Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Airtel Africa Q1 2025 results. All participants will be in listen-only mode. There will be an opportunity to ask questions later during the conference. If you should need assistance during the call, please signal an operator by pressing star, then zero. Please note that this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sunil Taldar. Please go ahead, sir.
Very good afternoon and good morning to our colleagues joining from the U.S., and very warm welcome to this call, and thank you for joining us on today's call. For those that may not know me, my name is Sunil Taldar, and I've taken over as CEO from the beginning of July. I'm joined on the line by our CFO, Jaideep Paul, and Head of Investor Relations, Alastair Jones. We will shortly be answering your questions, but first, I would like to provide you with a brief overview of the performance in the first quarter, and also give a few initial insights of the business and the opportunity that is available for Airtel Africa to capitalize on. I'm very much looking forward to engaging with you in the future as we report on these ambitions. Over the last year, the macroeconomic environment has remained volatile.
However, our focus on delivering against our strategy has enabled us to perform well in constant currency terms to reduce the impact that currency devaluation has had on our reported results. Revenues in quarter one reached $1.16 billion, which was a 19% growth in constant currency terms as the demand for our services in both GSM as well as mobile money remains strong. Given the significant currency headwinds, the reported currency revenues declined by 16.1% over the year. EBITDA margins for quarter one came in at 45.3%, which was driven lower by predominantly two reasons. The first is inflationary pressures across our markets, particularly in rising diesel prices across many of our markets, in particular Nigeria. Nigerian diesel prices are over 70% higher than this time a year ago.
Secondly, the mixed effect of Nigeria, given the lower contribution coming from our largest OpCo, which is a higher margin business. Just to give things into perspective here, Nigeria used to be upwards closer to 40% contribution of our total business, has come down to in early 20s. A high-margin business has a significant impact on overall margin delivery at a group or a total business level, and that is the impact that we are calling out here. However, it is worth putting this performance into context. Despite all the macro challenges, we have been able to enhance our reputation as one of the cost leaders across the industry.
We continue to remain as the cost leaders and the most profitable mobile network operator in Africa, and this has been enabled by leveraging our continued success on cost optimization, while also retaining our reputation for affordable and reliable services, which has maintained our top-line performance and driven increased operational leverage. Our industry-leading EBITDA margins reflect the very strong execution over the last few years, and it is this, in my mind, that gives us a huge confidence to take additional steps by further intensifying our efforts to look at further cost reductions to entrench our strong reputation across the industry.
We've already seen some benefits from this new initiative or intensification of our efforts on reducing costs or driving efficiencies, with the primary focus on network costs, which is the largest cost element in our business, and particularly energy costs, which remains a significant portion of our overall cost base. The deployment of renewable energy solutions, intelligent network design, which allows us to optimize our network, and renegotiation of contracts provides me with conviction that further cost reduction measures are still available, and we will continue to deliver on this over the year ahead. I also want to take a moment to talk through the positive outlook for further growth opportunities across our markets, in particular in the fiber, which is the home broadband business and also the enterprise business.
Data center, I see a big opportunity due to increasing internet penetration, rapid adoption of cloud computing, and soaring demand for digital services. I see this as a huge, a big future growth opportunity. The recent activation of 2Africa Submarine Cable, which combined with our 77,000 km fiber footprint across the continent, enables us to unlock significant potential for future growth. We have this opportunity to leverage Airtel Africa's relationship with its corporate clients and to offer reliable, resilient capacity to our enterprise segment at a scale across the continent and accelerate our growth on the B2B segment. So fiber, B2B, and data center is a very large future growth opportunity that we'll be focusing on. As we announced earlier this year, we have broken ground in Lagos as we commence the construction of a data center in Nigeria, with plans advancing for another significant data center in Kenya.
On average, both will be 40 MW hyperscale design facilities as we become increasingly optimistic on the opportunity this business offers. Not only is our offering about tapping the shortfall in capacity, but it's also offering high-density, secure, and scalable integrated solutions to global hyperscalers, government, and enterprise segment. We will leverage, as I said, our relationship with Nxtra business in India to draw on its considerable expertise and relationship with hyperscale players who will be looking to expand across the African continent, and also leverage our relationship with the India business to understand some of the best practices on setting up our go-to-market to service our B2B customers, especially in the large enterprise segment and also in the MSME and the small business SME segment. These are just some of the opportunities that reflect my optimism for the year ahead.
Let me now briefly run through the performance over the last quarter. Before discussing our performance across the two main reporting segments, I wanted to highlight our performance on a regional basis, including both mobile services and mobile money. In Nigeria, we continue to see strong trends with constant currency growth at over 33% in the period, continuing to reflect strong demand across the market despite the challenging macro backdrop. In East Africa, we reported over 22% revenue growth in constant currency. The Francophone region continues to see pressure on consumer spend from inflationary and competitive pressures, impacting growth, which increased 5.2 percentage points in constant currency. Let me begin by focusing on the performance of the mobile services segment.
The strong demand for services across our footprint, combined with our attractive consumer-focused proposition, resulted in an 8.6% growth in our customer base, which, combined with our growth of 7.8%, resulted in constant currency revenue growth of over 17%, with Nigeria growing over 33%, East Africa by almost 20%, while the Francophone region was up 3.6%. Demand for voice services continues to remain robust. However, data remains a very large and key opportunity for us. The young and aspiring population across our footprint, combined with our widespread 4G network, continues to support a further increase in smartphone penetration by almost 5% over the year. This, combined with a 25% increase in data usage per customer to 6.2 GB, has resulted in strong data revenue growth of 26.4% in constant currency. Usage remains, however, low in a global context, so we expect to see growth remain at an attractive level.
The mobile money business continued to see a strong performance with over 28% constant currency revenue growth in the period. Financial inclusion across many of our markets remained low, and we see mobile money as a key facilitator of increased adoption of financial services, supporting economic growth and transformation. A 15% growth in customer base and a 29% growth in transaction value to an annualized level of $120 billion reflects the continued enhancements we make to the mobile money ecosystem and continued investments into the distribution network, particularly the exclusive channels, which clearly differentiate our offerings. Below the EBITDA line, our results were once again impacted by foreign exchange fluctuations, with the Naira continuing to weaken in the quarter.
Across the group, currency devaluation resulted in derivative and foreign exchange losses of $136 million, of which $122 million related to the Naira devaluation, which has been classified as an exceptional item. EPS before exceptional item came in at $0.023. A key development during the quarter was the repayment of our HoldCo bond of $550 million, which matured in May 2024. This is once again a continuation of our strategy to reduce external foreign currency debt. A year ago, 48% of our market debt was in foreign currency, which has now been reduced to only 14% at the end of June, following the payment of our paydown of almost $830 million of foreign currency debt. I think we've stayed committed on this particular agenda, and today, at a HoldCo level, we are debt-free. Our capital allocation policy remains unchanged.
Our priority is to continue to invest in the business to ensure we future-proof our operations for sustained growth, and we therefore reiterate our previous tax guidance of $725 million-$750 million for this financial year. In addition, we remain committed to a positive shareholder return policy, with the AGM approving our final dividend for full year 2024 of $0.0357 and the continuation of our $100 million buyback program. Now, a little bit about my personal experiences. I joined the business in the middle of October, and in the last eight, nine months, I've managed to travel to 10 out of our 14 operating countries. Having visited most of our markets since I've joined Airtel, I'm very convinced of Airtel Africa's unique position to capture the opportunities on offer across the continent.
Our purpose of transforming lives is clearly being delivered as we continually invest in the markets to enable increased financial and digital inclusion, which is fundamental to driving economic prosperity across communities. The first priority for the group is to put the customer first and ensure we offer a great customer experience. To do this, we need to continue to simplify the products on offer and provide best-in-class network experience at an affordable level, because delivering great customer experience across all our touchpoints will be our differentiating factor as compared to competition across our markets. That remains a big area of focus, and we want to put customer right at the front and center of everything that we do. I expect to see continued migration of customers from feature phones to smartphones and the expansion of our 4G network, continuing to deliver sustained growth momentum in the future.
Offering additional services to our customers in the form of mobile money will further help our growth ambitions, and this remains a fantastic area of growth potential, which we will continue to tap. I will remain focused on ensuring our investments into both the new and the existing business streams continues to be in a way that maximizes returns available to all our stakeholders. I do think that execution seen to date across the business provides a foundation for future success. The ability to unlock and deliver on the significant growth potential I've alluded to is possible because of the strong capital structure we currently have in place. The outlook for Airtel Africa is very, very compelling, and I look forward to executing on this and our overall strategic priorities in the coming years.
With that, I would now like to open the line for questions, for which I'm joined by Jaideep, operator. I now hand over to you to facilitate the Q&A session, please.
Thank you, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you're welcome to press Star and then One on your touch-tone phone or on the keypad on your screen. You will hear a confirmation tone that you have joined the queue. If you wish to withdraw your question, you may press Star and then Two to remove yourself from the question queue. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, you may press Star and then One. The first question we have is from César Tiron of Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for the call and the opportunity to ask questions. I have three, if that's okay, but they're very easy. The first one would be on Francophone Africa. Can you please explain the key reason for the pressure on margins? Is that also diesel, or was the diesel just explaining the pressure on Nigeria? Second question, can you please elaborate a little bit more on your efficiency program, because obviously, your margins are already quite high in most of the markets? So how large could this be? And then the third question would be related to Nigeria. What progress have you made in your discussions with the local authorities related to any potential changes to tariffs? Thank you.
Thank you for asking those questions. Can I request you to repeat your question number three, please? Nigeria price rates.
Yes. So what progress, if any, have you made in your discussions with the Nigerian authorities relating to a potential change in tariffs, increasing prices? Thank you.
Sure. Thank you very much. So let me respond to your first question on margins on Francophone. We've seen some pressure on Francophone margins, primarily arising out of two or three factors. The first being overall inflation that we are experiencing across our footprint, and that is increasing the pressure on our network cost, and that has resulted in further impact on our EBITDA margins for Francophone. Other than this, something which is very specific to Francophone, in Q1 2025, EBITDA was impacted by increasing regulatory charges in some of our Francophone countries, specifically in Gabon, by roughly $2 million and MAT-related expenses in one of our large markets, which is DRC.
This, combined with a relatively overall slowdown in our top-line growth, has had some impact on the EBITDA margin for Francophone. Moving on to your next question on efficiency program, which is what you're saying, that our EBITDA margins are already healthy, and we are the cost leaders. That's how I understood your question, that, what are the further opportunities? What we've done is we've actually intensified our efforts, and we very genuinely believe that there are future cost reduction opportunities or opportunities to drive efficiency in our business. As I said, we have intensified our efforts in some of the areas, predominantly in the area of reducing network cost. And within network, it is primarily on reducing fuel cost, which is where we've seen a significant impact of cost increase.
What are some of the actions that we are taking or some of the areas that we've identified? First and foremost is in the area of optimizing our network utilization and design. The second is, as I said, introducing energy-saving initiatives, for example, solarization of sites using lithium-ion batteries across our network to reduce network costs. And in certain areas, it is about renegotiations of key contracts. While we do this, we are consciously aware that we do not touch any of our growth spends so that either our growth or the customer experience is not impacted at all. And the way I see it is, given the macro environmental headwinds and challenges, in the first quarter, we've managed our costs relatively better, and I have full confidence in our ability to execute better.
I remain fairly confident that from here onwards, as we intensify our efforts and execute the way we execute, and we've demonstrated our execution capabilities in delivering growth ahead of the market, I remain confident that we will be able to deliver on our cost efficiency and cost reduction program as well. Moving to your third question on Nigeria price increase. On the price increase front, we continue to engage with NCC and with other authorities in Nigeria to seek price increase, and this is something that we've been at it for some time, and our attempt is to at least cover inflation. Having said that, while it is very important for us to continue to engage with the regulator and seek for price increase, but that is not the only effort that we're putting in to remain profitable.
In Nigeria, which is a pretty large business, our focus is actually on acquiring customers, making sure that we deliver great customer experience, continue to stay invested in Nigeria through intensifying our network investments, our go-to-market efforts, and delivering great customer experience to drive top-line growth. That remains a key area of focus, but having said that, we remain engaged, and we remain engaged with the regulator to get price increase in Nigeria.
Thank you.
The next question we have is from Madhavendra Singh of HSBC. Please go ahead.
Yes, hi. Thanks for taking my question. This is Maddy Singh from HSBC. So just a few short questions from my side. Firstly, just extending on the price hike question in Nigeria, and I remember the previously focused customers relying on other levels of growth rather than just price hikes. So the question hello?
You broke up there. You broke up there. Please, can you repeat your question?
Yeah, sure. Just asking on the price hike point in Nigeria, I remember the previous CEO also talked about other levers of growth rather than just price hikes. Do you think you have enough of those other levers of growth to, let's say, regain the lost revenues in dollar terms, and how quickly you think you can recover and go back to the previous dollar-run rate of revenue and EBITDA in the market? So that's the first one. And then secondly, just also picking up on your progress on the mobile money unit IPO plans, if you could share where we are on that process and how confident you are of meeting the timeline there.
And then finally, on your CapEx plans as well, because of the currency devaluations, and you still maintain your overall CapEx plans, given that you're not really getting the price hikes you want, at least not in the short run, do you think it is still fair to keep investing at the same run rate of CapEx, or would you rather wait out the period where you're not getting the price hike and maybe resume investing when you have certain reversal of the, let's say, regaining of the U.S. dollar earnings base, especially in Nigeria? Thank you.
Thank you, Maddy, for asking those questions. Let me just start with addressing your first question, which is on price hike. I will not repeat my answer to say that we continue to engage with the authorities and the regulator to seek a price increase.
Having said that, your other question that you're asking on Nigeria is, do we see that Nigeria will continue? It's a big growth opportunity. Let me just answer it in two parts. First and foremost, we've demonstrated that Nigeria remains a very, very strong opportunity, and in our growth of 33% across voice data, it's a strong demonstration of the fact that Nigeria remains a very large opportunity. And if we execute right, we acquire our customers ahead of competition, we deliver a great experience to our customers. We will continue to grow our business in Nigeria. So that is one. We remain optimistic on the growth potential of Nigeria. Having said that, we retain a very, very judicious approach to our CapEx investment strategy in order to maximize our revenue growth.
The CapEx investment in Nigeria, we continue to remain optimistic, and we will continue to invest to expand our coverage, to expand, to cater to a great experience to our customers, because some of the opportunities that we see in Nigeria, they remain what they were. The first is, it is still a very large category penetration opportunity in Nigeria. It's still a very large land grab opportunity that we will continue to go after, and for that, wherever we need to expand our network coverage, we will continue to expand our network coverage. The second is, Nigeria offers us a very large upgrade opportunity. We've seen close to 25% increase in our data consumption in Nigeria. And that is one opportunity that we continue to look at.
Our consumption per customer in Nigeria is about 29% in this quarter, which indicates that it still is a very, very large upgrade opportunity that we will continue to pursue. And for that, if we need to invest behind our capacity sites, we will continue to invest. And so far, whatever that we have seen is our revenue per site continues to grow even after making additional investments. Having said that, these opportunities, which is customer acquisition opportunity, upgrade opportunity from 2G to 3G to 4G, that remains. There are two other opportunities, which is what I spoke about. At an overall context, it remains a very large opportunity in Nigeria, which is our fiber and our home broadband.
We've deployed 5G sites in Nigeria, which gives us enough data capacity to go after home broadband business, and that is one action that we've taken, and our initial results are very, very positive. Second is, as I said, B2B remains a very large opportunity, and Nigeria is the first country where we've very recently did our groundbreaking ceremony for our first very large, close to 40 kW data center, because we see that this market is absolutely ready, and this data center should be operational by FY 2026. So we remain committed to Nigeria, and we also, at the same time, continue to monitor that our capital investment continues to give us returns. Now, coming to the third question on mobile money IPO, we have made a commitment that we will do an IPO within four years of our first transaction, and we remain committed to that promise.
We are, at this point in time, working towards making sure that we meet the deadline, and we will share progress as we come closer to the timelines.
Great. And just one follow-up. Given the current market condition, do you think that achieving a similar level of EBITDA multiple on a potential IPO would be possible, or do you see some risk to that? Thank you.
So, Maddy, honestly, we'll have to discuss this as we progress. This is at the very initial stage. We are, from an organization, from governance, compliance, where we want to list, those decisions are currently under discussion at various levels. So as we progress further, engagement with the bankers, once we finalize everything, obviously, then this question will be better answered. At this moment, it will be all guess. So we would not like to speculate on that at this moment, but yes, as we progress through the year, probably during either quarter two or quarter three, as we come closer, we'll definitely address this question.
That is very helpful. Thank you very much.
The next question we have is from Rohit Modi of Citi. Please go ahead.
Thanks for the opportunity. Some of them have already been answered. Just three from my side. Firstly, I know you don't give the guidance on revenue, but if you can share anything around how you look at the Francophone revenue growth trajectory from here, given there has been a substantial slowdown this quarter, do we expect same kind of momentum for the rest of the year in Francophone, or do you think things might improve from here?
Secondly, your sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue has increased and also seems like has been putting a pressure on margins. Is that something that you're investing more to get that kind of revenue growth? And if that's the case, which are the markets where you think sales and marketing costs are going up particularly? Thirdly, you commented around fiber being an opportunity. Can you give us any color around, do you expect to invest more into fiber in the future? And are there any specific markets where you see this kind of opportunity shaping up? Thank you.
Thank you very much for asking those questions. First and foremost, let me address the point that you raised around growth slowdown in Francophone markets.
The way I see it is, if you look at Francophone markets, the underlying some of the metrics of the business continue to point that our business remains healthy. The reason why I'm saying this is as follows. The first and foremost, if I look at our base growth, which is a fundamental driver of growth for our business, it remains very healthy at about 10 percentage points plus. So our base is growing at 10 percentage points. Our data consumption continues to grow at about 23 percentage points in Franco markets. So if I look at, which is a very key indicator of how our customers are engaged with us. Having said that, despite, say, some of these underlying metrics, we've seen some slowdown in our growth rates in Francophone markets. This is primarily because of two reasons.
First and foremost, Francophone markets are experiencing very high inflation. And what has happened is, despite a 10% increase in base growth and roughly about a 23%-24% increase in data consumption, our revenue has come down. It is primarily because of our ARPU's come down by about 5% at an overall level, which is what is slowing down the growth rate in Francophone markets. And this ARPU's slowdown, as I said, is because of two reasons. First and foremost is the impact of inflation. Some of the Francophone markets, our biggest Francophone market, which is DRC, is experiencing high levels of inflation, which is resulting in some amount of tightening in consumption, which is the impact that we are also seeing in some of the other markets. That is one.
The second is, it's also a market where we are seeing very high competitive activity, which is bringing the ARPUs down. So this is what is contributing to the slowdown of growth rates in Francophone markets. And the way I see it is, we would have liked for Francophone to deliver better growth rates than what we have delivered in the first quarter. Having said that, I remain confident in the Francophone market's ability to turn around and deliver better growth rates. And this confidence is primarily coming from the point of view of the fact that our underlying metrics, and one of them key being is our base growth, which remains in double digit, which gives me enough confidence.
That is the reason we continue to stay positive on Francophone, and we continue to make required investments in our network and our GTM capabilities so that we continue to acquire customers and continue to give great experience to our customers. That's your first question. On the S&D side, which is what you're saying is our S&D expenses.
Let me address that. Our sales and marketing cost has moved up to 12.9% of the revenue as compared to 10.3%. The question is, why it has gone up? First, let me address this, that as per IFRS standard, it's more of an accounting thing. As per IFRS standard, every year we have to do the evaluation of the life of customer in our network. Accordingly, some of these expenditures are deferred.
So what happened last year to this year, there is an improvement in the life of customer in the system. So earlier it was, let's say, 12 months. Now it has gone up to 18 months. Therefore, the deferment adjustment has to do every year. Once in a year, we have to do that adjustment. So that adjustment has resulted in roughly an impact of $10 million-$11 million accounting adjustment, while the cash outflow remains the same. There is no change in the cash outflow. So this one-time thing you have seen in quarter one, that impact, and that's why you are seeing the expenditure as a percentage of revenue has gone up. But that then doesn't change till there is a further change in the life of customer in the network, which can only happen when the further improvement of churn happens.
It is a once-a-year activity which we do.
Now, let me just very quickly answer your third question, which is on fiber opportunity. The way I would approach this is a home broadband and enterprise opportunity. We remain very, very confident on what we've seen. From a home broadband point of view, what we are doing is we are testing. We first start with FWA because having invested in 5G capacities, we are today able to service our customers through our FWA CPE, which is consumer premises equipment, and deliver the required speeds and the experience. The response from the market has been very, very positive. As the demand grows, wherever we need to deploy fiber, we will deploy fiber. The second is, from an enterprise point of view, we remain confident that this is one segment which is very, very large and interactive.
Wherever fiber investments are required, we'll make the requisite fiber investments to service our enterprise customers and meet their data and speed requirements. So from an opportunity point of view, it's a large opportunity. We are right now investing in our infrastructure and also GTM capabilities to be able to service this demand and this market segment.
Okay. Thank you.
The next question we have is from John Karidis of Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much. So firstly, Sunil, good luck in your stewardship of Airtel Africa. Secondly, my questions, first of all, in Nigeria, three months ago, MTN Nigeria, its chief executive said that they are facing, in his words, existential issues. And as part of that, they're also cutting their CapEx very significantly.
So my question is, have you seen any change in competitive intensity, and/or do you expect a change in competitive intensity given their existential issues? My second question is, second of three, by the way, mobile money in Nigeria. I know you guys are building the business. At what point do we start putting any numbers in our Excel spreadsheets for revenue in mobile money Nigeria? Is it a quarter away, two years away? We're none the wiser. So anything you can say there would be great. And then thirdly, a question that doesn't have anything to do with the first quarter, but maybe Jaideep would oblige me as we try to get our brains more focused on the mobile money ahead of the IPO.
Last time around, when you gave us a pie chart of all the different services that contribute to mobile money revenue, to remind you things like cash-out, mobile recharges, P2P services, can you help us understand the profitability of each of those revenue streams relative to the average mobile money profitability, please? Thank you.
Thank you very much for those questions and also your best wishes. Let me first respond to the first question that you asked, which is the comment that you made on the MTN's existential crisis. I will not comment on that, but let me just try and address the key question that you asked is, we have not seen any reduction in competitive intensity in Nigeria, be it from MTN or any other operator for that point of view. And therefore, a simple and straight answer is there is no reduction in competition intensity.
Having said that, as far as we are concerned, which is what I was responding to the other question to say, we remain focused on the opportunities that Nigeria has to offer across both our GSM as well as the mobile money business. On the GSM and both the categories that are the services that we offer, as I said, there is a massive opportunity for, first and foremost, it's a penetration opportunity. The second is an upgrade opportunity. And this opportunity of penetration, and I will talk about upgrade when I'm talking about mobile money, is what do I mean by upgrade. It remains equally attractive when it comes to the mobile money business in Nigeria. Having said that, Nigeria is relatively a more mature market when it comes to the overall mobile money market.
Therefore, right now, what we are focused on is making sure that we acquire customers. We have a base of 50 million customers. A large number of those customers are smartphone customers. Therefore, we have a right to win with these customers. What we need to do is we need to build a very strong ecosystem and make sure that our platform and our services that we offer are very attractive for our customers. We give them great experience on our platform. That's what we are focused on. At what point in time we start to monetize these services or this customer base? I think it is very difficult for me to put a number, which I guess you're expecting here, whether it is one quarter or a few years. Very difficult, but our efforts are to say there's a large opportunity.
We have an existing relationship with 50+ million customers in Nigeria. Of these customers, there's a large number of customers are 4G customers. Therefore, they are the customers. If we engage with them, give them the right experience, they will give us an opportunity to serve them not only for cash-out or cash-in, but across the ecosystem. And that is where our focus right now is in building those capabilities and making sure that our customers remain engaged. And then we'll start to help you to put some numbers, as you said, on an Excel sheet. That, I guess, is your first two questions. And the third, I think, was what you pointed out to Jaideep, and I'll hand it over to Jaideep now.
Yeah. So obviously, in the half year, when we come with the full presentation, we'll discuss about this in detail.
But I'll give you a snapshot of what is happening. Obviously, cash-out still contributes a large part of the revenue as a cash-out as a bucket. So 48% of the revenue comes out of the cash-out commission, and the yield for that is roughly about 2%. And if I do the net of cash-in commission, then obviously, it comes down to approximately 1.2%-1.3%. Because cash-in, we don't charge anything to the customer. Cash-out, we do charge to the customer and pay commission to the agent. So the net cash-in, cash-out net-of will be about 1.2%-1.3% yield. For the rest of the transaction, for example, P2P contributes roughly about 12% of the revenue. There is no payout for that. And the yield for P2P is roughly about 0.5%. Yield for bill payment merchant is roughly about 1.8%-1.9%, and there is no cash payout for that.
That contributes roughly about bill pay and merchant all put together, it contributes about 14% of the revenue. And the recharge commission, because Airtel Money does a significant amount of recharge for the GSM entity, and here, 30% of their revenue comes from the recharge commission. And the yield for that is roughly between 6.5% and 7%. So broadly, there are other revenue streams which contribute about 12%-13% of the total revenue. And the yield for that, it varies from bucket to bucket, but it's not very significant. But the significant portion is cash-out. And over the period, if you see that there's a change in the mix, the cash-out has started coming down from which used to be about 60% a year and a half back, that has started coming down.
The bill pay margin, that started going up because that, and therefore, you see the growth continues because there is a better yield in the margin than bill pay ecosystem. So that's broadly the mix. But we will definitely come back and discuss this in detail when we come for the half year and we make the presentation to all of you.
That's very kind. Thank you both very much.
The next question we have is from Tracy Kivunyu of SBG Securities. Please go ahead.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to ask questions. So my first question is on your lease contracts. Could you give us the percentage of sites that would be renewable next year? I think the next financial year, I think you did mention the first quarter that we do see some potential for contract increases in FY 2026. And if you could also indicate if this is related to IHS or ATC, that would be helpful. Second, for the fuel price increases in Nigeria, we already saw some impact in the fourth quarter of last year. So what was the quarter-on-quarter change in fuel prices in the country? And then the last question is on the DRC MAT-related expenses. If you could indicate what impact that was, if you could quantify it on the Francophone EBITDA margin. Thank you.
Okay. So the first question, if I understood, there was a little problem on the voice, but if I understood it correctly, you want to know about the renewal of the lease contract in certain countries. Is that correct?
Correct. Yes. Yeah.
So as we mentioned earlier, that next year, there are about between next year and subsequent year, between, let's say, 18-24 months, or rather, I would say 12-18 months, the lease renewal is due in about four countries, four or five countries. And all these four or five countries are either ATC, IHS, or Helios, depending on which country is falling due when. So a large part of these leases will be coming for renewal in this period. But the terms and conditions and what will be the construct of those contracts, etc., will be known to even us as we currently are engaging with our tower cos for contract renewal.
And obviously, the commercials will be coming out after those negotiations and will be better off probably in quarter four of this year to be able to communicate much better in terms of the contract construction and more detail. Your next question was quarter-on-quarter fuel price increase. Fuel price in quarter four has gone up to almost 1,400 NGN+ a liter in Nigeria. I'm specifically talking about Nigeria, which is now, in quarter one, we are looking at in the range of 1,150-1,200. Now, as per the contract, our contract obligation, there is one quarter in lag this impact comes. So quarter four diesel cost increase, the impact has come in quarter one. And quarter one is the average rate which will be applicable when we get the diesel price bill or diesel bill from the tower in quarter two.
It's a one-quarter lag in most of the contract. So what we are seeing in quarter one, the impact which has come in quarter four, and then there is a marginal drop in the price in quarter one, which will come in quarter two. So if diesel price further doesn't go up in the next few weeks, then we expect to see a stability or a slight reduction probably on the diesel per cost as we go to quarter two. What will happen in quarter three, quarter four, if the price remains at this level, then we don't expect at least the rate increase impact in the OpEx as we go forward if diesel price is stabilized at, let's say, 1,150, 1,200. On the MAT, in two countries, the MAT has triggered minimum alternate tax.
As you know, that in these countries, there is a rule or law that if the countries have become tax loss, the countries are not tax profitable or tax loss, then minimum alternate tax, which is a percentage of revenue, between 2%-3% of the revenue, that comes as a minimum alternate tax which has to be paid. Unfortunately, minimum alternate tax, as per accounting standard, is not considered as a tax line item, but it is part of OpEx. Between DRC and Nigeria, this impact has come from January to June. So six months impact, about $5.2 million between these two countries. DRC is roughly about $2 million and balance is Nigeria.
This impact has come in quarter one, and this will continue at about $2-$2.5 million per quarter as we go forward between these two countries, as it is not expected, based on the current trend, that these two countries will become, or OpEx will become, tax profitable in this year. So this will continue for this year. However, when these countries become tax profitable, then the minimum alternate tax will not be coming in the OpEx. And then the corporate tax at the applicable corporate tax rate, this will come into the P&L under the tax line item.
That's right, yes. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the Q&A session, and I would like to hand back to Sunil for any closing remarks.
All right. If there are no more questions, I would like to thank you all for joining this call. I look forward to speaking to you again and hopefully meeting with many of you later this year. Thank you once again.
That concludes today's conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.