Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. I'm Myrtle, your Chorus Call operator. Welcome and thank you for joining the Turkcell conference call and live webcast. All participants will be in listen-only mode, and the conference is being recorded. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer session. Should any of you need assistance during the conference call, you may signal an operator by pressing star and zero on your telephone. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Ali Serdar Yağcı , Investor Relations and Corporate Finance Director. Mr. Yağcı , you may now proceed.
Thank you, Myrtle. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Turkcell Investor and Analyst Conference Call today. We have a very brief presentation consisting of four slides, which will be delivered by our CEO, Mr. Murat Erkan, and our CFO, Mr. Osman Yılmaz. We will then take your questions. Now I hand over to Mr. Erkan.
Hello everyone. Good morning and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today. I will initially provide you with a quick recap of our first nine-month performance. Following that, I will explain how recent macroeconomic developments are affecting Turkcell business and give some clarity on our actions and the plan tackling these challenges. Then our CFO, Osman, will take you through our balance sheet metrics and financial risk management details. Despite the strict lockdowns that prevailed over the first half of the year, we deliver a strong performance thanks to our well-executed diversified business model. Enjoying increased mobility and solid tourism activity in the third quarter, we further strengthened our operational and financial performance, which reflected on our subscriber net addition of 2.5 million and above inflation top line growth.
In the first nine months of the year, we managed to grow our revenue by just over 21% delivering real growth. This was enabled through rising data usage, growing subscriber base, and price increases. Our strategic focus areas, primarily through digital services and Paycell and a remarkable performance in the international business, further supported the growth. Rising by 20% year-on-year, our EBITDA reached TRY 10.8 billion. In terms of operational profitability, there was a very slight impact compared to last year. Mainly stemming from rising energy prices and recovery of marketing expense, which were suspended at the outbreak of the pandemic. Despite high financial volatility during the year, our prudent financial management supported us to achieve a TRY 3.6 billion bottom line, corresponding to a 24% year-on-year increase.
Taking this strong performance into consideration, as you will also recall, we once again revised our guidance upwards with the Q3 result in early November. Further to that, beginning from mid-November, we unfortunately started to experience a rapidly worsening macroeconomic environment. A relentless depreciation of Turkish lira against the dollar as high as almost 50% in just over two months could well be defined as a six sigma event. It was inevitably reflected on the local prices, which together with the global rising energy and commodity prices, ramped up the consumer price index to the peak of the past three years as of November. As corporates, we have entered into periods where the impacts of these unfavorable macroeconomics will probably be more compelling than ever.
However, at Turkcell, we are focused on minimizing this impact with the actions we already taken and through the ones we are currently taking in line with our prudent financial risk management approach and as per our diversified business model. Moving to the next slide, let me further clarify on this action and their implication. Starting with the revenue front, we have once again increased our price this month in addition to the several price adjustments we made through the year. This will conveniently position us to better monetize our expanded subscriber base going forward. Our strategic focus areas and international operation will also support the top-line growth. One of the most frequently asked question is the FX sensitivity of our EBITDA. In our Turkcell operations, we have around 3% FX revenue share coming from roaming and wholesale business.
On the OpEx side, FX share is around 7%. Thanks to this FX revenue generated in Turkey and also margin, equivalent international business, it's fair to state that FX sensitivity of our EBITDA is quite minimal. The other FX related concern area is apparently our capital expenditure as around 75% of our CapEx is in hard currencies. As you might recall, we have announced this year operational CapEx to sales guidance as 21%. While the depreciation of Turkish lira is clearly an issue, its impact will be limited compared to the competition. We have front loaded the vast majority of our CapEx earlier this year. To further address FX impact on CapEx of upcoming periods, demand driven CapEx will continue to be our priority with an increased focus, which means that discretionary CapEx will not be on the table.
Going forward, in terms of CapEx, our focal point will be the core business, such as fiber investments and investments with immediate revenue impact in the short to medium term. Thanks. Thank you for listening to me. Now I will leave the floor to Osman for the financial section.
Thank you, Murat Bey, and hi, everyone. I'll continue with the balance sheet leverage and FX risk metrics. As a telecom company having operations in an emerging market, liquidity management is unarguably the most critical issue for us. We have long been taking necessary measures to maintain a strong liquidity position and continuously monitor it with a proactive approach. At the end of the third quarter, we had a cash position of around $1.4 billion equivalent, which was mainly in hard currencies. This conveniently covers our debt service until 2025. Our repayment schedule for the next year or even the following years is quite manageable as well. Hence, we are not in an urgent need for additional financing in the short term. Please also note that the average maturity of our borrowing is around four years.
In addition to our strong balance sheet, we also had around $600 million committed credit lines with global lenders as at the end of third quarter, supporting our liquidity position even further. As you might recall, our net leverage was at 0.9x at the end of third quarter. However, given the rapid depreciation of Turkish lira, this leverage level will inevitably be exceeded should we close the year with the existing value of the lira. To give you a bit of color, we can note that each 15% depreciation in the lira increases our net leverage by around 0.1x. Next slide. Now a few words on management of FX risk. As you may recall, we keep majority of our cash in FX and also employ hedging instruments as a part of our prudent financial risk management approach.
At the end of Q3, we had around $2.2 billion dollar equivalent FX debt on our balance sheet. We also had $0.2 billion dollar FX position, mainly related to working capital. As a natural hedge, our hard currency cash holdings were around $1.3 billion US dollar. Remaining $1.1 billion dollar is covered by our derivative portfolio of around $1.2 billion dollar. Around 70% of our derivative portfolio consisted of participating cross-currency swaps by the end of third quarter, while 10% is plain vanilla cross-currency swaps. Proxy hedges, which are mainly FX future contracts, had 15% share. Lastly, currency swaps, which we generally use to utilize TL liquidity, had 7% weight.
We had 10% further participating cross currency swap expiry in October, bringing our nominal participating cross currency amount to around $700 million, half of the amount which we had here in late 2018. Please note that due to the significant volatility, the strike levels of some participating cross currency swap contracts have been exceeded. This led to deterioration in the effectiveness of the hedging portfolio to a certain extent. As a result, fair valuation of our derivative instruments is likely to be negatively impacted, which could result in higher FX loss in this quarter compared to the first three quarters. Restructuring them is an option, but it is very costly. Hence, we add cash FX or futures contracts to offset the loss in effectiveness.
Yet, I should also emphasize that in a scenario where we had not taken those hedging actions, we could have incurred an FX loss of a couple of billion TRY in the fourth quarter with current FX rates. It is fair to state that our hedging instruments still provide a significant protection even in the case of a six sigma event like this. This concludes our presentation. We are now ready to take your questions. Thank you very much for listening.
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we'll begin the question and answer session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question may press star followed by one on the telephone. If you wish to remove yourself from a question queue, then you may press star and two. Please use your handset when asking your question for better quality. Anyone who has a question may press star and one at this time. One moment for the first question, please. The first question comes from the line of Vyacheslav Degtyarev with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you very much for the presentation. Couple of questions. Firstly, do you currently see any of your customer groups trading down? If that were to happen, where do you see the highest elasticity of demand towards the current macro conditions? Secondly, with regard to the margin outlook, maybe you can comment at least directionally with regard to the margin outlook for the next year. Or at least, to which extent will that be possible to mitigate the negative margin effect from the rise in inflation? Maybe any costs you expect to be growing below inflation levels. Thank you.
Hello, Slava. First of all, regarding the first question, customer demand. Actually, since the FX has increased these days, demands are increasing as well due to the expectation of price will go higher. That's why the people would like to get whatever they can get as soon as possible. We don't see any customer leaving us. We don't want any customer to leave us. As you see, we net add 2.5 million subscriber for this year at first nine months. We don't see that demand as of today.
Regarding margin outlook for next year, I think it's too early to say because we are in a process of preparing next year forecast, next year guidance and next year budget preparation. Obviously, we will see some pressure on the margin. I think we have very good business and also diversified business to manage this margin impact. Obviously, there will be pressure, but I think we can manage it. Our CFO Osman will add some points as well.
Actually, regarding the margin outlook for the next year, we can say that there are three major drivers that are affecting our margins adversely, not only for Turkcell, for the whole sector. The first factor is energy prices. Energy prices are rising globally and depreciating lira is putting further pressure. The second is labor costs. We are anticipating real wage growth in the coming years as we experience this year. This is also a global phenomenon, and it is further fueled by the rising inflation in Turkey. The third one, which is more FX related, is transmission costs. International data traffic costs and roaming costs but are increasing. On the revenue side they have, it's also positive implication. Net effect is relatively more limited.
These are imminent effects. We will see the impact of these negative consequences starting from Q1. Anticipating these adverse impacts, we have been taking preemptive actions since last quarter. We have been revising our tariffs in either mobile segment or fixed segment since last September and October, by the way. We have further increased our prices in mobile and fixed in November. We are planning further increases in December. For either existing clients or new acquisition tariffs, we are planning price hikes. I can say since September we increased our prices by about 15%-30%, depending on the type of the product or depending on client type, whether it is existing client or a new client.
The other factor is we are proactively seeking areas where we can save costs. You know, Turkcell is cost-conscious company. We have always been prudent in cost management, and we are further taking additional cost actions to mitigate negative impacts of this inflation and FX-related risks. Maybe for a couple of quarters we can see some margin erosion limited. The price hikes that we have been doing and passing the inflation pass-through to our tariff prices and revenues will more than offset the negative impacts through in the rest of 2022.
Okay, thank you very much.
As a reminder, if you would like to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. The next question comes from the line of Annenkov Evgenii with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Thank you so much for the presentation. I have please two questions. The first one is on growth. You mentioned you are targeting real growth. Can you please elaborate, is it for 2022? And which assumption of inflation you are using in your base case? And do you think you can achieve real growth if inflation in the next year will be, let's say, 30%, 40%? And the second question I have is on CapEx. You mentioned you are postponing discretionary component of CapEx. Can you please give some color how big is it in terms of total CapEx and in which areas is it if it's not core but it's discretionary. Thank you.
Evgenii, thank you very much. For the first question regarding growth. I mean, our aim is to have a real growth above the inflation. This year we managed this, and next year we would like to manage this. Obviously, when you say 35, 40%, and even more than that, if such a case happens, probably we will go for real growth, but it will come with a little bit lag. Because as you know, we have contractor-based approach with the customer. Our contract with the customer will follow little bit with the lag. Obviously, our strategy is always inflationary pricing. Whatever the inflation is gonna happen, we will try to catch even above the inflation, stay above the inflation.
Regarding CapEx, obviously, for 2022, we would like to keep our CapEx ratio versus revenue similar to 2020. Obviously, we haven't finished or finalized the budgeting for next year. We will come with the guidance for next year. Obviously, as I mentioned, we spend our CapEx budget for 2021 at the first half of the year mostly. This makes us a little bit comfortable versus competition because, based on this FX ratio it's difficult to implement. As I mentioned, around 75% of our CapEx is hard currency and it's reasonable to expect some impact. As I said, we have made front loaded investment and we have started also company-wide smart CapEx project, which enable us to optimize our CapEx allocation and improve efficiency and estimates. As I said, our 75% of our CapEx is hard currency, so we'll see what we can do for the next year.
Thank you. Excluding these discretionary areas, you believe flat CapEx intensity could be potentially within reach?
Okay. Let me give the word to our CFO to go for these discretionary areas.
Actually, in order to maintain our premium image and strong quality image in mobile segment, we have never interrupted our investment even during the pandemic. To respond to rising demand, we continue to invest in the areas where we have seen reverse urbanization trends, especially in some southern parts of Turkey. This also reflected in our NPS scores. In connectivity-related parts of NPS, our scores have widened versus competitors. In mobile, we don't need to invest as heavily as we invested over the last couple of years. Our growth focus is now on fixed side, where we have been chasing the incumbent. Data center investments, mobile investments for the moment are relatively more discretionary items.
Given the uncertainties in the market and given the rising costs, these are not just related to FX. We have been pausing these in discretionary investments until we see more clarity in the market. Thanks to our proactive approach in the first half of the year in terms of CapEx, we are not anticipating any capacity or coverage related issues in any segment.
To add on top of what Osman said regarding data center, I think we are one of the best position in terms of being market leader in Turkey as data center side. We already finalized 4, you know, technologically advanced state-of-the-art data centers in Turkey. They are quite, you know, strong data centers. This is our also strong position. If somebody would like to do data center in Turkey, they have to heavily invest in CapEx as well, and FX related CapEx as well.
Thank you. That is clear. Thank you.
Once again, to register for a question, please press star and one on your telephone. As a final reminder, to register for a question, please press star and one at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Turkcell management for any closing comments. Thank you. Excuse me. Sorry to interrupt. We have a last minute registration from the line of Kayahan Demirak with AK Investment. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation and opportunity to ask questions. I have two questions. First of all, now with the given investment needs and the average revenue per user you're generating, for instance, in the fixed broadband, what is the current payback period for the fiber investments? I think I understand you can make some price adjustment, but it never is. I mean, inflation can catch the pace of the TL depreciation. I'm just trying to understand the return metrics at the current prices and the cost of investment. The second thing I like to ask, as I understand from your remarks that your current positions are unhedged because of the high costs.
I mean, what kind of a cost are we talking about, for instance, to just hedge the USD denominated in the TL terms? Or are you planning to keep it that way until you see some, I don't know, clarity, less volatility in the market? Thank you.
Okay. Thank you very much. First of all, regarding our fiber investment. Our fiber return on investment and payback period is typical fiber business is between eight-10 years. Obviously, the depreciation for the fiber investment is like more than 25 years, so it's typically eight-10 years is our existing payment period. Regarding matching for the ARPU inflation and investment payment, obviously, we will continue inflationary based pricing on the fixed side as well. Plus, I think if you compare our ARPU versus incumbent, even though we are follower, we are challenger in this segment, we are at least 20% above the incumbents ARPU. Which means that customer are appreciating our service, fiber quality, customer experience and the service level.
This is good signature, a good sign for us. We are in a good business. Our take-up rate, our return on investment much faster than the competition and also global market as well. Our take-up rate is around more than 40%, and which gives us opportunity to get payback earlier than we expected. Regarding hedge, I think Osman will give some color, but as you can imagine, hedging the money these days is quite expensive. There are limits for the hedge but maybe Osman can comment on this one.
Yes. You know, there are different types of hedges that we are using. The first one and the typical one that we use so far was long-term cross-currency swaps. We use these instruments to convert our long-term FX liabilities to fixed rate Turkish lira liabilities. Given the nature of cross-currency swap curve, which is fairly a steep curve, we avoid paying high hedging costs around these uncertain levels. Hedging five-year debt, including cost of the FX debt and hedging swaps exceeds 25%, which doesn't make sense. Rather than that, we prefer to use short-term contracts like futures contracts and forward contracts, or we prefer to convert our Turkish lira to FX.
Given the low short-term deposit rates, opportunity cost of converting Turkish lira to US dollars diminished fairly. We prefer to convert our Turkish lira to dollars when needed or use relatively shorter-term futures contracts. We're gonna continue to use long-term hedging contracts once the market settles, and we see more reasonable levels in the long end of the yield curve.
Okay, thank you. As a follow-up, in terms of the ARPU level, I mean, is there any particular levels you like to keep the ARPU levels in USD dollar terms? For instance, with the current rate, in the mobile for blended it's less than $4 per month, $3.7. In fixed, it's around $5.5 in blended terms. I mean, in dollar terms, given that your part of the business is in cost and the CapEx in dollars, is there any particular dollar level you want to keep ARPU? I don't know. I know it's not, I mean pricing is in TL, but, still as a threshold you have in mind. Thank you.
I think the quick answer for this one, we're not focusing USD level ARPU since our customer earning money based on Turkish lira. What we focus inflationary based pricing. At the end of the day, even though FX goes up and downs, volatility goes on, the short or mid-term and long-term inflation will catch up with the FX. It has to happen like this. We're focusing based on inflationary based pricing so that we can meet our customer expectation as well. That's, I mean, we obviously, agree with you, we're spending our CapEx on FX, but this is the reality of the market we are in. I think we'll catch up at the end of the day, inflation will catch up with the FX.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question comes from the line of Mandaci Ece with ÜNLÜ Securities. Please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you very much for the presentation. I have three questions. One is about the, you know, with the recent volatility, is there any effect should we assume on working capital? Is there any change in the business environment, I mean, in SMEs or et cetera? That's one question I was gonna ask. The second one is about the dividend. Since the fourth quarter earnings performance will be sensitive to currency fluctuations now, with the recent volatility, according to initial assumptions, probably we will lower our full-year estimates. How should we assume the dividend payout from 2021 earnings, given possible lower, potentially lower earnings than our initial estimates? Should we expect a higher dividend payout or similar payout like in the last two years, like the average of the last two years?
The third question is about LetterOne. I was gonna ask because they just made an announcement before the expiration of their lockup and they were looking for any strategic potential for their stake in Turkcell. Do you expect any concrete development in the near future? It will be very helpful if you share your view. Thank you very much.
Let me start from the question number three, which is regarding LetterOne expiry of lockup. Obviously, as a management team, as executive team, we would like to support our financial, our operational level to help for the shareholder and investor. We cannot comment on LetterOne's lockup and what is their option. Obviously, the right target for this question is LetterOne side, but I think we're doing our maximum to support our shareholders. Regarding dividends, Turkcell is quite, you know, a well-known company in terms of dividends, and we are quite a sustainable company in terms of distributing dividends. We have a clear policy, and we implement this policy during the last probably five years.
If government doesn't decide or any cap on the dividend side, we would like to follow our you know rules in terms of distributing dividends, which is 50% of the net profit. For the first question, volatility, let me give the word to Osman to describe you on the volatility side.
Actually, the FX volatility does not have much to do with our working capital as most of our receivables are in Turkish lira, and we haven't witnessed any deterioration in payment habits of our customers. Actually, we've experienced the lowest NPL ratios in Turkcell history, despite deteriorating macro outlook. Going forward, we don't foresee any negative impacts from working capital changes.
Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the conference over to Turkcell management for any closing comments. Thank you.
Okay. First of all, I would like to thank everyone who joined the conference call and hope to see you at the end of the year conference call as well. Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Ladies and gentlemen, the conference is now concluded, and you may disconnect your telephone. Thank you for calling, and have a pleasant evening.