take the political cost in those months between the campaign and the moment of the voting in order to have better opportunities of strengthening in terms of the Congress.
So in that specific case, we will have to be looking at the last window of opportunity, which is, after the elections, but with an uncertain outcome in terms of the election, and it is too far away. Are we gonna get there healthy in terms of our economy, still with currency controls, which is a problem, in terms of new investment in Argentina? So that's the risk of not doing, in the first part of two thousand twenty-five, a little bit of, adjustment in terms of the management, of our currency in Argentina. So given that, and given that analysis in terms of the windows of opportunity, we can think of different scenarios. Of course, we have the scenario, which is the government plan.
That scenario, and I had to use that picture from the last day, all the newspapers use it. I, I'm not gonna be the exception, but it's quite optimistic. It's a further gradual dismantling, I like to call it, in layers of these currency controls, so you do not have a hike. You still try to make these conversions between the pace of inflation and the pace of the effects, but we believe that at some point in time, we are gonna need to turn on the GPS, which is our base case scenario. Finally, there's a hidden plan in terms of adjusting the level of currency controls, and hence, a correction of the official exchange rate in Argentina, most likely in Q1 of next year.
The risk is that if they keep forcing towards the optimistic scenario, they might deviate to the worst case scenario, which is the alternative one. It's not recalculating, it's directly a detour from the plan dismantling, with another correction of the effects, given that you are forced by the market. It's still a government decision to eliminate the controls, but given the widening of the effects gap, given a further loss in terms of reserves, you have to do it even earlier in time, and by that, we mean by the end of two thousand twenty-four.
With the following trends in terms of the level of the effects for Argentina, of course, the light blue line is the optimistic scenario, in which we keep the 2% per month, but we do expect some further adjustment during the first part of two thousand twenty-five in this base case scenario, and in the alternative scenario, it would be much higher, given that it's not right away a decision of the government, and rather it's forced by the market. And hence, these different trends, in terms of the level of the exchange rate in Argentina, have their corresponding shocks or absence of shocks in terms of inflation, but even in the scenarios in which you perform that hike, you have the short-term cost, but then inflation goes back again, goes again towards the level of the optimistic scenario.
That's why we are saying, why forcing on a scenario that might increase the likelihood of the worst one? So shoot to the middle. That's the idea of the base case scenario. Take the short-term cost in order to avoid a long-term cost over the economy, over inflation, and also over activity, which it is what we are seeing here. These are the trends of activity for each one of the scenarios, and in all of them, we are seeing a recovery because we are rebounding. But not in all of them, we are going back to the previous levels of August, September 2023, which was the last recent peak, and after that, it was all going down. So we expect a rebound, probably more like an L-shaped one, rather than a V-shaped recovery in terms of activity.
But both in the best case scenario and in the optimistic one, by September, October, of next year, we are recovering the previous level. And after that, we can be thinking of a GDP growth, which is not only rebound, but more genuine, alike. So in that sense, these are the figures that we just saw in the specific slides for each specific scenario, but it's good, it's good to show them all at the same time, because even in the cases in which we are putting a hike over the effects into 2025, always inflation is above the level of depreciation of our exchange rate. So even in those scenarios, when we are saying the effect is gonna be corrected, it's not to have a higher real exchange rate. It's to avoid having an even lower one.
It's to compensate the loss that we already have, and we are gonna have, if we keep doing the same thing that we are doing. And in all the scenarios, the GDP is recovering. But again, in the alternative one, in the red scenario, we have a positive view in terms of activity, given the low base of comparison, but that's not sustainable over time, given that it's also a scenario with higher inflation. So by the beginning of the presentation, we saw the last 30 years. Now, let's try to see if this happens, the best case scenario, the optimistic scenario, which are the most likely ones, where are we heading in the next five, six years? And of course, 2024, we already knew.
With Milei, with another candidate, we already were expecting a contraction over activity, but it's happening with a moderation of inflation, much faster also than expected, given this approach in terms of the exchange rate. After that, 2025, again, if we think in terms of the best case scenario, we start going back. 2025, two thousand and twenty-six, 2030. We are gonna be, if this happens, in the same area that we were back in two thousand eleven, before the initial currency controls in Argentina, and the last recent peak in terms of per capita GDP, hopefully, of course. Why are we saying that this is possible?
Because in Argentina, we always say, "Well, why this time is different?" Well, we are not saying that this is gonna be the case, but we are saying that we have some sectors that might provide support to this stabilization. Sectors that are not gonna save Argentina. It's not that given these opportunities, things are gonna go good. But what we are saying is that if first, we have the stabilization of the economy, these sectors might provide the support to that, being more long-lasting in time. As you probably are aware, we have important resources in terms of oil and gas. In terms of the non-conventional oil reserves, fourth position in the world, second one in terms of non-conventional gas with Vaca Muerta.
Also, the agricultural sector is always there, but very productive in Argentina, and you all know the ranking in terms of production, in terms of export worldwide, soybean, corn, wheat, et cetera. But also, we have the mining sector, which it's new for us. We have the third reserve in the world in terms of lithium, and a lot of potentiality in the services sector, and mostly in the knowledge-based services. We have around eleven unicorns in Argentina. We are the first software exporters in LATAM. In fact, if we look at IT, communications, knowledge-based services, it is already the first sector in Argentina in terms of export, but it goes under the radar, after oilseeds and cereals, of course, and why is that?
Because given the gap between the parallel exchange rate and the official one, a lot of dollar inflow goes through the parallel market rather than the official one, and that's a problem that should be eliminated as long as currency controls are eliminated and we go into a unification of the exchange rate market. And this is quite important because we are greatly dependent upon the agricultural sector. This is our history. This picture is our history. Always, the agricultural sector, with their surplus, financing the deficit of all the other sectors in Argentina. So we need to diversify this matrix of inflow of dollars in Argentina with these new sectors, which can provide a lot in order to avoid this recurrent crisis of the balance of payments in our country.
Oil and gas and energy, specifically, we already expect a surplus this year in 2024. I can sign that it is gonna happen after 12 years of deficit in the energy trade balance in Argentina. Well, it could go up to $27 billion in terms of the trade balance for Argentina. The same goes for the mining sector export. I'm not talking here about Disneyland; this is with the ongoing projects in lithium, in copper, already under construction. It could go up approximately to $20 billion of exports by 2030. So other sectors could provide dollars for Argentina in order to be this sustained over time.
The agricultural and the agribusiness sector, we already know has a lot of potentiality, but it's already operating quite highly, so it could rise up to $60 billion. But we have a lot of higher increase and higher opportunities in terms of the increase of dollars and inflow of dollars for Argentina in the services. Nowadays, it's around $9 billion per year. It could go out to $25 billion, driven by knowledge-based services, tourism, et cetera. The same for energy as we saw before, currently $5 billion dollar exports on average in the last year. This is specifically for 2021, and the same goes to mining. So we could have another agricultural sector in Argentina if we stabilize the economy and investments happen as we are expecting.
Moreover, considering this special regime, the RIGI, how we call it locally, which promotes with some tax and customs benefits for large investments above $200 million. Still to happen, these are the announcement yet to be confirmed, but we already have $30 billion announcement, mainly from the LNG plant with YPF, and we shall see if Petronas still there, in that investment. But, copper projects, the gas pipeline extension, eolic energy, steel plant, solar energy, and these are the main announcement that we had so far, that could be the basis of this potentiality of these specific sectors that we just looked. In order to have a greater performance, again, because going back for the last 10 years, we were in our own club in Latin America. We are one of the big countries, but with the worst performance possible.
So we are in the middle. We have Brazil, we have Mexico, slow growth, but big size. We are medium to big size, but in the last 10 years, we lost around 12-13% in terms of per capita GDP. Quite different from the smaller countries, such as Uruguay, Paraguay, in which telecom also is present, which had a quite important performance, but their market is also quite smaller. But we have to go to that club in terms of performance, and for that, we need to normalize the economy. And for that, we have to reopen the access to credit markets, and for that, we have to eliminate currency controls at some moment in time. In fact, given our recent history, we are far away from the standpoint of Uruguay.
Paraguay, in fact, was upgraded to investment grade back in July, and we are, what, below Bolivia, we are below Ecuador in terms of our credit rating, and that is why we do not have access to credit markets. But if we think in terms of the future performance toward next year, towards the next five years, well, we already expect in 2025 for Argentina to have similar figures in terms of GDP performance than Paraguay, than Uruguay. And the same goes if we look at the forecast from us, from the market, from the IMF, you name it, in terms of GDP, in terms of inflation for the next five years.
Of course, inflation, we are taking average, so given the starting point, we are always gonna be, for some years, higher than these other countries, but we will be seeing at monthly inflation rates rather than annual figures if the trend of moderation over inflation, it's still the case. So to round up the presentation, we made this time-traveling trip during the last years and the next one. And to summarize that, 2023 was the year of the bad inheritance in terms of inflation, poverty, government controls, et cetera. And that explained the social demand for a change that has two parts. In the background, the structural reforms that take time, this deregulation, these reforms in the tax, labor, et cetera, system, but they will take effect next year, two thousand and twenty-six.
So up front, we have this painful correction of the economy. We already knew this was gonna be the case in Argentina, but in order to have the medium-term benefits of that. So as we all saw already, the activity is expected to rebound, the inflation is expected to moderate. We will be expecting this new investment through this special scheme and a new IMF program that hopefully, hopefully, brings fresh funds in order to stabilize the exchange rate market sector. In order to work at full throttle in terms of the potentiality of the sectors that I just mentioned, that would give support to the stabilization of the economy. And hopefully, two thousand and twenty-six-
... if we meet again, we are gonna be talking more in terms of a development agenda for Argentina, rather than a typical survival agenda we're always discussing, given the imbalances of our countries. The only one thing that yet we do not know in which year to put are the elimination of currency controls. But as I said before, they are gonna happen later or sooner, and that's the important thing. Because in this DeLorean, we do not have to go back to the future, we have to go back to normal. Thank you very much. If you have any questions.
Thanks a lot for your attention. We are having our presentation from Roberto and Gabriel, but first we are gonna show a little institutional video. Thanks.
We are in constant movement to accompany and enhance life through technology. We are a company with solutions designed for people and communities, so they can grow and move forward, but also enjoy, be entertained, and connect with what they want. We offer an integral experience with our digital services and solutions ecosystem. With Flow, we provide TV and streaming content. With Personal, we connect anytime, anywhere. With Personal Pay virtual wallet, we connect people with their money. And with Telecom, we support thousands of companies and institutions in their digital transformation. We are one of the largest employers in Argentina, with employees throughout the country who choose to be part of this great place to work. We invest in our customers to provide them with the best service experience. We strengthen our commitment to the environment and our ties with our community.
We promote talent and digital inclusion for all ages. In line with our constant search for innovation, we deployed Argentina's first 5G network. We installed networks throughout the country and mobile sites with the best technology on the market, technology that connects the entire country, reaching towns of less than five hundred inhabitants, Personal 4G locations, and more neighboring countries. Far from slowing down, today, we look forward. We are present and future. Telecom: We empower your drive to move forward.
Hello, everyone. Thanks for coming, and we will talk about the magic. Trying to do business in these last 30 years really is really tough. So, we will try to stop a little bit on the context on the industry, where the industry is leading, and what are the main challenges that the industry has. The first thing to say is that we still have growth in our core business. Mobile data is believed to be growing at a 6% a year pace. Fixed broadband is still growing. Streaming video streaming is growing. All the digital things are still growing against the analog and the old things that are declining. And despite that, last year, there was a disruption. There was a GenAI.
GenAI came into the world, into our world, and most of us, all our CSPs, are trying to do POCs, trials, and trying to work with GenAI, trying to improve efficiency and cost, process automation, improvement in customer experience and customization. And this is where we are heading, and this is what the industry is doing. But there is a problem. In the past years, telcos have been making all the investment and collected the lowest ROI, and all the OTTs have been taking this away. This is something that we call the fair share problem. So there's no other way than I want to check. No, it doesn't work. We need to move away from only connectivity. It's. There's no way we can keep being a dumb pipe.
So we need to address the fair share issue, but we also need to move up into this structure of businesses and trying to get into the digital, video, ICT, solutions, payments, gaming, you name it. So this is one of the biggest challenges that the industry has today. So in this context, number one challenge for the telco is to become a technology company. Leave out all the telco analog, process-oriented thing and become a digital company. Drive growth beyond the former commercial growth that we used to have. But we still have one big thing, that is the tech, the technical debt: legacy. Legacy networks, legacy systems, legacy applications that we need to increase our energy to migrate those into the new things.
We need to adopt platforms ala such as cloud, edge, AI, software everywhere. We need to expose the network as a service as a code in a simple way. We need to be data-driven, but not because it is nice, it is the only way we can drive GenAI experience. Without a platform, without a foundation of data, there's no way you can use GenAI. So data-driven is a must, and there's a new thing that we call API economy, and this is something that GSMA is pushing and sponsoring across the world. 30 years ago, GSMA was responsible for making a platform for roaming. Roaming has been possible because GSMA sponsor that and make it happen all across the world.
GSMA has, how you say, united 60% of the mobile worldwide connections into one scheme trying to make this happen. And the, the idea is to give all the network assets and the services as a code for applications, for developers to use. So, for example, in Netflix, in the near future, if they want to make a volumetric streaming, they need low latency. If not, you get dizzy. So the application could call an API and have low latency for that specific customer. So there is a whole bunch of new revenue streams coming from this API economy that we are sponsoring, and Telecom Argentina is one of the sponsors, we call it, champions to drive this throughout the country we are playing with.
If we take a look into LATAM, Omdia says that Argentina will grow. We will grow. We see that we will grow from scratch, but the next five years, Argentina has a lot of potential in terms of growth, together with Colombia. The rest of the Latin American countries are driving between 2% and 4% a year. Argentina has an opportunity there. And this is our zip code. This is where we are. We are in Argentina. 90% of our business is coming from Argentina. Argentina, we seen a recent presentation, is reordering the macro. There's a possibility of growth, not only in ARPU, but also in consumption. There's an opportunity trying to digitalize all the SMBs and the small enterprises that has not done this in the past years.
So there is a lot of potential, and we see on B2B businesses that we can still move on. Paraguay is a very stable economy and a very stable country, pro-market, so it's a very good place to do business in, and we see that we have really done a very good job there. And Uruguay has been protectionist for the last years, for many, many years, but this year was the first time that they are starting to open this up to new operators in the field. So going back to our vision, we want to transform our present into a relevant ecosystems for our customers, and we have four main pillars. The first one is maintain our core leadership.
We need to keep on being the best in class, the best MPAs, the best in all the areas we work with, in broadband, in mobile, in video. We need to grow, and this is why we need to start the digital businesses that we are trying to build. This is the case of pay, this is the case of IoT. We are doing a lot of things, smart home, automation, and so on. We need to transform ourselves. In order to become a tech, a technology company, a TechC o, we need to transform ourselves and stop being process-centric, becoming agile and customer-centric and digital, and the best place to work. Of course, we don't want to stop thinking big. We need to get more countries to play with.
Basically, these are our six strategic challenges that we have. We will go through them. The core business consolidation. This is to maintain our businesses as leaders in broadband, in mobile, and video. Launch digital businesses. This is the way we will grow. B2B businesses. We are trying to work with enterprises to help them and partner with them to digitalize their businesses and grow. I mean, there is a lot of potential. It is said that TIC, which is telecommunication industry, can increase productivity in 2% GDP over years. So there is a lot of potential here for the country also. The cultural and technological transformation. We will talk about it, and there are two other things which are extremely important for us in terms of strategy, which are regulation.
We are a re-regulated company, we are in a regulated business, and we are getting into new regulations like data protection, like when we go back to APIs economy, we need to protect data. We are getting into the fintech, so there are new regulations coming in. And, of course, working on the financial leverage that Gabriel will later talk, how we do liability management and how we being very successful in that. On our core, when we talk about mobile, we are the leaders in terms of coverage, in terms of quality. We have the highest NPS. We've been given the five-year in a row prize for coverage and quality in Argentina. We are deploying 5G, but we are not deploying 5G across the country. We are deploying 5G in a surgical way, where the demand is. We are trying to address our high-value customers.
Only 15% of our customers have a device that is 5G ready, so there's no need to rush, but we are prepared. We will be having our non-standalone core, but by the beginning of next year, we will have our own standalone core for 5G. So that core, that new core, can give new services, slicing, can really address all the benefits from 5G. And this is when we talk about technical debt, this is one of the things. We are coming from a joint venture, a joint merger between a cable company and a telco company, and we used to have two networks, copper and HFC. HFC has been good. It's gonna last for many, many years.
It gives a very good product, has very good NPS, but at a certain point, we need to move into FTTH. We need to go into fiber to the home, and so we are doing a strategy where we are deploying FTTH overlay HFC and trying to start migrating the customers from one network to the other. Without a rush, all the new adds are going to the new network, but we still need to keep on migrating customers into FTTH when there is an overlay, and we need to keep on deploying FTTH overlay to make sure that we cover these 65% of home pass in Argentina with FTTH. So this is one of the things we will need to address in the near future, too, and we believe that by 2026, we will have two million customers already on FTTH networks.
We are transforming the video business into an entertainment platform, and this is a nice case because we have 3.5 million video customers, typical pay TV, but we are transforming them into all of them have access as a companion device to our IP TV platform, which is Flow. This Flow has also been selected as one of the 10 most admired brands in Argentina, so we are really making a real push here, and all 1.4 million of those 3.5 already have their full package of Flow with a set-top box, and it's like a marketplace where you can see other OTTs, Disney+. You can integrate other OTTs into the same set-top box, so the experience is very easy to have.
But the core is not only about revenue, it's also about efficiencies, and we have invested a lot trying to maximize the efficiencies, trying to reduce the network TCO. This has to do with shutting down legacy systems, shutting down networks that are not good anymore. We continue with the digitalization process. We are reducing call centers and agents. We have removed agents from our sales network. Those were three thousand people that are not working with us anymore. We are implementing the first use cases for martech. We're working with Salesforce as a partner, and we are trying to personalize campaigns, trying to increase ARPU and increase NPS also. The experience of the chat with the customer is much, much better. We, of course, are reducing truck rolls.
We have better tools for diagnosing the network problems, and we are also working in a very close agenda with the unions. 70% of our employees are under unions, so we need to work very close to them. Of course, we're still working on a sustainability plan. We are planning to achieve 50% renewable energy by the year 2030. These are some examples of what we did. We moved from 16% of our sales on the digital platform to 48%, and we reduce from $2 to $0.75-$0.79 the cost per sale. So this is something that a tech co can do, not a telco, but it's full of technology.
We have moved from 15 million hours of call centers to 11 million hours of call centers, moving from 27% of our contacts on the digital platform to more than 50%. This is something we will still keep doing, and introducing GenAI will also help this improve. Always keeping in mind NPS. We are always making sure that NPS, the customer experience, is really good. We have also reduced own and third parties' employees. We have been able to reduce all the sales and after-sales department from almost 60%, from almost 15,000 people to 8.6 thousand people, and this has been technology driven. We have converged everything into a Salesforce platform. We ended up doing that last year.
We have all our customers, B2C customers, in one place, and that helps a lot, the interaction and the frictionless with the customers. On the fulfillment side, all our field services technicians, we have moved from 18,000 to 14,000, and this has also been done with technology, with new tools, with new network improvements. We still need to think big, and we are also in Paraguay and Uruguay. When five or six years ago, Paraguay was a $50 million EBITDA company a year. We moved from $50 million EBITDA company to $100 million company in the last 12 months, counting the H1 of 2024. So that was not only good luck. It was. We invest a lot. We invest $70 million a year in new networks.
We deploy FTTH. We moved from zero to 35% market share in less than three years. We are keeping 2.4 million customers in mobile, so we launch Personal Pay as our wallet. We already have 300,000 customers there, and we have Flow with 100. We're improving margins, and we're improving the revenues there. Uruguay, which is very small, has been very protective during the last years. We are deploying FTTH for the first time in four cities, so we are starting our broadband business, fixed broadband business in Uruguay, by the end of this year. Talking about the new digital businesses we are trying to step in, we have created a new fintech platform. This fintech platform moved in...
Back to two years ago, we launched a wallet, a digital wallet. It was only friends and family, and for us, I mean, for the employees. Since then, in less than two years, we were able to reach three million customers onboarded on the platform. This is one of the big numbers. More than $300 million are already in the wallet for what we call remunerated accounts. In a very special environment with high inflation, you need to have your money being remunerated with interest rates. We have provided this solution very easily. It's frictionless. The person put the money in the wallet and use it whenever they want it. They have no friction at all. He doesn't need to do anything. We are number two in remunerated balances.
We have grown, in the last year, sixty-one times in total purchasing value and twenty-one times in transactions, in number of transactions, so it's growing, and it's growing very fast, and this is a platform where we can start as a starting point for microloans. Everything is around the ecosystem. I mean, it's not apart from the ecosystem. Everything is trying to converge into our own ecosystem of products, of services. Basically, this is for prepaid customers, so we're trying to push prepaid charges coming through this wallet, and we are reducing the cost of the charge of the prepaid money, so basically, we are trying to generate sustainable and scalable business, but it works within the ecosystem and really helps the ecosystem to have a better NPS also.
Moving to B2B, we have, as the same as B2C, we still need to maintain our market traditional services, which is connectivity, but there is an evolution of the connectivity. There are software-defined networks, SD-WANs. We are introducing 5G. We're introducing FTTH everywhere, so we need to keep that. We have 50% market share on connectivity in Argentina, so we need to keep that and evolve in that. We need to grow, and how? We need to grow in leading professional services. Internally, we have done an excellent job in a foundation of what we call cloud foundation internally. We work with multi-cloud. We orchestrate all the clouds, our own cloud, and the hyperscaler cloud.
We have the skills and the knowledge to manage this, and we are now selling this to our customers, trying to help them to move into the cloud and reduce their CapEx. We have one of the best FinOps services, I mean, internally, and we are also selling that. We are selling cybersecurity services. We are working on the verticals that Federico was mentioning. We're working on energy, we're working on agriculture, and we're working on mining. On agriculture, we were able to, I mean, in Argentina, you will not cover areas where you don't have people. So we have 500,000 hectares of farming that were not covered by any network. We made a cluster, and we work with the whole value chain of agro.
To build the network for them and introduce IoT, and improve the efficiency, and improve the productivity of that farming area. So we are working with the agro very closely, and we are becoming a partner of them. And we are working on public utilities and smart cities as well. We are working in water. In water supply, we are with an IoT platform, we are trying to control all the levels of water supply, the pressure of the water supplies in a whole neighborhood. So we are very deeply working on that. And developing new markets, public safety. We are running the most important public safety network in Buenos Aires City. So all the police is running in a TETRA services that we are providing them.
This is the amount of potential that we have. We're not going to go through this, but you can see that cloud, what we call data center exits, moving the data centers of the customers into the cloud, will grow 20%. Data centers will grow also 80%. Security, 35%, unified communications, 10%. So all the verticals are growing, and we think we have here the opportunity of taking a stake of this. We are leading in Argentina the Open Gateway Initiative from GSMA. This is what we talked before. We have already four APIs that can tell SIM swap, means if you have been changed your SIM, your device SIM, in the last 24 hours. So if you are a bank, you can check if your customer has changed their SIM.
If he has changed their SIM, you can increase the level of security because it could be a fraud. These are the type of things we call anti-fraud APIs, and they are. We have already sell this to BYMA, which is the stock exchange of Argentina, and Banco Galicia is also in a trial on this. This is it? No, this is not it. We need a platform. We need where to expose. We need a catalog, where to expose the APIs. We need a consent manager because we need the consent from the customer that you can provide the information of his device to somebody else. We create this platform, which we call it Open Xpand. It's a platform that we created together with Intraway.
Intraway is a technology company that provides OSS services. We create this new company, and we are creating this platform as a service, not only for us, but for other telcos in Latin America. We are talking with Tigo, with Entel, with other operators in the region, and we are helping them to push this whole new initiative and make it real. Talking about transformation, and this is just we are trying to end. It's not only hard, it's not only technology, it's a lot of culture. We are coming from a merger. We were 27,000 people, now we are 20,000 people. We've been from a merger, and there were a lot of changes, and trying to be customer-centric and agile has been very tough.
Being, trying to delayer the structure and compressing the and empowering people, and this is something we, we've been working and we still work, because this is an evolution, it's never ending. But we work on the technology side, preparing ourselves to allow scalability, regionalization, and operational efficiencies. We work on platforms. We transform everything we touch into a platform that we can deliver, not only for Argentina, but for Paraguay, Uruguay, and hopefully, next. So we are trying to work on the back end to increase efficiency, digitalization at full. We have our data office, which is this foundation that we did on data. Data is a must. It's the input, the necessary input for GenAI. Everything is already on GCP, it's in Google platform.
Not only our network information, but also our customer information has been moved there, and we are trying to increase the experience of our customers at the front end. These are the whole idea that we're working on. Finally, this is the whole idea, transform our presence into a relevant ecosystem for our customers. It's not only about connectivity and entertainment, it's not only about Argentina and Paraguay. We are trying to get new emergent businesses from Fintech, from APIs. It's a B2B2C revenue stream, B2B, IoT, cybersecurity, and all managed services for enterprises, but also we need, we want to go to other regions or other countries, like improving in Uruguay, where we have a position there, but it's very small, but we think we can do it better. Why not next countries?
Okay, thank you.
Hello? Okay.
... Well, it's my pleasure to be here once again. Good afternoon to all our friends here and to the 100 that we have connected, looking at the presentation, even from Argentina. I will take some short minutes to share with you some main aspects of our business as a whole. As we have seen, the business environment in Argentina has not been easy at all, especially on the last year. But Telecom, in spite of this, has been able, since 2000 and the last three years, to provide a very positive total return to our shareholders, considering the comparison with the sector throughout all America. Why did we think to take into consideration the last three years?
The reason is that after the pandemic and the lockup that Argentina had, the country suffered a very different environment, and all the metrics have changed dramatically. But we compare the situation of Telecom in terms of total return to shareholders with the rest of the companies in Argentina, is still room to grow. I will try to show you why this is possible in the near future. The company has a very attractive cash flow yield and a fair valuation multiple. Here you have, again, the comparison with other leaders in the industry, and at the valuation also in terms of multiples compared with other leaders in the industry.
In spite of all the noise and all the difficulties of Argentina, we've been able to succeed in terms of providing all our stakeholders with the proper remuneration. We will try to share with you some opportunities that we are foreseeing and how we have managed this. When you look at what has happened in the ARPUs, in terms of the capacity of the company to recover it, look at the comparison of the different countries in Latin America. Argentina used to be more in the center of the equation, both in terms of ARPU for the mobile and also on the broadband. Now we are beginning to recover the ability of the company to price more consistently its product.
This has been a huge challenge during the last years, especially in 2023, because of the huge inflation and the impact that that inflation had in salaries of the people, and in the way it impact the general equation of the economy as a whole. So here, in terms of the capacity of the company to recover this, and we are going to see that, we are able to at least recover our position historically, which was in the center of this graph. And probably, as Roberto explained, by the addition of additional services, we will be able to increase the figure even more.
When we look at this, in terms of the perspectives in 2017, when we made the merge, we have gone on this rollercoaster in terms of the economy. These are our four business line: the TV, the broadband, mobile, and the fixed voice lines. We have been recovering since the normalization of the economy of the country. We've been recovering our ability to price more correctly our products. So the outlook in this sense is very positive. We have seen this drop mainly because of the huge distortion in the macro variables of the economy of Argentina, but in spite of this, we are going to fully recover this.
Just to give you some context of this, although we have already seen in the pre-economy presentation at the end of last year, prior ten days prior to the year end, the country suffered a devaluation of 140%. That has a huge impact in the company figures at the end of the year. But why is that? Because we wouldn't able to fully recover the impact of that devaluation immediately, because there were only ten days up to the end of the year and to closing our fiscal figures. But after that, and with the normalization and appreciation of the peso again, we are going to a more normal situation where we are recovering, in real terms, our income very consistently.
Look at what was the real impact of what I have explained. Last twelve months, three quarters of 2023, EBITDA of the company was $1 billion, the net debt $2.2 billion, and the leverage was 2.9. Immediately after the devaluation, remember, the 140% devaluation, those figures went up to 3.2 times leverage. Net debt was more or less the same, no significant variation, only the impact of the devaluation, and the EBITDA was reduced nominally by a third. That situation has completely changed in only six months. When you consider how the company looks today after the partial normalization of the economy that we are going on, we have recovered our situation prior to the devaluation and also in terms of cash generation. This is very important now.
In a way, we have the recognition on the market of this situation by granting Telecom. Telecom is the only Argentine-listed company listed in the United States, domiciled in Argentina, that has a treatment of an investment-grade governance in its debt issued in the international financial markets. That's the recognition of the ability of the company to serve all of this business environment. How do we achieve this? The company has been doing a very consistent pricing strategy. In general terms, as you can see from the left graph, when inflation picks up very quickly, we lag to inflation. It's very difficult to continuously translate this inflation pace to our prices.
So the company loses in real, in real money or in real terms, loses against inflation pace. But when inflation decreases, both because of the effect in the income of the people, but also because of the way the adjustments are carried out, we recover, in real terms, our, our revenues, and this is what is happening today. You see that we have been very positively doing that, and the service revenues has been recovered steadily in the last part of the year as Argentina is normalizing, and even the ARPU by different business segment is also beginning to recover steadily. So the impact or, or the positive impact of the recovery of the normalization of the economy in terms of this variable instantly goes to our figures, thanks to this pricing ability. But it's not only a matter of pricing.
We've been able to do this with very stable portfolios. When you look at how the impact of these prices increases or these price movements have been in our portfolio, you see that our portfolio, in terms of mobile, has continually growing in spite of all this. As you see in the upper left, our net portfolio of mobile has grown more than 3%, considering prepaid and postpaid, in a very positive way. Broadband and pay TV have been pretty stable, and the only portfolio that really is coming down is, of course, fixed voice, which is a natural trend that is going throughout the industry all over the world.
But the subscribers are beginning to recover, and this is also a very good news, not only in terms of pricing, but also in terms of portfolio. We've been able to go over all this very tough business environment. Now, as we have seen from the economy presentation, and we are speaking of Argentina, it always has been a real challenge in terms of how to cope with foreign exchange risk in a country with this type of volatility. We have invested very heavily in terms of explaining to our investors what is the real exposure that the company has in terms of foreign exchange risk. We have listened many times that, well, you have a peso business, and you have a strong devaluation, you have debt in dollars, this type of risk. Why is that?
The first thing is that the election of having debt in U.S. dollar is especially related to the ability of the country to provide long-term financing. This is an industry that requires significant amount of capital, significant amount of investment. There is no, I will say, a consistent, permanent base of funds locally that allowed us to do this only with local financing. Now, that's why the biggest companies in Argentina shift to foreign financing to fulfill their projects. What does imply that in Telecom balance sheet? When you look at the balance sheet of the company, in fact, our assets denominated in U.S. dollars represent 60% of our total assets, and liabilities, less than 40%.
When we speak on the consideration of how the company faces foreign exchange risk, in terms of balance sheet, the company is fully hedged. Why is that? Because we have a huge amount of infrastructure that is mainly dollar, dollar-based, because it's all investment of import, all the infrastructure required for telecommunication, plus a very minor part, which is civil construction, which is about 20%. And all this provide a very good cushion in terms of the risk of foreign exchange, in terms of our balance sheet. Also, it's important to add that Telecom's roughly represent about 70% of the infrastructure of telecommunication of the country as a whole, and it is fully owned by the company. Then we will go over that, and that is a very distinctive situation compared with the rest of the industry.
Most of the industry has sold to third parties a very significant part of the towers or the fiber. Telecom is a company that fully owns all the infrastructure that operates. Only about 20% of the towers that we have or we operate are leased, the rest are owned by the company with no type of restriction on top of that. And beside that, the company is one of the biggest real estate holders in the country, meaning that Telecom owns about 5,000 pieces of real estate. In a country like Argentina, those who are more familiar knows that real estate is bought, sold, and leased in U.S. dollar. So all that equation provides a very significant hedge in terms of balance sheet.
When we go to the flows in income statement, you see there that our revenues, about 20% of the revenues of the company, are dollar-related, meaning that we have a very strong operation outside Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. That operation provides around $100 million of cash generation, and our OPEX is only 12% denominated in U.S. dollars. So in terms of the interest, is about half of the interest are related to U.S. dollars, and we hedge a significant part of that. When you put all that in terms of income statement exposure, the net exposure of the company to foreign exchange is really very low. In terms of, you see on the lower right graph, our revenues are 20% in dollars, and our OPEX is only 12%. So in terms of operations and operational cash flow, the company is also fully hedged.
Let's go deeper in terms of the infrastructure of Telecom. Our balance sheet represent about $2.8 billion of infrastructure, which, as I mentioned, are mostly represented by the network itself. This network that is fully operated and owned by Telecom is mostly dollar-denominated. This provides a huge cushion and hedge to our debt, and it's really, I will say, in some extent pretty unusual to find a telecom company that really has a big footprint in a country, like the one that Telecom has in Argentina, in terms of infrastructure. Besides that, we have the mobile network with more than seven thousand towers owned and operated by Telecom. There you have some valuation exercises that we have made compared to some multiples.
That very quickly shows you that about two-thirds of the valuation of the company is only represented by the infrastructure, and the 20 million customers that Telecom has are represented only less than one-third of the valuation of the company. So we really have a very strong balance sheet in terms of coping with the volatility. Since the merger in 2017, the company has done a very extensive work, not only on the revenue side to cope with the volatility, but in terms of cost. If you look at the share of the different costs of the company, with the exception of the labor cost, the rest of the costs have reduced their share significantly.
This is, as Roberto explained, thanks to the strong acquisition of technology and applying technology to all our processes. In terms of labor cost, you may know that during very strong inflation environment, salaries in Argentina tend to be adjusted automatically by the inflation rate. That means that we have a lot of pressure on that, but the situation changed when the inflation came down because there is an effect of recovery of the salaries.
If you look at the historical series in Argentina, the comparison between the index price and the inflation and the salaries inflation adjustment, when inflation goes below 30%, which is something that we can expect for the near future, according to the policy that present authorities are taking out, that means that there is a gap that represent about 5-10 points of difference of salaries lagging to inflation pace that is directly translated to our cost structure, where salaries represent 50% of the cost as a whole.
So really, we also have here a very good outlook in terms of benefiting of the huge investment that we have been making all this year in technology, and in a way, all the volatility of the macro variables haven't allowed us to fully show the power of this. Regarding our capital allocation, the company has been investing very consistently all this year. Even this year, we are investing in Argentina $600 million, or maybe even more according to the macro variables. Maybe we've been, in some extent, quiet in terms of how we inform this, but the reality is that Telecom is probably one of the companies that has been concurrently investing more heavily in the country for the last years and is continuing to do so.
And that investment, for instance, as I mentioned there, doesn't include the 5G acquisition of the spectrum that we did at the end of last year. On cash flow generation, the company has a very, very steady cash flow, as you see there. Our yield has been also very consistent. Our CapEx to revenues, compared to the industry, the industry typically invests 17%-16% of its cash flow generation. We are even in this environment, even with all the macro variability and all the volatility, we have been in that type of figures, and again, that doesn't include what we did in the spectrum. If we add up the spectrum acquisition of last year, that goes up to 20%.
In terms of dividend yield, the company, being the only Argentine company that has been paying dividends since 2017 up to now, there is no other company listed outside Argentina that has been paying dividend concurrently each year. We have a very reasonable dividend yield, considering the volatility of the country and the macro volatility that we have already been discussing. As I mentioned, we are improving our profitability. To put it very simple, look at the variation of the CPI. We took Q2 of 2023 with Q2 of 2024 to make a simple comparison. That was the evolution of the inflation.
Service revenues in real terms, we have already recovered one-third of the gap in real terms, in the same period. Operational cost, in real terms, have also been benefiting of our cost managing, and that, of course, implies a significant recovery of the margin. As the economy is getting more normalized, the ability of the company to benefit from all the investment, of all the efficiencies that we have generated, is showing and paying off. Going to the financial side, sometimes it's difficult to consider well, how did Telecom did in all this environment in terms of its own debt?
When you look at what has happened in the last year since our merge, locally and also internationally, to the consideration on the upper left graph, risk-free rate for us, which is a very important, you have seen here how the interest rate have peaked in the period by three times. Country risk for Argentina has multiplied by five in the same period. Our cost of debt has been stable all this period, about 7%, a peak in two thousand and twenty-two, when the huge jump in the risk rate, risk-free rate went up, but after that, we, we've been able to keep with that in a very positive way. And we have done this without harming or shortening, the tenure of our debt.
When you look at the average lifetime of our debt, we are at three point two. That's pro forma because we issued a transaction very recently that is, has not been shown fully in our balance sheet because it took place after the closing of our quarter report. How we achieve that? We change the mix of our funding, increasing the funding on the local. Telecom has worked very strongly and very heavily in terms of having a very significant sources of financing, and we have been supported, as we are going to see, from many different sources that has helped us to keep this very, very controlled. This is how our debt book looks today, at $2.6 billion of debt. We have very different tranches.
The purple is represented by international notes, 144A bonds that we have issued. We came back to the market about a month ago after being outside the market for some years. We have been very extremely supported by multilateral agencies. We have a very close and long relationship with multilateral agencies: IDB, IFC, Finnvera from Finland, EDC from Canada. CDB loan is a loan provided by China Development Bank. This is the first loan provided to a company non-Chinese in RMB outside of China. So we really work very strongly in terms of getting different sources of financing, and that is helping us significantly to have a well-balanced and diversified balance sheet.
And then you have the breakdown by currency, where, of course, as I have mentioned, dollar has a very strong presence. The reason is very simple: it's the longer financing and the main source of our imports, where we have to keep investing to provide an additional future for the company. In terms of the last transaction that we have made, and here you have a maturity profile pro forma, how our maturities are going to be. We issued a $600 million bond about a month ago, very successfully, reopening the market for Argentina. As I mentioned, that bond has a structure of an investment-grade transaction. And then we have also issued concurrently in the local capital market, where Telecom taps almost on a quarterly basis. We work there a very convenient base.
We balance and keep all the sources of funding available to allow the company to continue with its growth plans without interruption. As final remarks, we have a company that is improving its EBITDA margin in a very challenging context. We are comfortable with that, and we think that Argentina is getting to a better mood and to a more rational administration where the economy is more sensible.
Just to give you an example, in a market where the company competes with other two operators, like Paraguay, and we have a more rational economy, our margin is 47%, just to the future implications on the regulation side, on all the regulation that we need to have. We manage to grow our customer base, even with that environment. Roberto already mentioned about our fintech business. Our fintech business is a business that we built up in one year and a half.
Today is almost equal to the number 30 bank in Argentina, almost from zero, from scratch, with three million customers, $300 million of deposits that are channeled to direct accounts in the local mutual funds. That money is not in Telecom balance sheet, has nothing to do with our balance sheet, or we share is the customer. This is a very significant opportunity, and we are growing to provide other services there very quickly. And we have a very resilient business.
We have already shown that even in this type of harsh environment, the company has been very successful in terms of of keeping pace, having good cash flows generation, and keeping all its stakeholders well remunerated, both on dividends, on interest payments, very consistently, and with a very sound financial structure that allows us to cope with the volatility. If you look at our cash position, we tend to have a very strong cash position, mostly in U.S. dollar. The reason of that, of course, is part of hedge and part to cope with the volatility of the local market. But also it means a huge opportunity in terms of the capacity that Telecom might have to even improve even further its financial figures, in terms of having a more efficient structure there.
As the volatility of Argentina came down and it normalized, we don't need to have that amount of cash or cash investment available. We continue work constantly on improving our debt book with all the source of financing available. We are also preparing to issue a green bond when the market recognize the value of issuance like that. Still, Argentina needs to improve its costs itself to get the recognitions or the differential spread of that, but we continue to work consistently on this. Thank you very much. [Foreign Language]
... Thanks so much for being here again, and...
Be nice.
Yes, be kind. I hope you all enjoy the food and the beverages, so treat us kindly. So back then again, I would like to start here by, if you have any questions, I can provide this microphone so you can ask them live. Then we go over the ones that we have in the webcast. But I would like to address your questions first. So who wants to shoot?
That's good.
Don't be shy.
Okay.
Thanks. Stefan, lucky one.
Thank you, Stefan.
Thanks a lot.
Hi, Stefan Styk with Barclays. Thank you for the presentation today. I had two questions. You mentioned increasing ARPUs. Just curious, what you would think the reaction functions would be from your competitors? And then in terms of capital allocation, are your long-term plans to continue to hold your towers and other infrastructure, or would you consider selling them? Thank you.
Okay. On the ARPU side, we are working on these use cases of Martech. It's a way of providing the rep the exact price that she, he should give the customer in terms of retention and fidelity, trying to sustain the. When you increase prices 250% a year, that's what we have been doing, you have one third of your customers will call for a rebate, for a promotion, because they cannot pay, because you have 50% of poverty in Argentina. So every time a customer calls, you retain that, giving out the promotion. What we have done. And that reduces the ARPU, okay? We have done with this use case recently is to.
You don't need to give the whole promotion to all the customers. You can be very surgical promotion to each customer based on data and based on the number of times he called, the number of promotion he has, where, what is he paying. So we are trying to increase ARPU through technology, through data, and through GenAI. And this is nothing to do with the prices that you are listing on your website, because that's the price that your competitors are looking at. Nobody's looking at your internal ARPU. So I hope that this is understood. And when you take a look into the competitors, the hint in the evaluation of the end of last year, really, for the first time, América Móvil was conscious and increased prices very, very heavily.
So, they've been lagging the increase of prices for many months. Probably when they take a look into the numbers of December, they were astonished, and they moved on. So the market has been very, I would say, improving in terms of prices. Going back to towers, 20% of our towers today are on lease. This is something that Gabriel said. Today, all the assets in Argentina have no price. I mean, there's no price for any asset. If you take a look into the benefits of selling the assets, we have discussed it internally a lot, also with the shareholders. Today, there's no reason, there is no economic reason to do that.
I mean, with the we get financing at much better prices than we lease than the towers. Every time I talk with TIM Brasil, with Orange, with all the companies that have been forced to sell the towers, they are today they are complaining, because if you take a look into TIM, TIM was spending $1 billion in leases of towers. Three years later, is about $3 billion. So it's crushing the margins, I would say. So that's the other reason. But in Argentina, unfortunately, we hope that this government will have the right path and grow and increase. But Argentina is Argentina, and a few years ago, 2012, I think, there was somebody sat that says Fibertel does not exist anymore.
That was the government that issue a resolution saying that our broadband service was not legal anymore. And if you outsource your network to an American Towers company or to a A-one company or any company that you want, they cannot help to stop something like that to happen. We went to court for several months and years, and finally got the license back, and our services was never stopped. But if you give the infrastructure to another one that is compliance with the US and it's legally corrected and so on, if a government says, "This network has to be shut down," they will shut you down. So that's something that we take into consideration when talking about Argentina. Argentina is what it is. So we need to be careful with that.
Yeah, I would just add to complement what Roberto mentioned. Very importantly, as he said, the cap rate of the telecom or the tower companies are much higher than our cost of debt. So for us, has a lot of additional value to keep the debt and the option for future sales.
There's always the option.
Absolutely. It provides an additional hedge. And of course, the situation compared to the rest of the industry, the multiple level of the industry has been about four. When most of the companies sold their infrastructure, most of the companies were heavily in debt, and the application of those funds has a lot of sense. At present, for us, the multiples are not good. The debt, in relative terms, is cheap to the cap rate of the infrastructure companies. So, probably it's not a good time to think about that. But of course, from time to time, we discuss this situation.
There's one more comment. You have all the leases nominated in dollars.
Absolutely.
So when you have a big devaluation, like the one we have, our revenues are in pesos, and your costs are growing in dollars, so it's very harmful. We need to wait and see, and we will do it whenever it's good for the company, for the shareholders, and to make sure that the company can run for many, many years more.
Thank you, Stephen.
So, anyone, anyone else? Thanks. Sweet. Thanks, Liu.
This is Liu from T. Rowe. Thanks again for the presentation. Just going back to the first two slides where you highlight the AI opportunity, can you remind us, like, your data center infrastructure? And then, what you see in terms of increased need for more data centers in Argentina, and help us understand that opportunity set. Thank you.
We have a big data center. Today, I would say, almost full. We have all the hyperscalers' nodes in our data center. I mean, we have our own cloud running in our data center, which is DC4, we call it internally. And it's a brilliant revenue stream that is coming with very good margins, much better than when we are reselling partners' clouds, like AWS or Microsoft or Google. So that's a good spot. We have not decided whether to increase our data center capacity. We have not decided that. There are several projects that could help. Our hyperscalers are willing us to invest and increase our capacity, but those are $20 million-$30 million CapEx in...
So we are really also waiting for the hyperscalers to do the move. We are not going forward without the contracts. Mm-hmm.
Roberto mentioned in the presentation that, maybe indirectly related, not specifically to data center, but let me give the advertisement. We are foreseeing a very significant growth on the digitalization of the companies. Argentina has lack of a lot of investment in that area, and the improvement that comes from there is very relevant. Our B2B business, we are thinking that is going to double in three years, and that's indirectly very related to this capacity that we have.
Yeah. There is also an opportunity on the edge. We have a lot of own data centers that are very close to where the customers are, enterprise customers are, like banks. We. So we are reutilizing, I don't know if it, the word exists, we are reusing those edges for our customers also. Mainly banks that need a low latency and need to have, sometimes for legal reasons, the data in the same location. So we are, we're helping that.
Thanks.
Thanks. Cesar, the next one.
Hi, Cesar Medina from Morgan Stanley. We are monopolizing the questions in this table.
Very good.
Sure.
But I just wanted to get a sense in terms of how should we think of your CapEx to revenue, in the future?
... You put a slide in there that you wanna increase fiber to home penetration. You said that your 5G rollout is gonna be a bit more surgical, but maybe help us understand, you know, how does that look at going forward, and in what timeframe should we expect that spending?
Thanks.
Okay. Well, it will probably you will see something very similar to what you are seeing now, in the range of 15%-17%. What might make that vary significantly, it will depend a lot on the macro conditions of Argentina. If the recovery of the ARPUs accelerates and give us the opportunity, the company has always the willing to invest. And as you have seen in the environment that we have described, we have invested very significantly. After the merge, our in-year investment was in the range of $1.5 billion. So, I would say there is not a bias in the company management of not investing.
On the contrary, but the bias is to make it sensible to what is happening in the macro and what is the ability of fully recover that. As we think that the situation is going to improve, that might come out. We have the opportunity of 5G, the corporate opportunity on the growth of that, and the digital business as a whole. But, for the time being, for the macro picture that we have today, you must think in figures very similar, pretty similar to what we are facing today.
But just one follow-up. Like, if one thinks of the trends in ARPU, all right? What is the big driver for the ARPU to increase in real terms? Is it reduction of those discounts? Is it repricing higher? How should we think about it?
It's everything.
It's everything, but basically making it smaller, the discounts that we are, the promotions that we're doing. In a 30%, that's a lot, in a 30% inflation economy, you can drive prices much easier when you don't need to increase 20% a month. You go with the 3% or 4%, which is the inflation we are running, and that is a lot easier to pass through to your customers. When you increase 20%, 25% in one month, the customer calls immediately because...
[Any indication of what percentage of your clients are discounted?]
80% of our customers-
Yes
... have a discount. Going back to your previous question was the CapEx. There is a good thing about the CapEx, which is the capacity of executing. If we want to eat all the network that we want to deploy, we cannot do it in one year. So we have a fifteen thousand blocks a year capacity, so that's the rolling over of things we can do. The other good thing is the cost of the technology is going down, and when you compare an HFC network with an FTTH network, not only the cost of the infrastructure is lower, but also the CPEs that you put inside the home is one third of an HFC cable modem. So those are incentives to move forward faster.
And the last thing is, we are moving, deploying the network from the best areas to the worst areas. But the worst areas are there, and we need to do something with them, so we will probably start looking for different approaches. Maybe using other networks to cover these areas, where if we don't do the deployment quickly, we will lose the customers. We are not the incumbent there. We are 30% market share in those areas, so we can use other people's infrastructure in those areas. Do you have anyone else wants to ask someone?
Okay.
We have a couple of questions from the webcast.
Okay.
We are all set. I think we are good on time. The first one is: Good day to the entire committee, and congratulations on the great achievement. I would like to ask you two questions. Are there any plans to expand in Paraguay soon? I think, in the event that the real estate market improves in 2025, do you plan to consider a spin-off of the towers? I believe the second was already answered.
The first one, we have the international directory. We have deployed a lot in Paraguay, so we don't think we need to keep on deploying networks. We will go for 5G. We are working with the government, trying to move into 4G, 5G. That's gonna be the... We hope that we will be participating on the bid on by the beginning of next year.
[Great.]
The good thing is prices are, they are taking the Brazilian way of doing things, so they are asking for 10% of the price upfront, and then committing commitments of deployment. We're working very closely with the industry, so
... Paraguay will keep on growing. We have 35% market share. When you have the network and the capacity and the convergence, we think we can be number one, and we will keep on working for taking the lead. Today, the leader is Millicom.
We are launching Pay. Our...
We have launched Pay recently and Flow and all the services. Yeah.
The last ones, last two. You mentioned that CapEx this year would reach almost $506 million or more. Can you clarify what scenarios could drive your CapEx higher or lower? And the second is, are you including interest payments in your free cash flow calculation?
I can take that one. In the presentation, we are not including interest payments. You should consider them in a range of around $200 million for that sake.
Yeah. The first one was?
What about what could drive eventually your CapEx plan for today higher or lower?
The way we plan the CapEx every year is we have a plan, and it's like an onion. We start with 30% of the CapEx. We launch that 30%. Depending on the numbers, depending on the macro, depending on all the stoppers, the handles that we have, we launch the second phase, and then we launch the third phase. So basically, this year, the CapEx will be what he said because we have already launched it. If not, we cannot do it this year. Next year, we will do the same thing because we see we should run the base or the optimistic. I like the optimistic one, but if we go with the baseline, we will check the numbers for Q1 and then move on quarter by quarter.
There's also must take into consideration the CapEx that the company currently as has been investing very heavily all these years. We don't have a very big single project that we need to put money, but there are hundreds of small projects that in case the economy goes the wrong way, they can very easily be stopped. Or our maximum exposure in terms of CapEx disbursement and interruption on the economy cycle is like 60 days, no more than that. So it's very flexible in terms of the way we can manage that investment. As said, we are not building a five-year project. We have already covered all the mobile network, and the biggest part of the CapEx is just replacing the copper by fiber.
Okay.
Okay, so we are all set. Thanks.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
We will follow with a presentation from the Argentine Exchange and Securities and Exchange Commission or Comisión Nacional de Valores Chairman Roberto Silva. Roberto is a lawyer graduated from the University of Buenos Aires and has obtained an LLM from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He had academic participation in several law schools. He was a partner at Marval, O'Farrell & Mairal, and a member of its board of directors, where he worked from 1993 until the date of his appointment at CNV. He has worked in other legal firms in Argentina, and he also works as a foreign associate for Shearman & Sterling in New York for part of 1991 and 1992. He was also a secretary of the Chamber of Trusts and Funds of Direct Investment in Productive Activities since 2018.
He has been president of the Banking Law Committee in the International Bar Association, and he has been consistently recognized in areas of practice by specialized legal publications such as Chambers and The Legal 500, among others. So thank you, Roberto.
Thank you. Good afternoon to everybody. I like to use Securities Commission, but that's a personal thing. Let me start by saying that I'm the chairman of the Securities Commission, not the Minister of the Economy, not the president of the Central Bank. That's gonna be relevant as we go on the presentation and some of the things that have been said before. Let me start with some personal background. I was a New York resident in 1980, 1981, so I also call New York home. I became a lawyer in Argentina. I got my LLM from Champaign, Illinois, in 1990, 1991. I was a foreign associate at Shearman & Sterling.
I spent the last 31 years at Marval, O'Farrell & Mairal, Argentina's top law firm, where I was a partner for 28 years and a member of its board 20 years. And I've been Chairman of the CNV with the initial new government, beginning January 2nd. I think it's important we speak a bit about Argentina before we talked about CNV. And so it was mentioned that, and many of you are familiar with, Milei, a new phenomenon, not having a large representation before Congress. Notwithstanding, all this administration is based on three legal instruments, three very important legal instruments. They have been called before Omnibus law, and that's very accurate because there are many laws in one.
The first thing we have is a presidential, what we call DNU, Decree of Need and Urgency, that has some problems because it has been repealed by one of the chambers of Congress. If it is repealed by the second one, it would lose effectiveness. It does a lot of things. It's a very long law, 366 articles, sixteen titles. It talks about the basis for reconstruction of Argentina, the regulation, state reform, labor laws reform, customs, mining and energy, aviation, justice reform, health, sport law, and car registrations, among other things. Milei was able to pass two laws. These two laws, again, omnibus laws, very long. The first one is what we call the foundational law, Ley Bases in Spanish.
That's 238 articles, nine titles, and again, main context, public emergency and administrative, economic, financial, and energy matters, state reforms, privatizations, public employment, private employment, energy, oil and gas, and the RIGI, to which I will come back later. The second law, which is a fiscal and economic law called the Fiscal Package, which is a bit shorter, 105 articles, 8 titles, and talks about the tax moratorium, the tax amnesty, the personal assets tax reform, and the income tax reinstatement for individuals, which have been taken away by the government for the election. So let me talk a bit about RIGI. RIGI is the acronym in Spanish of what we call the Large Investment Incentives Regime. It was mentioned before.
The threshold is $200 million, but there's a higher threshold for oil and gas, which could be $300 million or $600 million. If you go to a long-term export project, that's an even higher threshold, which is $2 billion, that has additional benefits. It's not for everybody, it's limited to certain sectors. The sectors are forestry, tourism, infrastructure, mining, technology, iron and steel, energy, oil and gas. You need to use an SPV, we call them VPUs in Spanish. The main advantages are essentially stability, 30-year stability for fiscal, customs, and exchange legal framework. The fiscal is very important because income tax is gonna be limited to 25%. It's 35% for other people. The tax, dividend on taxes, which is currently 7%, after seven years, goes back to half, 3.5%.
There's an accelerated amortization, there's a VAT tax credit certificate system. There's indefinite carry forward of losses, and eventually, you can even sell them. And you get full credit for credits and debits tax paid, and no thin capitalization rules apply for the first five years. So very convenient from a tax point of view. When you relate to customs, there's a promise of no export taxes after three years, and there's no import taxes for capital goods. And lastly, on effects, there's an increasing release from the repatriation obligation that all Argentine exporters have, and eventually, you can keep those dollars, and if there were FX controls, after you use your free dollars, you can access to repay debt and dividends. Also very important is that, there's an international jurisdiction available for dispute resolution.
It could be ICSID or it could be something else, but you could settle your resolutions outside of your disputes, outside of Argentine courts, so very important for investment. Also, our economist touched on this, but let me go quickly through a few things which are relevant. The government aims to eradicate fiscal deficit, and in this way, defeat inflation and reduce poverty. The current policies, was mentioned this before, is zero fiscal deficit, both primary and financial. This is reinforced by the 2015 draft budget law, which the president submitted to Congress a few weekends ago. We have a very, very tight central bank monetary policy. This began with the issuance of BOPREAL.
BOPREAL is, if you're not familiar with, a bond that the central bank issued to pay the suppliers, which implied not only an FX swap, but it postponed claims for reserves and partly reduced the excess of money supply. Then the central bank, this is taken from central bank presentation, has an approach which they call the faucets. And they, the approach is three faucets to reduce excess money supply. The first one is faucet number one, which was a financing of the government by the central bank. This has been eliminated due to fiscal adjustment. There's a T missing there, and I know it's late. The government doesn't need any more money from the central bank. It's financing itself.
The faucet number two, which is a central bank sterilization, and interest on the debt to central bank in pesos, that's called the quasi-fiscal deficit. It was again eliminated due to a combination of negative interest rates at the beginning, rate cuts, and then migration to treasury, so we no longer have the Leliqs, which were these short-term bonds or bills issued by the central bank. Now, they have been partly replaced by Lecaps, which are bills issued by the treasury, and lastly, faucet number three, all these were the faucets to issue pesos, was a central bank put, which was something that the government had to concede in order for the debt to be renewed.
They had a put against liquidity with the central bank, which implied a contingent liability, and all these have been eliminated as there was a negotiation with the banks, and they were rescinded. So with all these three faucets closed, that's why no more pesos are being issued, and that's very relevant for to understand the what what's behind all the policy. So let me get into C&B. I said we start already this year. I have a good team. We are three. I have both Patricia Boedo and Sonia Salvatierra with me. Patricia Boedo was a former vice president during the Macri times, so she was vice president of the of the entity.
I would say that we have a very effective interaction with the other economic areas of the government, be it the Ministry of Economy, the Finance Secretariat, the Central Bank, with which is our FinCEN, Superintendency of Companies, or AFIP, which is our IRS. So we, we interact, and we work a lot with all these agencies. What's our purpose? Well, becoming normal again, whatever that means. We wanna certainly be a part of the world economy again. We wanna reassert ourselves, certainly promote foreign investment. We like to say that our policy is austerity and effectiveness, and we try to adhere to that. What are our objectives? We, we divide this in short term, medium term, and long term. In short term, certainly the normalization of the FX restrictions is an objective.
I have no doubt about it. I'm gonna touch about it in the next slide, but we're also very concerned about the financing of small and medium enterprises. We are also very concerned with the simplification of the public offering approval process. This is something that you probably have all encountered if you have issued debt. We had a little Greek gift at the beginning of the year from Congress, in which they made us the regulator of the crypto world, so now we have to regulate, and we're working heavily on that, the VASPs, Virtual Asset Service Providers. We're also working on a regulation of an initial regulation of tokens.
As I mentioned before, there's a tax amnesty open now in Argentina, so one of the things you have to do, or you can do, to avoid paying a penalty on the tax amnesty is make an investment in the capital markets. So we were very generous with that, and we had a wide options. So the, essentially, except for CEDEARs, which are our Argentine ADR, all the options are open. So you can easily invest your money in the capital markets and avoid paying the penalty from the amnesty. To date, we have approved more around 30 regulations, and we're working on many more at the same time. So somebody asked me today earlier at the cocktail, how long I have been in office, and I said, "It depends. If I count it by the calendar, that's around ten months.
If I count it by the amount of things we have faced, that's around ten years." But let me go on. Let me talk a bit about FX restrictions. The release of FX restrictions is not done alone by CNV. This is coordinated with the central bank and the Ministry of Economy. And as you know, it's not immediate. Federico has made that very clear before. So what I'm gonna do is gonna be, I may frustrate some of you, but it's gonna be merely descriptive. I will not say when. I will not say how, how being whether it's gonna be in phases or not. But if you look back, you may take your guess. So what do we have currently? Well, we have...
It's difficult to explain FX restrictions in Argentina, because what we locally call SEPO, it has at least two different parts. One is the central bank, which essentially the reasons you can buy dollars from the central bank are very, very limited. This is official dollar. But then at the same time, we have a parallel market or financial market in the capital markets, and that is, that's essentially what we have done. We have moved part of our FX transactions into the capital markets through the blue chip transactions, which I assume everybody is familiar with, so no need to explain that. And now we still have a lot of restrictions in this financial market of FX in the capital markets, no? So what are those restrictions?
Currently, what we have is a restriction for non-residents who cannot take more than ARS 200 million a day. That's either operate a sale or a transfer abroad. That, at today's parallel rate, is around $165,000. So there's a limit to how much money you can take on a daily basis. We still have, for blue-chip swaps, a one-day parking, and we have certain financings in pesos that prevent you from entering into blue-chip swap. We also have restrictions from our mutual investment funds, which used to be bi-monetary, no longer. Now, you have to choose your currency, and you cannot change between currencies. We have some central bank regulation, which is a nightmare. Again, central bank regulation, so I want to stress that.
Which makes you, every time you make a transaction, your money has to go back and forth to the bank, either a bank in Argentina or a bank abroad. There's a few exceptions, but that is a nightmare that we would like, love to get rid of. But we have already done a lot of things, and there were a lot of parkings, and they were unified at one day. That was before I assumed office, but under this government already. There was a big weekly information by the brokers, gone. There was an affidavit restraining certain transactions in what we call the PPT segment, in which, because there was a price differential, you had to promise that you had not transacted.
You had to give a rep that you had not made a transaction in the last fifteen days and make a covenant that you would not transact in the next fifteen days. That's gone. When the BOPREALs were issued, we find out that all these restrictions on the BOPREAL applied, so we had to accept the BOPREALs. Then we realized that the BOPREALs were not quoting at par. They were quoting below par, so people had not only to sell the BOPREAL to pay the supplier but do a supplementary transaction, and the supplementary transaction was also caught by all these restrictions, so we accepted that. There was a restriction on the net worth of stockbrokers. They cannot dollarize themselves. That was gone.
Then we've, as credit, particularly mortgage credit, came back to Argentina, we realized that when you wanted to give a mortgage loan, the one-day period, holding period, didn't work, so we had to make an exception for that. Last thing we did is we did away, this was last week, with a five-day pre-notice that you had to do before you do a transaction, and also, we consider an USD financing no longer it prevents you from doing a blue chip swap. You can see, if you wanna find or answer yourself the question, there have been a lot of layers that have been slowly taken away. We certainly know there's a lot of work more to be done, and we wanna do that work. Again, this is in coordination with Ministry of Economy and Central Bank.
So when we look at medium term, what are we thinking about it? Well, certainly we're thinking about continuing to align Argentina's regulatory framework with international standards. Not that we are not. We are in pretty, pretty good shape, but we wanna continue to do that. We are part of IOSCO. IOSCO is International Organization of Securities Commissions. I, myself, am a board representative from IARC, which is the Americas Regional Committee within New York, so that includes SEC. We are also aiming to become a full member of the OECD. That involves a lot of things. Some of those things, particularly everything has to do with corporate governance, fall within the jurisdiction of the CNV, so that's now under my jurisdiction. We wanna continue with the ESG agenda, everything has to do with sustainability and climate change.
One of the challenges we have is implementation of the NIIF S1 and S2 rules, which is something we need to do. But let me point out that Argentina already has a corporate governance code. It has around five sustainability regulations. It has 84 green or other thematic bonds issues, or issuances, and 11 ESG investment funds already in place. When we look at the long-term objectives, I have to say that the development of capital markets is very, very much dependent on macroeconomic stability. So there's some things that come with that, and there's nothing we can do for the long-term development if we don't have a macroeconomic stability. But we certainly would like to increase our international debt offerings. This year, we had already seven offerings for $2.3 billion.
That includes, inter alia, our blue chips, like YPF, PAI, Telecom, and TGS. We had two IPOs this year, that's not a big figure, and they're local IPOs. We would love to have international IPOs again. The last one we had was in 2018. Certainly, one of the challenges we have is to go through the development of rates and real estate financing. We have a big problem. My colleague, Roberto, not my colleague, my. I forgot how you say in English when you have the same, share the same name. But never mind, and he talked about the wallet. One of the big challenges we have is, wallets are now the door to capital markets, because wallets bring the money.
He explained that that money cannot stay there sitting quietly, so it has to be invested, and they have developed a very efficient way to invest that money into mutual funds. So that, this is how we grew from having 400,000 brokerage accounts a few years ago, and now we have 20 million brokerage accounts. There's been a phenomenal increase of that, and all our kids use wallets. It's something completely different, a huge generational change. And lastly, on the long term, we are always interested in financial education. That's something we are very concerned with. Argentines are very, very good when it comes to talking about dollars and changing dollars, but if you talk to them about other investments, they are not so good, and there's a lot of work that we have to do there.
Let me finish with some final highlights. We passed already around two or three weeks ago what we consider to be a very important regulation, which is Private Offering Regulations. Which is, it's now in place. It's a U.S.-style regulation with a safe harbor approach, and you can have up to 35 purchasers, not more than 10 can be non-qualified or non-accredited, you would say, in the U.S. And that you have to do nothing because you're under the Private Offering regime. In this Private Offering regime, we regulated employee stock option plans and also extraterritorial offers. We are looking forward at regulating the mutual funds that can acquire foreign assets without limitations.
They're called the Senebi funds, but in Argentina, because of the Mutual Fund Law, you have a limitation that you cannot invest in foreign assets more than 25%, and this is a window that we would be opening to some kind of of funds that would not have that limitation. We talked a lot about FX today. The effects in everything has to do with debt is quite okay. We had a very bad rule, which no longer applies, but I think most of you are familiar with. We call it the 40/60 rule. Under the prior administration, you could only pay 40% of whatever matures, and you had to refinance 60% for longer than two years. That rule is gone. If your bond matures tomorrow, you can pay fully, the full of it.
There's something which is typical of FX regimes, which is there can be no prepayments, but that's more difficult to get around. As I said, we continue to relax restrictions. We know, and I explained before, that we have still restrictions for non-resident trapped in Argentina. The president is always very good at explaining this. One of the things that has to go away before we can relax the restrictions is the stock. So once we feel the stock is under control, and if we open that door, not everybody will run at the same time, then this can be relaxed. We're also looking at privatizations.
As I mentioned in the three initial laws, there's a number of companies, not that big as in the '90s, but there's a number of companies that are gonna be privatized, and one of the ways they're looking to do that is through the capital markets. That requires a few solutions. One of the things we needed to do is an exemption from the tender offer regime, because if you list a company and somebody buys it, immediately I'm taking it out of the capital market, so that didn't make sense, and we're also working on a regulation, yet to come, on the financial balances of these companies because they usually cannot comply with the rules with the history and everything that companies need to access the capital markets.
We implemented T+1 settlement since May, in line with the U.S. I think we were one of the few countries, except with the NAFTA countries, moving into T+1. We already did that, and our markets are operating T+1. I'm also participating personally of the FATF assessment. As you know, we call it GAFI in Spanish, but Argentina's under assessment in order to see whether it keeps its status, or it goes down to the gray list. And a lot of that has to do with blue chip swap market and then understanding how this flow of money moves. So I got personally involved in this in order to help with that, the assessors understanding how this particularity of Argentina. And lastly, we are open for business, so we are...
All investors are welcome, and I'm open to questions, but we'd like to see you all back. Come to Argentina. [Foreign Language]. If anybody has a question, I'm open, so... You're either tired or ate too much.
Okay, thank you.
All very clear. So thanks a lot for being here. With this, we conclude our investor day here. So, very happy for you participating. All of you are invited to our closing bell ceremony, if you wish to stay, but then again, thanks, and let's see you in another one. Thank you.