Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our analyst call following our half-year results announcement this morning. We're going to jump into Q&A pretty fast. I just thought I'd share a quick summary of what we think are the key takeaways. As usual, I'm joined by Thomas Reisten, our Chief Financial Officer, and I am Vivek Badrinath, the Chief Executive Officer of Vantage Towers. It's great to be with all of you this morning. First thing first, the commercialization of our business continues, and we are having more business with MNOs on one hand, and also, I would say, quite nicely expanding our footprint on IoT and DAS. That is the adjacencies beyond the MNO business.
There are a number of, I would say, proof points that we put out in the press release this morning and the release this morning that shows some progression in a number of geographies. From a commercial point of view, we have added in this first half more than 670 non-Vodafone tenancies, of which more than 370 are the non-committed ones, which continues to show our progression. If you recall, these numbers were 200 and 100 respectively in the first quarter. As you can see, a good momentum in our commercial activity. That means our tenancy ratio is now at 1.42, whereas it was 1.39 in the prior year. Once again, progression of our tenancies through our commercial activity.
If you look at the other side, which was the area that impacts the most, the cost structure, our Ground Lease Buyout Program progressing well. Now 250 signed contracts in Spain and Germany, and over 60 in the other markets. We have many more to come because it's a pipeline, so there's the commitment that we get from the landlord, and then there's the administrative steps that take us to the signing figure, which, as I said, is 250 in Spain and Germany and 60 in other markets. In terms of financials, a 2.5% revenue increase to EUR 494 million in H1, and well-positioned to accelerate in H2. Our EBITDA margin is at 54%, in line with our guidance.
If you look at our recurring free cash flow, it's at EUR 284 million in H1. That's because the tax and interest payments are scheduled for the second half. Nevertheless, we announced on Friday night that we were increasing our recurring free cash flow guidance for the fiscal year 2022 from the previous range of EUR 390 million-EUR 400 million to a range of EUR 405 million-EUR 415 million. That's a combination of our borrowing costs being optimized and cash tax expenses. We do expect to retain these benefits over the medium term. At the same time, we reiterate our unchanged revenue and EBITDA after leases margin guidance for this financial year, as well as we reaffirm our medium-term targets.
That's the short summary of this half year results session. With this, I'd like to turn it over to you for questions, requesting you kindly to limit your questions to one question per analyst so that we can go through the questions that each and every one of you may have. With this, I'd like to open the floor for your questions. Thank you very much.
Lovely. Thank you very much, Vivek. Our first question today comes from Georgios Ierodiaconou from Citigroup. Georgios, please go ahead.
Good morning, and thank you for taking my question. It's actually based on the OpEx side. We've seen two lines have a slight increase in cost. One was maintenance cost, which you highlight in the presentation, and the other one was the ground lease expense. Is it possible to give us an idea of what may drive whether similar drivers will be in place in the second half of the year? Any comments as to how this could phase into next year. Particularly, one thing I wanted to understand is how does it work with the decommissioning of sites in Spain, whether the benefits of that are coming with a delay or not. Thank you.
Sure. Maybe I'll turn this one to Thomas because he's been going through that bridge pretty much in detail .
Overall, important to say that obviously we are very much on track to achieve our guidance on EBITDA as much as obviously we've been talking about as well, the revenue guidance and now upgrading our cash flow guidance. Broadly stable versus the last year is our guidance, and that's what we feel very confident that we can actually achieve that. Talking a little bit about the individual cost components in that. On the maintenance cost, we've commented on that as well. We've seen some one-off costs and actually other costs that are in that line as well that are related to the ramp-up of our activities. Things like, I mean, I'll give you an example.
Like, understanding actually our sites a bit better, doing analysis on our sites in terms of actually how much lease-up potential do we have in that context. Expenses like this we've actually seen coming through in the first half, and that obviously should leave us in a very good situation for the future to be well prepared to capture actually the growth in that. On the ground lease side then, what we've seen here is actually the full-year impact of the lease term reassessment coming through. You will remember that in particular on Greece, they were actually only coming in in December last year. We have seen actually some incremental cost coming through from that lease term reassessment as a full-year effect. There's no incremental lease term reassessment just to deal with that potential question as well coming our way.
No further cost increases actually on that. I mean, another important aspect of the ground lease cost is if you look at the phasing, they're actually developing very, very well and very stable, i.e., not inflating. That's, I think, very important to note in the context of our programs, the GLBO program in particular, that is starting to ramp up obviously, as we were saying, in our announcement as well. I mean, 310 sites GLBOs we have now signed, which means contractual agreements finished and savings as a consequence immediately coming through. The pipeline of deals that we have agreed is now close to 600. We're making very good progress in the number of territories.
I mean, Spain and Germany, 250 of those signatures, 60 in the other markets. There's really good progress on those initiatives. That should leave us then, consequently, if you just take the trajectory into the future of achieving actually high fifties% EBITDA after leases margin on a very good trajectory to achieve exactly that guidance over the medium term.
I'll ask a clarification on the maintenance costs. You mentioned that you are spending more in trying to have a better analysis of your sites. Is the 20.
It's one-off.
Is what we've seen in the first half of this year typical of what you'll be spending in the future, or is this a one-off? I understand we shouldn't assume the growth keeps accumulating, but is the level you're spending now typical of what you will in the future?
No, what we are saying is actually that we had one-off costs in the first half, and that we had investment costs that are not necessarily repeating into the future, basically.
Thank you, Georgios.
Okay. Thank you very much, Georgios. Our next question today comes from Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Andrew, please go ahead.
Yeah, morning. Morning, guys. Just had a question on your guidance. Hi. It's obviously a year, I think, since you set your guidance, and we're still in kind of acceleration mode, so it's a bit harder maybe for us to kinda get a real sense as to kind of what's going on in terms of underlying growth. Just wondering if you could comment on how your underlying drivers are progressing versus how you anticipated things when you set midterm guidance. You know, TOTEM's growth looks pretty decent this quarter, as do other revenues like IoT. Maybe if you just run through what's going better and what is not, versus your original expectations of your core revenue drivers. Thank you.
Yeah, look, I think we're broadly speaking, we're in the corridor of what we were setting out to achieve, and that's why, I mean, as you can see, we're reasserting our guidance for this year and for the medium term. Commercially, as you can see, we are, I mean, you put it very well. It's an acceleration mode. You see first half EUR 670, first quarter EUR 200, so that's the non-Vodafone activity. The work that we're doing in terms of setting up a commercial team, engaging with customers, looking for opportunities, progressing well, I would say good clip. We did start in March 2020 to stand up that team and, I'm very proud of them because they really go out there.
They're with the customers, and we've been seizing all the little windows of opportunity to travel that we could seize in the last few weeks and months to go into countries as a leadership team and meet with some of our larger customers. Good reception, always, ideas. Beyond the let's get the work done on the existing contracts, let's make those new contracts future-proof in terms of being, making them into proper Master Services Agreements. Good progress there. On the other hand, can we do something more? Let's explore new areas. I'd say that space is healthy. In terms of production and the Build-to-Suit programs, the acceleration, as we've always said, there was a level of, I would say, seasonality.
If you look at the first quarter, we were finishing some of the sites of the previous budgetary year. Now we're wrapping up, and you will see the acceleration in the second half in terms of production of items. It's fair to say it's a lot of work. That's also we're professionalizing the teams, working with the teams and their vendors because the ramp-up is pretty significant to make sure that those volumes that we're putting into the market are well managed by our, you know, construction, tower building, the cement needs to dry, all that stuff needs to get done. We're on it at a very, I would say, analytical level, detailed side by side. We're making that industrial progress. It's work ongoing.
That's good. GLBO, as you can see, good ramp-up now, because I gave the numbers for the signed ones and, you know, there's the limit to how much you can squeeze the time between signing and authorizing a land type of deal in any country. Can't say the times are that easy for that, but the pipeline's healthy. We've got commitments that are coming in at the right pace for us to wrap up. I'd say the acceleration is ongoing pretty much within those boundaries of what we were setting out to do, which was, I mean, we went in to an IPO with an ambitious plan, but I think we're on track. That's what I'd say, no more, no less. Yeah.
That said, and then you did see the, in terms of guidance, full year 2020, fiscal 2022 Recurring Free Cash Flow there on that aspect, which is less operational, but more, let's say, the Chief Financial Officer is happy results of taxes and borrowings, some good uplift, EUR 50 million up on the range that we were able to confirm last Friday.
Thank you.
Thanks, Andrew.
Thank you very much, Andrew. Our next question today comes from Usman Ghazi from Berenberg. Usman, please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Hi, Usman.
Hi, gentlemen. Good morning. I just wanted to touch base on the tax optimization measures that you've outlined, which has obviously come as a positive surprise. I mean, could you talk through what is actually happening here? I mean, is it just a phasing effect, you know, where you're paying taxes a bit later for the year? Or is it that the effective tax rate you expect is lower than what you anticipated at the IPO?
What we are expecting in terms of the effective tax rate is still at 26%. Overall, in terms of the calculation of cash taxes, actually we are now in absolute terms, lower. That's actually what is then leading to us being able to upgrade our guidance together with obviously the lower interest costs that we are incurring as well. Overall, you are right that there's a phasing impact if you just look at our cash flow for the first half versus the second half overall. In the first half, it's actually lighter on, in fact, actually cash payments for leases. The interest costs are due in March, and the bulk of the taxes actually get paid in the second half as well.
Having said that, having gone through our analysis, we can confidently now upgrade actually our guidance because of lower absolute tax payments and lower interest costs. We have actually reasserted our working capital movements and all of the other aspects of obviously coming up with our calculating our Recurring Free Cash Flow. As a consequence, we believe we can both, first of all, upgrade our fiscal year 2022 guidance and as well, very clearly state that this is actually an effect that we will actually retain.
Just a follow-up to that. I mean, so you would expect that cash taxes in any one year are not equivalent to the full P&L tax effect. Is it that the cash tax as a percentage of the P&L tax would be lower in any given year? Is that correct?
Well, over the long term, obviously this will equal out, right? In any case. I think what is really important to note here is that we continue to make efforts on really tax optimization as well as we've been flagging in the previous quarters and for the full year as well. The 26% is still at this stage, the guidance that we have given.
Mm-hmm.
We will continue to work on further initiatives that will then hopefully help us to drive down that percentage even more.
Great. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Usman. Our next question today comes from Simon Coles from Barclays. Simon, please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the question. It's just on Germany, and we've seen the tenancy ratio increase slightly, and we've heard a potential customer say that it's difficult to share rooftops in Germany. I was just wondering if you could give us an update on how negotiations with the landlords are going about being able to increase the tenancy ratio on rooftops, and then if you can give any color on that increase in the tenancy ratio, whether that was more weighted to your rooftops or your ground-based towers, that would be really helpful. Thank you.
It's fair to say that these tenancies that we've achieved so far in Germany are more skewed towards ground-based at this point, because that's where the existing MNOs have expressed more needs at this point. That said, we've gone through quite a lot of analysis work, calling the landlords, discussing with them, and I would say we're seeing good feedback. I mean, people understand the need to improve the use of these assets, and there is good response overall. It's one of our projects, one of our action plans.
You remember that we came out at the IPO and then were followed, in fact, by American Tower when they bought into Telxius Germany, on the fact that there is opportunity on the rooftops in Germany, and we're working through it. We've done a lot of work on the engineering to make sure that you put up the right number of poles and the angles that work well, so that you're able to accommodate different combinations of configurations. We will have operators who want big antennas, some who just want a fill-in of a smaller antenna for higher bands, and so on. We've got now, I would say, a pretty extensive portfolio of engineering designs that support this work.
I'd say good progress to be ready to sign as we get gradually over time, more requests for rooftop sharing. It's been an area of homework in the backside, right, for us. Yeah.
Okay, great. Now it's really just those locations.
Landlords are responsive. We called a bunch of them, and the response is that they're open to conversations. I mean, there are pockets.
Thank you.
where people will say not pockets, not geographic pockets, but there'll be landlords who may be more or less, you know, inclined or interested. Overall, I mean, very, very normal, economically sound response of this subject.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thanks, sir.
Thank you very much, Simon. Our next question today comes from Jerry Dellis from Jefferies. Jerry, please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for taking my questions. Just looking at your full year revenue guidance range, please. I think for the second half, that implies a growth range of between 3.5% and 6.5%. It's obviously a relatively wide range, so I'd be interested if you could comment on what are the scenarios that will determine where you come within that guided range, please. Thank you.
I'm not sure we go deeper, I mean, you see the step up between Q1 and Q2, obviously by difference.
Yeah.
You see where we're at this point.
Yeah. I think, I mean, if you look at our trajectory at this point in time, you've seen us growing roughly around 2% actually for Q1, just over 3% actually for Q2. You see that acceleration. Really important to note that between Q1 and Q2, we obviously have then grown revenue by 1.1% already. You continue that trajectory with an incremental acceleration, which we are clearly intending to achieve and, as we've just been commenting on, are set up to actually push as well. Then you see us obviously in the range to achieve that full year guidance. The confidence we have reiterated to achieve full year guidance, as well actually the medium-term growth ambition of mid-single digit CAGR over the medium term.
Obviously there's a number of aspects that, in terms of BTS rollout, as much as continuing actually our tenancy increase that will support that.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, we're not narrowing the range at this half year.
No.
I mean, it's our first year. We're trying. We need to get everything. It's about getting things into the year in the revenue in. We're learning all that this year, so we felt that, you know, we keep this range at EUR 995-EUR 1,010 and bear with us.
I mean, if you just take another angle to this topic as well. I mean, we have been saying actually for the medium term, we do need incremental tenancies and 2,100 out of these overall 15,500 that we would require are non-committed tenancies. 15,500 to achieve actually passing the 1.5x tenancy ratio. With this 2,100 non-committed, we are now just over 1,000 of those already achieved. You clearly see that acceleration of commercial momentum on the tenancy side coming through.
It's very clear. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Jerry. Our next question today comes from Akhil Dattani from JPMorgan. Akhil, please go ahead.
Hi, Akhil.
Hi. Morning. Thanks to both of you for taking the question. If I can maybe just ask on inflation. Obviously very topical at the moment, given what we're seeing across the broader market. Maybe if you can just remind us of when your contracts reprice. I guess given we're close to year-end, you probably have a decent sense of, you know, what the escalators then kick into next year. I guess at the same time, if maybe you could give us a bit of color around cost. You know, what sort of cost inflation should we think about, both in terms of energy exposure and also in terms of your leases. Thanks a lot.
You wanna take that?
Yeah. Sure. I mean, if you start with the revenue side of this equation. I mean, you've heard us saying already at the last quarter, and that's still where we are by the way, that we believe we are in fact actually an inflation hedge. Now why is that the case? Let's go a little bit into the revenue side. Obviously our MSA with our anchor tenant is inflation linked. We've been discussing that. The repricing of this one happens always for the fiscal year. That actually steps in then, for first of April on this. Overall, if you just look at our base of revenue contracts, we can comfortably say that over 95% of our contracts are inflation linked. You take the 85% of.
Vodafone.
Vodafone plus the remainder. In that context, we can actually say over 95% of our contracts are inflation linked. That gives us already a lot of certainty over the future revenue growth from an inflation point of view. Take that, and you go through our cost lines and how we can actually impact our cost lines. Maintenance costs, a lot of renegotiation that actually happens every year on that one, where we feel comfortable that we can actually push these contracts into the right direction and that's something that is obviously happening on an ongoing basis. On top of that, we keep on pushing our initiatives of remote monitoring of sites, which will eventually bear fruits as well.
On the energy side, by the way, which is a key driver of inflation as you see it today, this is actually a pass-through for us. Whilst on the one hand our results would not be impacted just to a very minor part, it's actually our own energy costs, we are still working for our customers on energy efficiency solutions in order to drive down these costs as well. Last but not least, you've seen the lease costs. The cost increase that you've seen in the first half is still down to obviously the lease term reassessment, the full year impact, as I've outlined a moment ago.
If you look at the phasing really month by month over the course of our existence, actually the costs have not inflated to a large extent, and our initiatives are starting to obviously mitigate that. We believe that GLBO can obviously help us in other initiatives actually renegotiating of contracts as well to moderate these costs over the medium term so that we do indeed achieve our high 50s% margin on that one. You take all of that into account, then we have the ability to manage actually in an inflation environment our cost base, and we have actually the positive impact onto the revenue side.
It's worth flagging that, indeed, we've had the question several times on what proportion of our revenue comes from is inflation indexed, and so we went through the scan. What I mentioned at the beginning, the fact that we sit down and have a more structured relationship with each operator in every market, that has yielded good results in that space, which is why we're now at above 95% of our revenues inflation indexed.
That's really helpful. Can I just ask one clarification? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I seem to remember that at the IPO point, you flagged that some of your third-party contracts were not yet inflation-linked because of the way that Vodafone had reciprocal relationships with, obviously, other tower cos. Where are you in the process of renegotiating those contracts into inflation-linked contracts? 'Cause I guess that was part of obviously the journey.
No, that's the answer.
For the IPO.
No, you're spot on, Akhil. That's exactly what we're talking about. That is, take 85%, 80%, a bit under 85% is Vodafone. Okay, fine. That's inflation indexed as we know. I mean, we're telling you today that 95% plus of our revenue.
Of our total revenue
Of our total revenue is on the other side, which is with inflation. Some are, some might be, those. I mean, a lot of it is actually that we moved the needle during this period. Typically, when I say we sit down with them, we say, "Okay, we had these old contracts that were like single site type of contracts. We piled them up. Let's put them into a framework. Let's agree what the framework looks like. Let's agree the escalator on this framework," and all those sort of things. That work's been progressing at a good pace. I mean, it's kind of a door-opening conversation with them in EM&O when you start to engage with them in a market. We managed to put it quite successfully on top of the conversation.
Hence now the comfort we have by saying that 95% of our revenue is already inflation indexed. I'd say that subject is by and large behind us. It is the way to look at it. We're on the good side now. Yeah.
Perfect. Thanks very much.
Thank you very much, Akhil. Our next question today comes from Emmet Kelly from Morgan Stanley. Emmet, please go ahead.
Hi, Emmet.
Hello.
Hi. Good morning, everybody. Hope you're all keeping well.
Yeah.
My question is on.
Emmet, sorry to interrupt. You've got your microphone above your head, so we can't hear you very well.
Yeah, yeah.
Excellent.
The static version was not quite perfect. Yeah.
Well spotted. Absolutely. Good stuff. I have a question, please, on towers M&A. If I look at the European towers landscape, it looks like the M&A side has definitely gone a little bit quiet over the last eight or nine months. Can you maybe just say a few words about how you see the European towers landscape? In particular, if you could maybe just say a few words about Liberty Global and their tower intentions. They said they would look at strategic options for their stake in CTIL in the U.K., whether that's something that interests you. Also maybe entering new markets, were Liberty to put up their towers for sale in the Netherlands and Belgium, please. Thank you.
Sure. Look, it is. Yeah, it's a bit more quiet, but not that there's actually some rumbling always going on, right? I mean, the tower market is a happening market. No concrete. I mean, if there were a deal, we would have had a conversation on whatever deal that would be by now. Nothing to disclose at this point. It's fair to say that as you know, I mean, Liberty is a partner, has a JV in the Netherlands with Vodafone. CTIL, obviously, we are already a 50% shareholder. I've never made a secret that we'd be interested in consolidating CTIL. It's a good asset in a country where there are relevant with a very good customer base.
Obviously, two anchor tenants is always a desirable situation to be in, like we have in Greece. We'd be very happy to offer to VMO2 the same, let's say satisfactory service that we offer to Wind Hellas in Greece. We are very motivated. I've made no mystery of it to anyone. I think I've said it publicly, I've said it to our customers there. At the end, it's a transaction, and there are other parameters in terms of price, MSA, et c., that may come into consideration. It's in their gift. It's for them to say when they want to move and how they want to move. We've stated our interest clearly.
Any broader conversation with Liberty is obviously something that we'd welcome. You know, these are people with whom transactions have happened before, so there is good, let's say, dialogue and interaction. In the broader space, you've also heard our majority shareholder, Vodafone, state clearly that they were supportive of us playing a role in the industry consolidation in Europe, that they'd be supportive going forward. I think they went all the way up to saying that combinations with like-minded operator-originated Tower Cos are things that they could consider going all the way up to co-control if need be. I'd say the optionality is definitely there. It's multifaceted and we're active.
I would say, engaging, or ready to engage with any opportunity that comes up in this space. I think everybody's kind of looking at their options. There's a lot of optionality in the market right now. That's the way to look at it.
A, a very quick-
I expect things to.
A very quick follow-up, if I may, Vivek. Just on the antitrust side, do you believe that maybe the antitrust environment has maybe become a little bit more challenging or difficult given the ruling that Cellnex had from the Autorité de la concurrence in France? Or do you believe that it's largely specific to Cellnex because they've been gathering three, four, even five portfolios in some of their markets?
Well, look, regulatory decision commentary is a very dangerous sport, so I try to veer away from that. It's fair to say that in France, the Cellnex portfolio is basically based on three out of the four players in the market, right? I mean, the Iliad portfolio, the Bouygues portfolio and the SFR portfolio. Their competition authority would be looking at it. I think each case is going to be different. Let's recall that INWIT was agreed, that the Greek situation for us was agreed. That today the U.K. is looking at, I mean, the CMA is looking at the Cellnex-Hutchison deal in the U.K., but that is still open-ended, so we don't know which way that will go.
On the French side, the remedy was pretty straightforward. I mean, and it was linked to a market analysis that the Autorité de la concurrence did of splitting the market into four boxes and trying to get a feel of each one of them. I don't hear a resounding, "Let's stop consolidating towers in Europe." I think the common understanding is that strong tower companies with good economics are favorable to the downstream market, which is the MNO market, because it does reduce the unit cost of delivering network to their customers. It is pro-competitive at a certain level. You know, you've got a backlog of transactions that are going through the regulatory process. That's what we're seeing now, post the very active period before.
I think the philosophy just needs to be arrived at. I wouldn't overread into it, but it's fair to say that we watch very carefully all these regulatory decisions because they're important for us to understand what's the art of the possible. Yeah.
Super. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Emmet. Our next question today comes from Luigi Minerva from HSBC. Luigi, please go ahead.
Good morning.
Yes. Good morning, everybody. I wanted to ask you, your comment, you know, your views on the tower strategy of 1&1 in Germany. They gave more details last week. I think, you know, to recap, they are willing to work with many tower cos. They mentioned three. They are looking for one tower co to be a sort of coordinator, and then they're also looking for a build-to-suit partner. I was wondering, what are your views? What is your appetite given this disclosure? What kind of contribution from a business with 1&1 is in your guidance? Thank you.
Okay. Quick point first. It's fair to say that, the contribution from 1&1 in our guidance initially was.
Fairly low, actually.
Yeah.
So-
Yeah, moderate to low.
Very moderate.
Yeah. Because, well, it's in their gift, so you don't bet on a single unit contract when you put it in your guidance. It's also fair to say that engagement with 1&1 is extremely important to us. We feel that on the co-location space, typically, we have a lot to bring because we have a very attractive grid in Germany with an experienced team to deliver on that grid. We are in the places, typically, we have sites in places which are relevant to 1&1's rollout plans because they roll out starting from zero to a certain level of coverage to another broader level of coverage. For that, using existing sites is the most cost-effective and time-effective way to deliver the network. We're engaging actively with them.
As you heard from their announcements last week, they're very actively in the process of negotiations. Those negotiations are obviously private between 1&1 and the various TowerCo. I'm not at liberty to give more disclosures. As soon as there's something, if and when there's something that needs to be disclosed, we will of course make the disclosures appropriately. It's still ongoing. Co-locations where relevant. We think we have a strong value proposition. I think we are a credible counterparty in the German market, so we hope that we can do something valuable and interesting with 1&1. We have appetite to your question.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Luigi. Our next question today comes from James Ratzer from New Street. James, please go ahead. Your line is now open.
James, I'm afraid we can't hear your voice.
Yes, James. We can't seem to hear you. Can I ask if you just check in your audio settings that you have the correct device selected under your microphone? Next to the mute button, there's a little up arrow, and if you click on that, you can change which microphone that you're using. If you're just using the laptop, there we go. That sounded like something.
Okay. Can you hear me now?
That works.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes. Okay. Apologies. Not sure what happened there. Yes. Question I had, please, was just regarding your lease optimization that is going on at the moment. You've disclosed around 600 ground lease buyouts. Can I just confirm these are all transactions where you are going to be taking legal ownership of the land under the tower site? 'Cause what I was interested in is if that is the case, what other optimizations you are taking on. Are you taking on any policies to go back to landlords and just renegotiate lease terms lower, even if you're not actually taking on overall ownership of the ground? If you could give some update on that would be much appreciated. Actually, as a follow-up, if I have time from Luigi's last question, just on 1&1.
I mean, they were quite skeptical on the ability to actually get access to rooftop tenancies in Germany in urban areas. I mean, I believe you have about 15,000 rooftop sites in Germany. Could you just confirm how many of those 15,000 would now be open to a second tenant coming on, you know, assuming there are no issues with landlords or with space requirements? Thank you.
Yeah. Maybe it's on GLBO. There's a variety of things we're doing on leases more generally. It's a continuum between outright purchase, pricing, price terms renegotiation, and unit price renegotiation. Maybe, Thomas, you can walk us through that. Maybe that's the
Yeah.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I'll take the other one. Yeah.
Basically, within the GLBO program, albeit the name obviously says ground lease buyout, what we've been guiding towards is that this is not only the straight buyout of leases. We do that, absolutely, so the about 600 are actually a mix of those and acquiring long-term rights of use. That's the other element, obviously, within what we call the GLBO program that we're actually using effectively. So where you would then obviously buy ground and the right of use at a lower multiple than the total payment over the contract period, as it would be. That's one other tool that we are using. I mean, you're absolutely right.
We do use as well, outside even the GLBO program, other tools where we just simply renegotiated contracts with landlords for, on the one hand, strategic reasons to get better terms and conditions into it, even outside the pricing. On the other hand, try to as well, limit either cost increases or even go into cost decreases, in fact, as well. That's absolutely true. It's a really broad range of tools that we have available to optimize our leases overall. That's why we are saying very confidently that we can actually achieve our midterm goal of high 50s% margin, driven as well by running a GLBO and lease optimization in general, amongst other tools, obviously, on the other cost lines.
Are you able to help quantify that at all, Thomas? I mean, so outside of the 600, how many have you been able to renegotiate with landlords on lower lease fees? I suppose I'm asking this because INWIT seems to have had quite a bit of success on this front.
Yeah. We haven't made this public, but we'll certainly take it away whether actually we consider this. I mean, having said that.
Yeah
Overall, I think you do see it actually in our lease cost development outside this one effect that I've been explaining earlier, where actually over the course of the year, actually this is very well managed, I'd say. In terms of lease cost increases, you will actually see this coming up, the effects of this renegotiation as much as actually the GLBO program coming through.
It's fair to say that we use the INWIT playbook quite a lot, and we try to put in place those same methods. It is single site landlords that we have in a large majority, which is conducive to driving that process at a, let's say, unitary conversation level, on an ongoing basis. It's one of the core activities of our local operating teams, right? To make sure that each renewal is well managed, ideally, at an improved price with better terms and conditions that also enable further growth. Which leads me to your second question on rooftops. We won't be disclosing that percentage. I think it's kind of the game in the German market to build it now, this opportunity of rooftop sharing.
You've heard American Tower saying that they were like us thinking that there is opportunity to grow. Certainly, all the sampling that we've done in preparation for more rollouts in urban areas that customers may have and do tell us that landlords are open to these conversations by and large, and that we just need to work through it. I think I'm not sure if analysts really referred to. I mean, they mentioned, I think, that it is not, you know, it's not a slam dunk as an activity, the multiple tenants on rooftops. It's also worth mentioning that there are quite a few rooftops that do have multiple tenants, albeit through separate tenancies.
At that point, if you're bringing a tenant to the site, you have a very natural conversation with the landlord saying, "Well, actually, I'd like to put a second one here." For them, in the physical world, it doesn't really change much to what's happening, which is there are two poles or two equipments in two different sides of the rooftop or on the same corner of the rooftop, depending on where it is. I think there's a continuum of situations, but I would say we are making good headway. As I said earlier, it's been an area of homework for us where we invested both engineering time, modeling time, calling the landlords time, and we're making good headway there.
Obviously, that's one of the things that makes our grid attractive when we are in conversations with 1&1s.
Great. Thank you.
Thanks.
Thank you very much, James. Our next question today comes from Sam McHugh from Exane. Sam, please go ahead.
Sam, you're on mute again.
I'm on again. Yeah.
Yeah. Hi, good to see you.
Yeah. Sorry. Slow.
Yes.
One question and one small follow-up, if I could be cheeky. Just on the M&A front, I think Vodafone has made no secret recently of saying that they are keen to deconsolidate Vantage and talked about it being one of their kind of high strategic objectives in the near term. I just wondered how much time you're spending on M&A discussions versus what you thought you would be doing six months ago. In a hypothetical scenario, were Vodafone looking to do a deal with someone like TOTEM, can you just talk through what kind of approval it would need from your supervisory board and whether there'd be a shareholder vote on that? The follow-up was on energy costs. I think you said they were passed through.
I have some long memory of three-year fixed price contracts. I don't know if you could just clarify around the energy costs? Thanks very much.
Okay. That was a bit more than one question, but just marginally more. I'll leave the energy question to Thomas to cover, but I'll just say a few words. Look, on deconsolidation, first of all, I think Vodafone has, I mean, indeed, has made no mystery that they felt that deconsolidating us was not, was certainly not a taboo. I mean, they're. It's something that could make sense. To be very fair to Vodafone and to our shareholders in general, we've not seen the negative impact of not being deconsolidated so far. I mean, we're getting all the support there. Our
We have the capital, we have the cash, we have the balance sheet structure that's been set up, if you look at it, that allows us to embark on organic and inorganic opportunities in a very natural way for a tower company at this point. It's not that being deconsolidated is an on/off button to unlock more things for us in our current journey. Fine, it's still something that I think Vodafone was looking at, and it's in their gift. I think that's those questions are more probably towards them than towards the company itself.
You raise an interesting point. I mean, if there were to be a combination, I think that we're a bit early in any cycle whatsoever to be commenting on structure and approvals for a hypothetical transaction, because you could go different ways. You could go combinations. You could, depending on the shareholding of who becomes a shareholder at the end and so on. But it's fair to say that, I mean, from a Vantage Towers point of view, we feel that one thing we bring is we've got some industrial scale. We're rationalizing our operations on towers pan-European. We're getting some commercial deals that are multi-country. We've got a lean team at the center.
In terms of the industrial efficiency that we can deliver by being multi-country, we're beginning to feel that benefit. Expanding to more geographies, putting those best practices to play on more than 82,000 towers would be something that I think could be relevant, both for speed and efficiency on the cost side. I'd say we are, we're open to any of such conversation, and I'm sure our supervisory board would take the same read of it, which is that if it makes business sense, we should embark in it. We also know that the European tower industry has come a long way.
Has come a long way in the last couple of, say, 18-24 months. But there's still 75% of the towers in operation externalized from MNOs as we speak. That journey is not over, pointing to the U.S. where it's 90%. Obviously these conversations are taking place in every boardroom of every MNO across Europe. On what do we do with our towers? I'd say the supervisory board is acutely aware of the fact that this is a journey that's happening in front of our eyes, or let's say, will happen in the coming, let's say, months and years probably, but low number of years. Ready to seize those opportunities.
For the rest, transaction structure, approval structure, I think it's if anything, it's more than premature because it's everything is very hypothetical. Yeah.
Yeah. On the energy side, Thomas?
Yeah, absolutely. On the energy side, I mean, there are two parts of the energy costs that are just a bit differently treated, obviously. I mean, first of all, there's the bulk of it by far the most of the energy is being consumed in the active part of the equipment, which is a straight pass-through. You are right that on the passive side, there's actually some fixed fees over a period of time, but they then after some period of time actually do get adjusted then as well. That's obviously for passive equipment itself, which is the smaller by far amount of the energy costs.
That's the part that we have, besides obviously continuing to drive energy efficiency initiatives in general, but where we actually have our own initiatives in place as well to manage that very well. I mean, passive cooling is one of the energy efficiency initiatives that we have as an example. That's how it works out. If that answers your question.
I think it does. Thank you for the color. A follow-up question, not a question, so I'm cheating somehow.
No, that's fine. Thanks, Sam.
Thank you very much, Sam. Our next question today comes from Robert Grindle from Deutsche Bank. Robert, please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you.
Hi, Robert.
My question is about macro. Can you hear me okay?
Yeah.
Yep.
Okay. My question is about macro site revenue growth, which slowed a bit, approximately halving in Q2 versus Q1. What is driving that, please? Is it a base effect due to commissions, though you are protected to the downside on revenues in those markets? Or is there an underlying slowdown in macro site revenues in any country? Thank you.
No, there's not an underlying macro site slowdown in countries. Obviously, what you see as well is that we have the optimization in Spain actually still, which we see only in the numbers because we are protected, obviously, on the revenue side. It protects us rather than obviously giving it the upside. Yeah. When it goes through the decommissioning in Spain, then we keep the revenue equal to where it was before. The upside only comes when we would roll out more tenancies as a consequence then. I think, I mean, it's fair to say that we are in the acceleration phase and that there's more revenue growth that we're anticipating actually for the second half to come in that context.
Underlying, we continue to build our sites and obviously ramp up the rollout speed in order to then achieve that ramp up of an acceleration of revenue growth for the second half. As much as on the tenancy side, as we were actually pointing out, we're making really good progress and continue to be very optimistic for future growth actually of tenancies as well.
It's fair to say in this business, when you're adding 200 sites in a quarter and they get ramped up over the three months, you're talking small amounts at a time, right? It's a run rate business, not an in-quarter business to a large extent. Sometimes you really need a magnifier to catch the in-quarter impact of something, right? I mean, as we're ramping up, that's what you'll see. Yeah.
Thank you.
Thanks, Robert.
Thank you very much, Robert. We are coming up to the hour, but we have time for one more question from David Wright from Bank of America Merrill Lynch. David, please go ahead.
Yes, guys. Thank you very much.
Hello.
If I'm the last guy, I'll try and sneak in my question quickly. It was just some commentary from Deutsche Telekom on the potential for towers mergers. They talked about partners looking for entrepreneurship. I'm struggling to understand quite what they mean by that. I guess my question to you guys is how do you feel that you are evolving this towers model? How do you feel that you are sort of leading the industry in evolving the towers model, whether that be efficiencies on energy costs, whether that be looking at going beyond the passive infrastructure? I guess I just want to understand how Vantage is entrepreneurial just against some of the Deutsche Telekom commentary. That would be appreciated. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, look, that's a word, entrepreneurial is as much a word about the culture as it is a word about what you do, right? Let me parse the two. I don't wanna dodge the question. Probably there's a third dimension which is entrepreneurial, typically refers you to the kind of structures that I would say private equity type of organizations with those kind of incentive drives and so on could refer to. I won't go there in specifics because I think that would be. I'm not sure how you can qualify that conversation. Let me take the first two. Culture-wise, we are really working hard on this, and this is something that doesn't usually come on financial analyst calls, but we're really working to stay, I would say, lean.
I would say, you know, there's a mindset of big and small in our organization. We're big. I mean, it is a EUR 15 billion market cap, so you have to. It is a pretty serious player. At the same time, it's just north of 500 people working in the organization, and we try to keep the decision layers light. We decide extremely frequently. We don't have monthly, you know, review sessions that slow things down. We've seen this over the last few months. If you look at the number of commercial deals that we've done, and you see them in our release, I mean, these are lots of individual transactions with different people in different countries that we just power through during the quarter with people who are indeed in spaces beyond MNO.
If you look at what we're doing, you know, in terms of of building new things, sure, we are rationalizing our relationship with MNOs. You recall the conversation on inflation indexation of our contracts. It means we're very disciplined about getting the right framework with each MNO to make sure that we can develop farm and develop their business. That's straightforward B2B sales, right, to a large extent. But we're also testing new ground. As early as last year, we signed with Sigfox, which is an IoT player that needed sites. We're now working with Stadtwerke München, which is the city services of the city of Munich, to put sensors on sites. We're innovating on a technological side. We've got a bunch of, I would say, talented engineers who are looking for the opportunity to try new things on sensors, on IoT.
We are building our new DAS systems in the neutral host model of very interesting buildings with, you know, the right innovations in terms of antennas. I would say my response to what's the entrepreneurial culture, it's really a culture of trying to innovate as much as we can, trying new things. I mean, the sentence, "We should try this out because it might be the next thing that TowerCo can do," is something that is very well accepted within the organization. I think that's what this. I mean, we've got a pretty experienced leadership team, which has done telecoms for a long time. At the same time, we know that projects can be done with a bit of energy to develop new things. You see that on our roadmap of beyond MNO, which is quite interesting.
Lots of exciting one-offs or firsts. They're one-offs today, but they could be firsts tomorrow. If you can do a nice sensor deal with Munich, what's telling how many cities across Europe could find that relevant, for instance? Those are all the things that we're doing. We would stop short of competing with customers who give us 80% plus of our revenue. That's a line that when you're in 32-year contracts, you really don't want to. You wanna think carefully about, so it would have to be.
I mean, there are things that we can do, as you can see on DAS, which is a neutral host solution, where everybody's very happy to find us able to bring the signal of multiple operators. Whenever there's sharing, I think we're relevant, and we can be front foot forward, and that's what we're doing. If you look at the energy model, what Thomas mentioned earlier, when we've got models to partner with our customers to bring down their energy costs by investing into equipment for them. We put in place a number of pilots on solar, on wind, on the modernization of the energy machine inside a site when it's a pretty big site and you need to change to new technologies of batteries or power supply.
All those things we have just the right size of little some pizza teams going after these innovations. I think that's what we're trying to keep as our flavor and our culture.
That's a super helpful answer. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
That was our last question for today, so I'll now hand back to Vivek and Thomas.
Thank you so much, and thanks for your attention and your great questions this morning. As you can see, we're continuing our journey, progressing well on the commercial front. The tenancy ratio at 1.42 is one step more and good tenancies from the non-Vodafone side. Also GLBO, good progress. So we shared the signed version of it, but of course the pipeline has ramped up pretty well. As you can see on the inflation discussion, we are also quite happy with the progress we've made on, let's say, formalizing the inflation indexation in a number of our contracts.
We once again made announcements in terms of guidance, reiterating medium-term guidance, reiterating revenue and EBITDA for fiscal 2022, and upping our range for recurring free cash flow to EUR 405 million-EUR 415 million. That's an increase of EUR 15 million on both sides of the range for our recurring free cash flow. All in all, that's the current summary of state of affairs after the first half of fiscal 2022. Thanks a lot for your interest and support in our company. Have a very good day.