Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Helios Towers' 2025 Capital Markets Day. Please promise you won't build your Lego towers in this room, by the way. It's fantastic to see so many familiar faces in this room, and actually just as many new ones here. Thank you for joining us and being part of this important moment for our business. Our in-person attendance has more than doubled since our last event, and I'm really excited for what we're going to show you guys this afternoon. What you'll hear today is that Helios Towers is entering what we call the sweet spot. Tom, Manjit and the team will show you this is a natural and exciting next part of the company's journey. As a quick introduction, I am Chris Baker Sams, Head of Strategic Finance and Investor Relations.
I've been with Helios Towers for over seven years now, and this is the phase I've really been looking forward to. Before we begin, just a couple of housekeeping items. First, health and safety. As many of you know, world-class health and safety is central to our Business Excellence Program. If you speak to any of our board, local, or exco members here today, they will tell you that health and safety is the first thing on our agenda. In that spirit, I'd like to let you know the fire exits we found at the very far left, and to this side as well, too. The assembly point is down by 22 Bishopsgate if needed. On exits, if anyone does need to hop out for a call or for a bathroom break, please use the back left just here or just down to my right-hand side.
As you can see on the screen behind me, our disclaimer covers the usual forward-looking information and financial statements. With that, let's take a look at what's ahead this afternoon. First, we'll hear from our Chair, Sir Sam Jonah, who'll open today with a few reflections on our journey since IPO and the opportunity that lies ahead. Tom will take us through the big picture, our Impact 2030 strategy, and how our platform captures the long-term structural growth. Next, Manjit will show how our model delivers consistent U.S. dollar earnings and how we think about disciplined capital allocation. We'll then take a 10-minute break, and after that, return for a conversation with our commercial, operational, and regional leaders to discuss questions we've received from investors in advance of this Capital Markets Day, particularly around the operational risks associated with the markets where we operate.
We'll have a dedicated Q&A section after that. Then we'll head up to the 26th floor, and our team will be around to guide you up there. We'll be serving food and drink from our markets up there while enjoying some interactive deep dive presentations. We'll explore how our proprietary technology is driving tenancy growth, how we're using AI to drive customer experience excellence and returns, how over the past decade we built an operational moat through power management expertise, and finally, how mobile will evolve over the next 10 years and the complementary role the satellites will play.
For this final session, our team will be joined by one of our technology advisors who's already been conversing with a few investors so far today, but Marcus Weldon, former president of Nokia Bell Labs, the world-renowned innovation powerhouse that pioneered many of the digital technologies we use today, wireless communications and AI, and winning 11 Nobel Prizes along the way. It is going to be an insightful afternoon. To open our Capital Markets Day, please do welcome onto the stage our Chair, Sir Sam Jonah.
Good afternoon. Thank you, Chris. I am Samuel Jonah, the Chairman of Helios Towers, and it's a great pleasure to welcome all of you to our 2025 Capital Markets Day. Today, we come together to showcase the strength and quality of our business, and to share our ambitions for the next five years and beyond. The strategy you'll be hearing about will reflect months of thoughtful preparation and collaboration across the entire company. Let me say that all of us at Helios are deeply passionate about what we do. Given that all our colleagues are indeed shareholders of the company, we are fully invested in the success of this business. I know that many of our colleagues are tuning in to watch this event.
I would like to take the opportunity to extend my heartfelt thanks for your continued hard work and dedication, which has enabled us to deliver our previous strategy ahead of plan and which underpins our future successes. Throughout my career, I've had the great pleasure and privilege of working with many fantastic businesses and outstanding people. Yet I can say with absolute conviction that I've been genuinely blown over by the commitment, tenacity, and talent of the team that we are so privileged to have at Helios Towers. Since joining as Chairman of this company in 2019, just before the IPO, I've had the opportunity to travel across our markets and spend time with our exceptional teams on the ground. Their energy, their determination, and shared sense of purpose are truly inspiring. While the company has gone through its most recent phase of growth.
The world around us has undoubtedly become more challenging in many respects. Yet through those challenges, we have proudly built together our culture, our purpose, and our infrastructure, which we believe would endure and last for a very long time. During my tenure, the targets that we have always set have always been ambitious. Yet time and again, Helios Towers has continued to execute with remarkable discipline and consistency. That this metronomic delivery is part of who we are and have no doubt at all that it will continue. Under Tom's remarkable and distinguished leadership, supported by Manjit and the broader management team, you will see today what we are so excited about to be delivering, including for the first time in the company's history, returns to shareholders. It is a proud milestone and one that reflects both the strength of our platform and the maturity of our business model.
From our origins in my native country, Ghana, Helios Towers has grown into a business that now operates across over 15,000 towers across nine markets in Africa and the Middle East. Through these towers, we help connect nearly half of the populations in those countries, around 160 million people, whose lives are touched by improved mobile connectivity. We understand it still. Our new strategic plan, Impact 2030, sets out how we will continue to capture growth as we enter the next phase of our journey, how we will harness the powerful long-term trends shaping our markets, and how we will maintain our relentless focus on delivering first-class service for our customers. The board, many of whom I'm pleased to say are here today, and the management team have worked hand in hand to develop this strategy. We are genuinely excited to share it with you today.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have been down for the last few days with the mother of all flus. I was asked not to come. Trust me, it is my wish, hope, and desire that all of you here will leave this event strong and healthy. The last thing I want is to inflict my pain on you to give you the excuse to revenge on your shock. Whilst I would have liked to stay with you and engage you, I am delighted that my colleagues are here, the directors are here to engage you. Thank you very much indeed.
Thank you very much, Sir Sam, and we wish you well. Huge welcome, everyone. Good afternoon and huge welcome to everyone in this room and everyone on the webcam. I'm Tom Greenwood, CEO of Helios Towers, and I've been here since the beginning, almost 16 years. Across each strategic cycle, from building the platform to scaling it and now compounding cash flow and value. Today, we're a high-performing business with a culture of excellence and a relentless focus on the customer experience. I know that a huge amount of our talented colleagues are watching today on the webcam. I wanted to say everything we talk about today is because of your dedication, your commitment, and your excellence. We're one team, one business here at Helios Towers, all striving towards the same goals, the same purpose, and the same ambition. We're the most diversified tower co across Africa and the Middle East, and we deliver global levels of quality across our portfolio, with revenues approaching $1 billion and double-digit growth in earnings and cash flow.
Today, we run 15,000 towers that support connectivity for almost 160 million people across the nine markets. That is going to grow towards 200 million over the next five years as the networks densify and the coverage expands. We provide the mission-critical infrastructure, often where there is no alternative form of communication. What excites me the most is the next five years for this business. Three things converge. One, the market demand is unmistakable. This is supported by powerful structural mega trends. Two, our team's ability to execute in complex markets is proven. Three, our cash generation enters the cash compounding sweet spot. This enables the next phase of shareholder returns. We will unpack each of these this afternoon, and I will make the case to you that Helios Towers is one of the most compelling investor propositions globally today.
Quite simply, this cycle is the next stage of investor return and value creation. This session is structured around six themes: our world-class platform, the growth runway in our markets, the quality of our customers, how we deliver operational excellence, our financial track record, and of course, our Impact 2030 target. Think of this as the story of a platform built for decades of growth ahead with disciplined operational excellence and financial return. Our greatest asset is our people. Our executive leadership team here brings 450 years plus of combined experience across towers, power, and emerging markets. Many of the leaders you'll hear from today run operations, delivery, engineering, commercial, and the regions day to day. The majority of people on this slide you see here have been internally promoted to these positions. At Helios Towers, we invest in our people.
We provide bespoke training and development programs across the entire business to give everyone the support and the tools that they need to succeed. Lean Six Sigma is the foundation of our Business Excellence Program. You'll see the black and the orange belts on here. Now, this is not just training. This is how we make decisions. It's how we standardize processes, and it's how we continuously improve. Crucially, we invest in local leadership. We're 95% localized at country level. This drives performance. It drives safety, and it drives sustainable economics in market. That combination of deep domain expertise, Lean Six Sigma discipline, and local leadership, this is a competitive advantage that you cannot replicate easily. Supporting the executive is our highly experienced board, many of whom are here today, with deep Africa and EM credentials across telecoms, technology, investment.
Now, we operate to the highest standards, compliant with U.K. corporate governance code, and we're complemented by leading DFI investors across our capital structure: British International Investment, DEG from Germany, EAIF, and of course, the IFC, who've backed us from day one. Their presence matters. It uplifts governance, it unlocks relationships, and it supports all investors in Helios Towers across the regions in which we operate. Against these strong foundations, from 2015 through to today, we've delivered 10 consecutive years of EBITDA growth. That's 24% CAGR through multiple macro cycles. This is the hallmark of disciplined execution and resilient contract-driven model in growing markets. This comes from two places. One, the region in which we operate is the growth region, with decades of demand ahead. Two, the Helios Towers culture, excellence, and continuous improvement.
We run world-class infrastructure in developing and often challenging locations, and we do it reliably. Which is why we're the trusted partner to all of the region's leading mobile operators. Today, I will connect this track record to why now is the moment that we're compounding cash flow and returns. This next section introduces Impact 2030, our next five-year strategy. I will start with why we're here today, and then I will walk you through the journey that we've been on through the previous strategic cycles that brought us to this point. Four years ago, we set a clear goal for this 2022- 2026 cycle to reach 2.2 tenants per site by the end of 2026. We've achieved this over a year early, which is why we're launching the next phase now. Impact 2030 focuses on capital-efficient organic growth, sector-leading lease-up.
Customer experience excellence, and of course, ROIC continuing to expand above WACC. This drives a highly visible route to $1.3 billion of cumulative recurring free cash flow over the next five years, which is the starting point for our capital allocation decisions. In terms of our capital allocation framework, i.e., how is this cash deployed, this is equally clear. We will target $500+ million in high-returning organic growth CapEx over the period. We will return at least $400 million to investors whilst retaining further optionality to drive more growth and more returns even higher through this cycle. We are entering the cash compounding phase of the Helios Towers story now. Let me summarize our journey. 2019- 2022. Strengthening the platform. At IPO, we set a 12 by 8 by 5 strategy, 12,000 towers, eight markets in five years. We exceeded this in three.
That period was about expansion, acquisitions, platform growth, building a lease-up ready portfolio. Free cash flow was negative by design as we invested to double the size of the business. Then 2022. Up until now. Integration and lease-up. We pivoted to organic growth, driving tenancy ratio from 1.8- 2.2 and improving ROIC from 10%- 14%. Operational delivery and power performance lifted efficiency and customer experience. Free cash flow inflected positive last year in 2024 and is stepping up steeply now in 2025. This gives us more capital allocation choice. Now, Impact 2030, the cash compounding sweet spot. We continue the organic plan ahead, aiming for 2.5 tenants per site, a 15%-20% range in the ROIC and strong recurring free cash flow, enabling material investor distributions whilst also preserving optionality for high-returning selective growth.
Our vision is very simple, to be the leading tower co in Africa and the Middle East. Our purpose. Connecting people and powering growth. Our mission, to deliver customer experience excellence through our bespoke digital business excellence platform, creating sustainable value for our people, environment, customers, communities, and of course, our investors. I'll now go on to the platform fundamentals, where we operate, who we serve, and why our long-term business structure matters. We're strategically focused on Africa and the Middle East. This gives investors risk-mitigated access to the fastest-growing region in the world through our disciplined operating model. We're the most diversified tower co across the region, nine markets, leading market share in seven nationwide networks, and a robust base of contractual earnings.
We have $5.5 billion of future contracted revenue in the bag today, which equates to an average remaining life of about seven years. This is even before any renewals. 71% of our EBITDA is hard currency. This reflects the portfolio mix and our contract structure. We operate 15,000 towers across Tanzania, DRC, Oman, Senegal, Ghana, Malawi, Madagascar, Congo Brazzaville, and South Africa. Our footprint coverage is already large and growing. 157 million people rely on our infrastructure for daily connectivity, and this is rising 20% over the next five years as subscribers and population continue to set the pace globally. The key takeaway here is a really solid contracted earnings base from which to compound growth and cash flow generation for many, many years to come. Let's whittle it down now to a single tower, a single site. Our unit business model is straightforward and powerful.
We build or acquire a tower. We provide the passive infrastructure. That is the tower itself, the power systems, the security systems, and we lease space out to multiple mobile operators. We guarantee near-continuous power uptime at the site, which is mission-critical for the mobile operators. Of course, there are millions of subscribers that use these towers for their daily connectivity. Why does this business model work so well? One, the infrastructure sharing lowers total cost for our customers versus them each building their own sites. Number two, it lets mobile operators focus their capital and their operations on active network technology while we specialize in the real estate and the power elements, raising overall service quality. Three, costs are largely fixed at site level, so each additional tenant drops through with high incremental margins. This is the key structural operating leverage.
In our infrastructure sharing business model. Therefore, on returns. A new site with one tenant will have 12% ROIC on day one. By adding a second tenant, we go up to the mid-20% and a third tenant to the mid-30%. Combined with the contracts of 10-15 years long plus renewals, this is long-duration compounding cash flow at each site. Here, you can see the unit economics scaling through the portfolio. In 2022, after acquisitions, the group sat at 1.8 tenancy ratio, 10% ROIC. Free cash flow was negative as we absorbed the investment and doubled the platform. Through the lease-up and the efficiency, we're now at 2.2 tenants per site, 14% ROIC, and free cash flow positive.
Impact 2030 targets to continue these trends and execution strategy to get to 2.5 tenants per site, 15%-20% ROIC, and this all driving $1.3+ billion of cumulative recurring free cash flow, off which we do $400+ million of investor distributions across this period. This here is the cash compounding sweet spot, which then continues beyond 2030 as well. Let's look at the demand now. Why do our markets support growth, not just for the next five years, but for decades ahead? Three structural drivers are key. Population growth. Africa and the Middle East account for the majority of population growth to 2050, with a 55% increase from today over the next 25 years. In fact, 8 out of 10 people born for the rest of this century will be in Africa and the Middle East. Then mobile adoption.
The region adds 800 million unique mobile subscribers by 2050. That's over 70% from today. Smartphones are proliferating, 1.7 billion additional devices in the markets by 2050. This is more than doubling over the next 25 years. The result of this is a multi-decade requirement for more coverage and more capacity. For a tower company, that translates to more points of service per market over time, more tenants, more equipment on site, and more densification in urban and suburban areas. Let's now look at the nearer term, the next five years. Data usage in our region is set to boom. It's growing four times over the next five years. This is the fastest of anywhere in the world. User behavior is changing, and people across the region are demanding more and more data applications to use in their daily lives.
There are two catalysts for this. First, affordable smartphones. Prices are falling towards $30. This opens up data affordability and access for millions and millions more people. Second, the technology mix is shifting. 4G and 5G become the majority of connections in our markets over the next five years. These technologies require denser networks and more points of service or tenancies per area to maintain the quality. This means that sustained lease-up for existing sites is there, and targeted build-to-suits in coverage gaps is what we're focusing on. Both of these are the high-returning opportunities core in our model. Translating those drivers into our nine markets, the total addressable market tenancies expand materially through to 2030. The trend continues well beyond that.
Our plan, Impact 2030, targets 10,000 plus additional tenancies for Helios Towers through 2030, with market growth supported by population, smartphone affordability, and data intensity growth. The key message here is this is not a one-off cycle. This is a long runway. We have the platform, we have the customer relationships, and the operating model to convert that total addressable market into ROIC and cash flow consistently and at scale. Our growth focus remains firmly on our core product of towers, which we view as the highest earnings quality in the digital infrastructure space. Standard towers will continue to generate around 95% of revenue through this planned period.
We are also well-positioned for tower-like ancillaries, supporting the next wave of connectivity in building systems, smart street structures, and fringe-edge data centers, all designed to support 4G densification and 5G rollout, and all with virtually identical earnings quality to towers. These adjacent products build naturally on our existing tower and power expertise, creating new revenue streams for us whilst leveraging the same operating backbone. They are not about chasing diversification for its own sake. They are about staying ahead of customer need and ensuring that our capital is being deployed on the highest-returning growth opportunities out there. With that context, I'll next cover our customers, our service model, and then go into execution and our financials. Our customer base comprises the leading mobile operators in the region, the likes of Airtel, Vodacom, Orange, Amantel, Axian, Viettel, and MTN.
Leading operators account for 99% of our revenue, with roughly 70% coming from investment-grade customers. That combination of scale and credit quality gives us real resilience. Each of these customers is investing heavily in their network expansion and growth. They are delivering significant growth and strong financial performance themselves, which creates the right impact for our growth and capital allocation Impact 2030 strategy. Because we operate in multiple markets with the same groups, we benefit also from multi-market relationships that deepen over time. Let's take a look at our markets. We've earned market-leading positions through over a decade of operational reliability in seven of our nine markets, with a leading number one independent tower company serving every mobile operator in every market. Our markets typically have three or four major mobile operators and one or two other tower codes.
Our strategy is simple, to compete on customer experience, which is why we focus relentlessly on operational excellence. The upshot of this strategy is clear. Our tenancy ratios continue to climb. For example, Tanzania now at 2.6, DRC 2.7, Oman 1.7 after only three years. All of these are continuing to grow day in, day out. This local scale means we can deliver new sites faster and more efficiently than our competitors while providing national reach for our customers. It is a powerful combination that we have here. Market leadership, trusted execution, and of course, proven lease-up momentum. At the heart of our customer proposition is customer experience excellence, the first pillar in our strategy, the way we roll out and at speed, and the way we deliver power uptime. We can get colocation customers live in 24 hours. We deliver 99.99% power uptime.
This is critical service because every 1% downtime would cost our customers $175 million in lost network revenue each year. We help them focus their capital on active technology, saving roughly 30% versus self-build. We cut diesel emissions per tenant by almost 40% through our shared infrastructure model. In short, we deliver global quality, operational excellence, financial value, and sustainability impact all in one package. Here is a tangible proof point. We entered new markets three or four years ago, Senegal, Madagascar, Malawi, and Oman. We acquired networks from mobile operators, and these networks had frequent power interruptions. Now, through our operational excellence methodology, our engineering capability, and site digitalization, we have cut average downtime on these sites by 90%+ across the four markets. For the mobile operators, this is not just about transactional financial value in these sale and lease-back acquisitions.
This is about network reliability and, critically, improving their subscriber network experience. Each of these improvements reinforces why operators choose Helios Towers as their preferred partner when they expand coverage or roll out new technology. Our customers recognize our performance. You can see here direct quotes from Airtel, Vodacom, Amantel, each of them highlighting what matters most to them, speed, reliability, trust. These testimonials are not marketing. These are earned through consistent delivery. Getting sites live fast. Keeping them powered, and responding to challenges when they arise. This is powerful validation that Helios Towers is not just a supplier, but a strategic partner for our customers' network growth and performance. Let's take a look under the hood now at the operational discipline and systems that enable us to deliver that level of service across some of the fastest-growing markets in the world.
Operating telecom infrastructure in Africa and the Middle East is, in some ways, unlike anywhere else. We're managing enormous geographies. Our nine markets are over 6 million sq km. This is 50% larger than Europe, but with under 10% of the tarmac roads. We also operate with limited grid power, so 17 hours per day on average that we get across our portfolio. Some sites at 0, some sites at 24, and everything in between. This drives the key operational difference between us and a tower co-say in Europe or the U.S. We also provide power as a service, as well as the standard infrastructure and real estate services common to tower co-s worldwide. These environments where logistics, weather, and grid reliability are a challenge need to be overcome to operate effectively. We've built systems and processes.
That overcome these complexities, combining local know-how, technology, and process discipline to ensure uptime and delivery at world-class standards and service levels. This creates a moat around our business and is a significant competitive advantage in our customer proposition. Next, I'll show you how we deploy that same operational discipline across the entire business through our business excellence platform. To deliver consistency at this scale, we run the entire business through our business excellence platform. This is built on Lean Six Sigma foundations. This is a framework that drives database decisions, process efficiency, and a continuous improvement culture. Since 2022, we've increased the proportion of our Lean Six Sigma trained colleagues from 40%- 65%. We'll be at 70% next year.
What this means is the majority of our workforce, not just the senior leaders, are trained and can identify inefficiencies, can map them, can solve problems using consistent methodology across the business. This is the reason why our rollout speed, our uptime, our ROIC continues to improve each and every quarter. Here are some examples of the outcome of this over the past few years. Average downtime per tower per week has dropped from well over four minutes in 2022 to one minute today. This translates to the 99.99% power uptime. At the same time, our build-to-suit delivery speed has reduced almost 40% over this time. Colocation rollout is now, on average, two days across the entire business. These metrics matter because they translate directly to more satisfied customers, to higher ROIC, and a stronger reputation for execution excellence.
We have also embedded business excellence into our proprietary GIS system. You'll get a demo of that upstairs later. This identifies, analyzes, and predicts where new sites will deliver the best lease-up returns and the optimum performance within the networks. This platform combines the geospatial data. It includes the population density, the traffic patterns, and the existing network coverage to pinpoint exactly where capacity demand will emerge and therefore where our capital is best deployed. This has been instrumental in driving our tenancy growth across our markets through every vintage. Our system is improving. For example, towers built in 2010- 2015 have leased up with colocations at 0.2 per year. Towers built in the past four years have leased up twice as fast at 0.4 colos per year. That is two and a half years now to add a colo to a new build-to-suit.
That is arriving at the 25% ROIC that I showed you earlier on the unit economics page. This is a great example of the power of using data and disciplined methodology to drive growth and achieve higher returns faster. Finally, this slide shows what continuous improvement looks like day to day on the ground. A few examples of some recent projects. Each of these projects was led by our people using Lean Six Sigma techniques that they have learned through our training and development program. Albert in Malawi has reduced diesel costs on high-load sites, saving $1.2 million. Gloria in Tanzania integrated remote monitoring, improving the installation process for customers, added $1 million revenue. Analwaleed in Oman has enhanced preventative maintenance processes, saving $1 million. All of these using Lean Six Sigma techniques through our training. These are not pilots.
These are embedded processes happening day in, day out across our business in every market, in every function. It's proof that our people development program and continuous improvement culture is real. It's working. It's compounding value day in, day out across the business. With that operational foundation in place, let's move to what this all drives: the financial targets and performance. Everything we're discussing here today really comes together here through Impact 2030. We are entering the cash compounding sweet spot, not just for the next five years, but for decades ahead. This is the point where the operational excellence, the disciplined capital allocation, and the structural growth all converge. Manjit will take you through the robust business model and the growth algorithm that provides a clear route to delivering these. In summary, we're targeting sector-leading growth.
We're targeting continued returns, expansion above our cost of capital. We're deploying this in a disciplined way, compounding our cash flows while introducing attractive distributions for investors. When you add it all up, growth, execution capability, cash flow generation, capital discipline, and returns, Helios Towers becomes one of the most compelling investor propositions globally, delivering both scale growth and yield at the same time. Of course, underpinning all of it, a world-class platform operating in markets with decades of growth ahead. High-quality customers with long-term contracts, industry-leading operational excellence built on Lean Six Sigma discipline, the most talented teams in the markets. A clear and disciplined capital allocation framework. That is why I say Helios Towers is entering its sweet spot phase. We're moving into sustainable growth, cash flow generation, and shareholder returns.
As we look to 2030 and beyond, our focus is simple, keep delivering for our customers, keep compounding for investors, and keep connecting people. Powering growth across Africa and the Middle East. Thank you very much, everyone. I hope everyone has a great day. Through the rest of the agenda, we've got a great lineup for you. We're going to have a very short video now. Then Manjit will cover our financial performance and targets in more detail. We look forward to lots of questions and discussions after that. Thank you very much, everyone.
The rhythm of the city is changing in Dar es Salaam. By 2035, almost 50 million people will call this city home. That's double today's population. From business disputes to beachfront cafes, people are living online, working, learning, and creating. Kinshasa is a very dynamic city. Over the next 10 years, we are anticipating that Kinshasa will have 10 more million people, bringing the entire population to 30 million people. Kinshasa will be considered to be part of the seven largest cities in the world. Here in Kinshasa, we have a lot of million people already connected using data. The data demand in Kinshasa is keep growing. This is the new Africa. It is digital. It is dynamic and connected. At Helios Towers, we are proud to be part of this transformation, providing the critical infrastructure that enables the rollout of 4G and 5G across growing urban centers like Dar es Salaam and delivering fast, reliable connection where it matters most. We support with connectivity into the markets, office, shopping center to ensure that we can continue to support the customer to deploy the 5G everywhere in Kinshasa and around the country.
Our urban solutions are supporting that surge in data use across Africa's cities efficiently, sustainably, and at scale. For the next five years, we are anticipating that the usage of data will grow four times compared to where we are currently. Helios Towers is ready to continue to support the customer to build that network of connectivity. We are supporting a growing young population that's thirsty for data, for learning, for business, for entertainment, and for connection. Every site we build helps them take the next step forward.
I generally really love these kind of videos. It is one of the reasons why I love working for this company. We all here today can take for granted the digitalization journey we've all been on in the past few decades. The sense of excitement, optimism, and the thirst for connectivity is really alive, not just in Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa, but in every one of our markets. It really echoes what Tom has spoken about. I really do suggest today that you all try and speak to our fantastic colleagues who are here. Some of our senior leadership are dotted around. Some of them are former MDs and can really add more color to the stories that we are providing today. It is really exciting and energizing to see so many people here today and dialing in and taking a real interest in our business. We are all incredibly excited about what we have built, where the company is today, but importantly, where it is going. I am pleased to speak about Impact 2030 and our financial performance and outlook.
To echo both Sam and Tom, firstly, a quick thank you to our colleagues and partners who are dialing in. We present our targets and roadmap from a position of strength, which certainly makes our job a lot easier today. That is all due to the foundations that you have all built. Now, a quick introduction. My name is Manjit Dhillon. I am the Group Chief Financial Officer and Oman Executive Chair. I joined Helios Towers back in 2016, and I have had the privilege of seeing this company transform from a four-player market operator into a truly diversified Pan-African and Middle Eastern infrastructure leader. Over that time, I have helped lead more than $5 billion in capital raising. Alongside Tom and the other senior leadership team here, I have also worked on our acquisitions and successful IPO.
I was appointed CFO five years ago at the beginning of 2021 and more recently took on the role of Executive Chair of Oman, one of our fastest-growing markets. Why are we here today? It is because we have hit our strategy ahead of schedule, achieving our 2.2 tenancy ratio target earlier than planned. With that milestone now reached, we are setting out our Impact 2030 strategy, the next phase of Helios Towers' journey, focused on compounding growth, stronger cash flow generation, and delivering sustainable shareholder returns. With the symbol clash being that we are now commencing shareholder distributions for the first time, a process that began this morning. Over the next few slides, I will be going through the building blocks of how we will deliver this in a robust and resilient manner.
To kick off, I'll touch on our highlights of our Q3 results, which we released this morning. We've delivered another strong set of results showing continued momentum. We added 2,125 tenancies year to date, including 296 new sites, taking our tenancy ratio up by 0.1- 2.2, hitting our target early. Adjusted EBITDA is up 11% year- on- year to $346 million, with free cash flow expanding by $70 million to reach $49 million, again demonstrating the cash compounding nature of our growth. We've also reduced net leverage by 0.6 year- on- year to 3.6. We successfully tendered $120 million of our convertible bonds below par, removing 41 million potentially dilutive shares. Today, our average remaining life on our debt is four years. We're in good shape. We continue to proactively manage the balance sheet, looking to reduce the cost of capital and enhance equity value.
On the back of this great performance, we've tightened upwards our full-year guidance across all metrics once again. Given the strong rollout year to date, we are now guiding to 2,500 tenancy additions for the full year and EBITDA of approximately $470 million, both top ends of the previously guided ranges. With free cash flow expected to exceed $60 million, whilst we continue to guide to deleveraging to roughly $3.5 million. Given the high tenancies, we expect CapEx to come in between $160 million-$180 million. We're happy with the performance to date this year. We're now really focused on ensuring we end the year with momentum driving us into this next strategic cycle. I think these results once again demonstrate our ability to capture the growth opportunities in our markets in a robust and resilient manner, which takes me very nicely to the next section.
Now, you saw this slide earlier in Tom's presentation. When I go through how we've designed our business to be robust and resilient, the greatest proof point is performance. We've delivered 10 years of consecutive U.S. dollar EBITDA growth despite global pandemics, oil price shocks, rising inflation, rising interest rates, and increasing global volatility. The world is very different 10 years ago, but then so is our business. Through this backdrop, we've grown our EBITDA with a CAGR of 24% from $54 million in 2015 all the way to $470 million that we're guiding to at the end of this year. The business foundations we've set to deliver this growth have not only been maintained over the last few years, but strengthened. This provides the basis for how we will sustainably capture all the growth that Tom has mentioned over the next decade plus.
Though there are many nuances and business characteristics and positive characters within our business, these can be distilled into four key pillars that underpin our strength and resilience. One, a uniquely diversified portfolio across carefully chosen high-growth African and Middle Eastern markets. Two, a strong hard currency earning base driven mainly by our presence in innately hard currency markets and reinforced by contractual protections. Three, partnerships with blue chip, largely investment-grade customers. Four, we sign up to long-term contracts with these customers, totaling $5.5 billion of contracted revenues, providing exceptional visibility and forming the foundation for our next phase of growth. Now, I'll click into these dynamics in a bit more detail, starting with our customers and contracts. Firstly, on customers on the right-hand side of the page. Whilst we operate in high-growth markets, we're contracting with and dealing with these operators on a daily basis.
They're diversified and truly the household names you would expect, with many spanning multiple mobile markets, many of our markets. Importantly, they are showing phenomenal growth themselves. For example, Orange's Mina business continues to thrive, while Vodacom and Airtel Africa are going from strength to strength, with Airtel upgrading their CapEx plans last week on the back of the great results they're seeing. We are proud partners to all of them. We contract with these operators utilizing the U.S. Tower Code contract structure, but applying it to high-growth African and Middle Eastern markets. These contracts have a long duration, 10-15 years initial term, and then they have auto-renewals, which will likely take them up to 40+ years . There are minimal cancellation rights. Typically, operators can cancel about 1% of tenancies per annum.
The reality is that churn is not really an issue with this business. It's negligible. It's really about operators rolling out more tenancies. We see this in our reported numbers. Now, we charge the customers based on three things. The vertical space they take up on the tower, the power that they utilize, and the wind load of their equipment. We effectively allocate a predefined bucket for each of these three characteristics. In our contracts, we have amendment revenue clauses. What that means is that if an operator adds more equipment or utilizes more power than their predefined limits, then we get to charge for that. Today, roughly 15% of our tenancies are amendments.
This is driven by the fact that we are seeing technological improvements across our markets, with operators adding more and more equipment to sites so that they can provide 3G, 4G, and now 5G connectivity. All of that means extra potential revenue for us. Today, we have $5.5 billion of contracted revenue with our customers, with an average remaining life of 6.7 years. This number does not include auto-renewals. Expect this number to rise in the future. These dynamics give us fantastic revenue visibility and certainty and provide the baseline to then layer on top all the incremental growth that we will see. Finally, on this page, and importantly, we also have inflation and power price escalators in our contracts. I'll explain that in more detail now.
Now, this is quite a full slide, but I'm going to take a few minutes to kind of go through it because it's a very important one. I'll go through the various mechanics. Now, on the top, from left to right, you'll see our markets, with the overall group being on the far right-hand side. One of our key strengths is our hard currency profile. Today, 71% of our adjusted EBITDA is in hard currency. This is driven mainly by the four markets highlighted in the orange box. These are innately hard currency markets. DRC is dollarized. Oman is dollar-pegged. Worth noting, DRC and Oman are two of our three biggest markets. This is supplemented with Senegal and Congo Brazzaville, which are euro-pegged.
Not only do these markets demonstrate fantastic mobile growth, but by being innately hard currency, it means the revenues our customers receive are the hard currencies that they pay to us. In our remaining markets, we also have a portion of revenues linked to hard currencies, which you can see in the other pie charts, adding further to the overall mix. Now, in all of our contracts, in all markets, we have inflation and power price escalators. Inflation escalators typically kick in in Q1 of every year and are linked to the currency of the revenue we receive. If we receive U.S. dollars, it is U.S. CPI. If we receive Tanzanian shilling, it is Tanzanian CPI. The inflation escalators further assist to help against protection against FX movements.
I'll show on the next page, the combination of being these hard currency markets and having inflation escalators is a robust way of managing FX movements. We also have power price protections in all contracts, which escalate either quarterly or annually, depending on the contract, with more fuel-intensive markets typically escalating quarterly, for example. These escalators go both up or down, depending on the local pricing of power. If the local price pleats for diesel goes up, then the escalator goes up. Conversely, if it goes down, then the escalator goes down. The escalator is set up to effectively mitigate the macro movement of an impact of pricing. We are on the hook for what is within our control, which is volume.
Therefore, if we can operate our sites more effectively by moving away from the most expensive form of powering a site, which is through diesel, and connect to the grid where possible or utilize batteries and solar, then we'll make those investments because that will drive returns. For the last few years, we've shown how these escalators work in practice every quarter to show them in action. Here, we show the high-level output of the cumulative effect of the key drivers on our business since 2021, when we first started to show this level of granularity. The key output here is that 97% of our $ EBITDA growth has been driven by business performance, i.e., tenancy additions and operational improvements. Power, CPI, and FX movements have offset one another and operating as designed so that macro movements do not dictate the company performance.
We do not make a margin on the escalators, and neither do we want to. We want our business performance to be driven by what we can control and how we provide our services even better and more efficiently to our customers. That is what you see here. Now, whilst we have shown this analysis on a cumulative basis, this ultimate dynamic and conclusion is what we have shown every single quarter too. Some of you may have seen this slide before, but this takes the prior fundamentals I have talked through and presents the correlation between our dollar adjusted EBITDA growth and tenancy additions over the past 10 years. The dark bar is our tenancy numbers. The lighter bar is our U.S. dollar annualized EBITDA.
We have then layered on top of it the lines which depict FX movements versus the dollar for our local foreign currencies and also the movement in Brent crude. Despite the movements in some FX rates and Brent crude, as you can see, our business model has continually delivered consistent U.S. dollar EBITDA growth over that time and demonstrates an extremely high correlation to tenancy growth. R squared, the measure of correlation of one, is perfect. We show here a 0.97 R squared. We are near enough perfectly correlated with tenancy growth, with almost no correlation to movements in FX and Brent crude. This is really another way of demonstrating that our business has been effectively designed to grow with tenancy additions, which is both a function of our market growth, but also our capacity to deliver exceptional customer experience, which Tom went through.
Fundamentally, we're in the right markets with great customers who are growing and investing. We continue to be laser-focused on ensuring we push the boundaries on how we deliver for our customers. We have set rock-solid foundations to be able to capture this growth into the future. In short, if we continue to do what we've been doing for a decade, this chart will continue into the foreseeable, increasing dollar earnings, increasing cash compounding returns. Our growth algorithm is clear. Strong market growth drives our tenancy growth, which drives our dollar EBITDA, which will drive our recurring free cash flow. That's the capital available to management to deploy on discretionary growth CapEx, debt paydowns, and/or shareholder distributions. We expect market growth of 6% CAGR, or to put it another way, 27,000 incremental market tenancies to be rolled out by M&Os across our markets.
That is just shy of our own business size today at 31,500 tenancies. Given our market-leading positioning and capabilities, this will drive our own annual tenancy growth of 6%+ , which effectively equates to 2,000-2,500 incremental tenancies per annum, which is similar to what we've been doing now for the past three years, of which 20%-25% we expect of those tenancies to be new sites. I want to also say that this is a five-year view. There will be peaks and troughs in terms of rollout. Some years, we may see more build-to-suits than this, and some years, we may see less. Indeed, as it actually stands today, we're having really exciting conversations with our customers across all markets about rollouts of new sites. It is a very, very exciting time.
When looking at these rollout numbers over the next five-year period, this will broadly be the average view. The split will be more colos to be than build-to-suits, again, consistent with history. As a consequence, we expect our tenancy ratios to increase to 2.5 by 2030. This will not only drive 9% CAGR on our EBITDA, but high recurring free cash flow generation. On this bridge, we set out those drivers in a bit more detail. The key driver is that our EBITDA will be growing faster than our cost base, resulting in high cash flow through. This is principally due to continued lease-up on our portfolio, which Tom referenced earlier about the cash compounding effect of this, and also because we will be seeing site growth of 3%, which is the driver to other line items.
Non-discretionary CapEx and ground lease payments are both around $3,000 per site. These will increase in relation to the growing site base, which is slower than the EBITDA growth rates. Cash taxes will equate to roughly 5%-6% of revenue for the period. With 84% of our debt being fixed, this will also be leveraged. It is really our aim to continue to optimize our funding sources and cost of capital. Our ultimate aim is to drive return on invested capital in excess of WAC, drive returns through capital-efficient investments, and aim to reduce WACC through balance sheet management where possible. The combination of all of this will lead to $1.3 billion of cumulative recurring free cash flow. This takes us now to how we allocate that capital. Discipline and returns remain at the heart of every decision.
Now, as management, our role is, amongst other things, to be disciplined capital allocators. Every strategic decision we make is grounded in analytical rigor. Our disciplined but flexible capital allocation framework provides a structure for how we will make these decisions, assessing where our capital will generate the highest and most sustainable returns for shareholders, be that through reinvestment or distributions. Our first priority is to reinvest in organic opportunities that will deliver the strongest returns, compound our growth, whilst continually improving the quality and resilience of our portfolio. We will always fuel the compounding engine of our business. To that end, we are guided to spend over $500,000,000 in value-accretive organic opportunities between 2026 and 2030.
Our compounding growth and inflection in cash flow now also means we're happy to commence investor distributions, with over $400 million being earmarked over that same period, with a balance of a growing dividend and a regular but flexible buyback. Now, this is a key moment for the company, where we enter the sweet spot for providing both attractive growth and now returns to our investors. Looking down the priority list is opportunistic but disciplined M&A. We are happy with the markets and the portfolios that we have. We've demonstrated there are massive growth opportunities in our existing markets, and we're well positioned to capture on those. However, we will continue to assess potential inorganic opportunities and keep our eyes open for the right opportunities. Underpinning all of this is our desire to maintain both balance sheet strength and the financial flexibility to capture further opportunities as they emerge.
The execution of our plan through Impact 2030, with over $900 million firmly allocated to organic investment and investor distributions, would see us naturally deliver from 3.5 at the end of this year towards 2 by 2030. Now, it's worth noting, however, that towercos generally, given the contracted revenue profile with blue-chip customer base and consistent cash flow generation, can and do operate with higher levels of leverage than this, not too dissimilar from real estate companies. With that in mind, whilst I expect us to deliver further, I see a 2.5-3.5 range as being one that we can comfortably operate within over the coming years. Being towards the top or the upper end of that range is likely if we see faster-than-expected organic opportunities to invest and also further capital return opportunities emerging.
Exactly where we operate within that range will depend on the opportunities set in front of us and the disciplined and flexible capital allocation decisions we will make through the framework I have just laid out. That way we maintain a strong balance sheet while maximizing returns for our investors. I will now go through these three buckets in a bit more detail. Priority one is always going to be funding our high-returning organic growth. We have a weekly management capital allocation committee where we review the set menu of options we have across the board. We effectively rank these opportunities by return and allocate the capital accordingly to the highest-returning investment. There are a lot of analytics that go into that list, I should add, and we test, test, and retest the inputs to ensure we are maximizing our collective knowledge to drive the best return possible.
It is this rigor that has driven innovation, led to new site designs, OpEx improvements, and you'll hear about some of those in the breakouts upstairs. Now, internally, we have a saying, "We're not a Tauco, but we're a Coloco." At the capital allocation committee, the discussions on colo investments are very quick. We always approve colocations. That is the compounder of our business with ROICs over 100%, with a typical cost per colo of $10,000. Next is then power investments, which save OpEx. Now, we've seen good returns on these investments with roughly 33% return on invested capital. As part of Project 100, our previously communicated commitment to invest $100 million in carbon-reducing initiatives, we expect to invest roughly $10 million per annum up to 2030, yielding similar returns over that period. It is worth noting that with our business, sustainability and financial returns are directly correlated.
Diesel is the most expensive form of powering a site. If we can reduce diesel consumption, we reduce carbon emissions and also critically drive returns. Lara will go through how we do this upstairs again in the breakout session. Finally, new site builds. Utilizing the great work completed by the GIS team in identifying the best locations and the engineering team in refining site builds, we have seen 12% day-one return on invested capital, with recent vintages leasing up within two to three years. We are very analytical about our investment decisions with new site builds, and we will ensure we continue to invest in attractive new sites to expand our portfolio, which will then further drive lease-up as we go forward. We expect 20%-25% of our tenancy rollout to be new builds, equating to roughly 400-500 new sites per annum.
On the left-hand side, you'll see how we've delivered this over the past three years and how our investment in growth CapEx has led to high returns. The dark blue bar being the growth CapEx incurred, the orange bar being the incremental EBITDA, and the green bar being the incremental portfolio free cash flow, i.e., the cash generated by our tower assets and is the numerator to return on invested capital calculation. Here, we can see that we've been generating 30%+ ROICs on our investments in growth. This provides the evidence that we are disciplined in our investments and demonstrates the best use of capital is to invest in these initiatives. We're committed to spending over $500 million on these investments up to 2030. This fuels the compounding engine of our business, and we will always ensure we have capital to deploy on these as needed.
Excitingly, we are and will continue to generate excess capital. Today, we've announced $400 million is earmarked for distribution to our investors. We're guiding to a minimum of $250 million of share buybacks over the next five years, which is envisaged to be evenly spread over that period. We've initiated the buyback as of this morning, and we have authorization for $75 million, which effectively takes us up to the end of next year with some buffer should we see further incremental opportunities over that period. Our approach to buybacks is no different to any investment, disciplined and focused on returns, and we'll undertake share buybacks when they represent effective use of capital to enhance shareholder returns. Additionally, we're announcing the introduction of a $25 million dividend for fiscal year 2026 to be paid semi-annually and growing at 10% per annum.
Now, the sharp eyed will see that not all the recurring free cash flows have been allocated, with $400 million currently unallocated. We maintain capital flexibility to continue to invest in the highest-returning investments as they arise. We want this capital to work hard for us. In short, either that amount we reinvest in the business or allocate it again to our investors. Whilst lower down the pecking order, we do continue to monitor and review inorganic opportunities with a preference for in-market bolt-ons. This has been a tried-and-tested route where the initial acquisition sets the foundations for growth, and then should another in-market bolt-on opportunity appear, we then have the option to utilize the established setup to quickly and accretively fold in that portfolio, leveraging the team and partner group already set up in that market.
We've completed a number of these over the years, and when we look at the current total opportunity set out there, there are roughly around 23,000 towers in the hands of M&Os that could potentially come to market, of which 10,000 are ones that largely match our criteria, with half of that being in the medium-term pipeline, which we will continue to monitor. Now, with regards to new markets, again, further down the priority list, however, the potential opportunity set is very large, with roughly 180,000 towers high-level being ones that would largely match our criteria, i.e., being in Africa and the Middle East, multiple M&Os, no or limited towerco presence, and with stable and/or pegged currencies. Now, M&A has been an important tool for the company, and it's worth mentioning that we've said no to far more deals than we said yes to.
We're disciplined in our assessment of new opportunities, and when we look at the integration of our new market deals we've completed over the last few years, as it stands today, as a collective, they are all performing well and ahead of plan. The aim of entering new high-growth markets, diversifying our earnings, has been well executed and really gives us the springboard for our strategy today. To wrap up, the reason why I and all of us at Helios Towers feel so excited about this next phase of company evolution is because we are now entering a really compelling phase for the company. We've called it the sweet spot where we are able to deliver both growth and value, but the critical point being that this phase will not be short-lived, but something that we can deliver for many years ahead.
Tom has gone through the numerous opportunities available to us and our capabilities in capturing those. I have talked through how we have created a financially robust business model that has demonstrated year on year how we have sustainably captured those opportunities and driven financial returns. As a shareholder in this business, as are all Helios Towers staff, we are laser-focused on delivering Impact 2030, where we will be delivering both high-returning, capital-efficient growth and generating truly excess capital for investor distributions for the first time. It really is a fantastic moment for the company. We are all super motivated to execute this strategy. Thank you very much. Before we go into the fireside chat, where you will hear firsthand from our colleagues on how we operate, we are going to have a short comfort break for 10 minutes. Thank you all very much.
Helios Towers is a leading telecom towers company. We operate the mission-critical infrastructure that is the backbone of the mobile network. Over the next five years, data consumption across Africa and the Middle East is forecast to quadruple. For the rest of this century, eight out of 10 people born will be in Africa and the Middle East. This is at a time right now when only 50% of people are actually connected to mobile communications. There is a huge gap right now, and there is a huge shift coming. Mobile is such a fundamental tool for life in terms of how you communicate, particularly in our markets, because if mobile is not there, there is no other form of communication. We are contracting with high-growth mobile network operators to try and operate their networks from a passive perspective better than they can do it themselves and try and provide them a more cost-effective solution.
The amount of growth that is coming through our markets and the broader region is the highest globally. That sets us up quite nicely for our next strategy cycle, Impact 2030, in which we are targeting an achievement of 2.5 tenancies on our towers. Of course, during that time, we expect to build more towers as well, so we will have a bigger base with a bigger tenancy count on these towers by 2030. Year- on- year, we drive high power uptime and operational efficiencies across our market. From digital site planning, automated workflows to centralized project tracking, technology has been central and embedded in what we do on a day-to-day basis. From a study we did, every 1% of downtime is the equivalent of $175 million of revenue for our mobile operators. It is incredibly important that our customers see that consistent availability in power. We've achieved great success in downtime per tower across the network. We were at 20 minutes in 2015. Now, in 2025, we're at one minute downtime per tower. We are not stopping there. We have a target in 2030 of 10 seconds downtime per tower.
At Helios Towers, our people are our most important asset. We are very proud to say that 95% of our workforce are local employees. We've got a really clear partner engagement program to make sure that they understand the KPIs that we're setting as part of the new strategy and, more importantly, that we can help them to deliver on those KPIs, whether it's power uptime or speed of rollout. Most importantly, we're listening to customer feedback, and we're taking that on board to shape the strategy. We will continue to do that and be agile for the next five years.
Our focus, day in, day out, is to provide customer experience excellence. This means delivering new sites at record speed safely. To us, our success is when we are able to connect people and we are able to empower growth. It's not the number of towers; it's the positive impact our tower footprint has impacted in society. I'm really, really excited about Impact 2030. To me, this is what the company has been building up towards. As we set out on this new strategic cycle of Impact 2030, I'm super confident about delivery. I'm super excited to go on this journey with our teams for the next five years and beyond.
Cool. Yeah, welcome back, everyone. As a quick reminder for the agenda from here, we'll have a fireside chat now. After that, we'll do some Q&A from the audience, about 30 minutes in total. We will move upstairs to the 26th floor to have some food and drink from our markets and do some really interesting deep-dive presentations I hope you all can stay around for. Thank you, Tom and Manjit, for the presentations. I thought it was super interesting. As I said at the beginning, there are really exciting prospects for this company. This session, we are going to delve into some of the risks associated with our markets and the opportunities as well. Manjit covered the macroeconomic and the financial risks. We are going to discuss today the operational risks. These reflect questions from investors we received over the past few weeks in advance of this Capital Markets Day. To help me, I have invited our regional, operational, and commercial leaders on stage. I have worked with all these guys for more than seven years now. I know them well, but can you please introduce yourselves to the audience?
Hi, everyone. Great to see you all. My name is Alan Fairbairn. I'm Director of Delivery, IT, and Business Excellence. I've been with Helios Towers for four years. Prior to that, I was 15 years with Aggreko, sort of designing and delivering power plants across Africa and the Middle East. I'm a proud Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, and a fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology.
My name is Fritz Juklow. I joined Helios Towers in 2012 after my career with Vodafone. And since joining Helios Towers, I've worked in different markets like Tanzania and Ghana, and also held various leadership roles. Since 2023, I've had the privilege of becoming the Regional CEO for West, Central, and Southern Africa. I'm Ghanaian, and I'm an electrical engineer.
Yeah, so hello, Jambo, everybody. My name is Gwakisa Stadi , I'm the Regional CEO for East Africa. I joined this company 10 years ago. I'm one of the true testimony of those who have grown from within, growing from Financial Controller to my Regional CEO current role. While I was the Managing Director in Tanzania, over three years, we managed to grow EBITDA by over 50%. I'm a chartered accountant, previously working with Deloitte East Africa, where I got the opportunity to audit most of the mobile operators in that market. That's where I connected with Helios the first time.
I'm Lara Coady, and I'm the Director of Operations and Engineering. I've been working across Africa and the Middle East now for over 18 years in technical and operational roles. Previous to joining Helios, I actually worked at Aggreko alongside Alan, working on building, developing, designing, and maintaining big power plants across developing markets. So a lot of synergies with what we do here at Helios Towers.
Good afternoon. I'm Sineesh Vallabh, Group Chief Commercial Officer. I've been with the business for five years, having held a number of exco roles, including Regional CEO for our Southern and Central African operations. I've got a total of 22 years of telco experience in Africa and the Middle East, 10 years as a sector-focused investment banker at HSBC and Rothschild, and seven years at Vodafone Group, where I led the strategy and mergers and acquisitions functions. Very happy to be here and great to be speaking to you all.
Good. Yeah, thanks all. Really appreciate that. There's going to be three sections here. One's growth, one is operating expense and returns, and the final is tail risk. Starting with growth, Tom outlined we're targeting over 10,000 tenancies over the next five years. One of the key questions I get from investors relates to, are we leaving a lot of growth on the table? Manjit outlined high return thresholds. Yeah, I guess to you, it's are we leaving any growth on the table?
Yeah, thanks, Chris. I mean, Manjit and Tom both mentioned the strong innate level of growth that we have within our markets. I won't talk about that again. We're capturing this growth in better and smarter ways. Number one, we use our proprietary GIS system. Tom mentioned that. We've got a deep-dive session later on, which we'll take you through that a bit more. This system allows us to drive and accelerate colocations on our existing assets, which drive returns. Secondly, we are building better, and we are providing our service, power as a service, in a smarter way. This equally drives our returns. Overall, through our discipline and capital allocation process. By the way, I sit in our capital allocation committee that Manjit mentioned. I'm confident that we are investing in the right levels of growth to achieve and even exceed our stated targets.
Yeah, so. To echo Manjit, we are not leaving any growth. For instance, in Tanzania, we have been able to tap all the growth potential available in the market while we expand our returns, making sure our work is greater than our work. We have been able to do that into two factors. Number one. We have been reducing our CapEx through structural tower redesign and OpEx saving initiative through grid and solar deployment, meaning we have less power cost. Number two, we have been able to proactively maximize the lease-up potential in our tower by pre-selling lease space. That has been done through early power and tower strengthening to ensure that we maximize the lease-up. That has made us deliver colocation in virtually 24 hours vis-à-vis our competitor, who does that for up to three weeks. As a result, of all the 5G deployment in Tanzania for the last three years, Helios has tapped a market share of 70%, which is huge. Number two, on return, four years ago during CMD, Tanzania LOIC was around 16%. I'm happy to inform you that we are trending now above 20%.
I guess just overnight as well too, that 70% 5G deployment we captured, that's far more than our market share as well too. I think we are capturing more than our fair share there through early delivery. On the point as well too, targeting 10,000 tenancies over the next five years. If you look back to IPO, we're rolling out about 1,000 tenancies per annum. This year's guidance is 2.5K. It's a material step up in tenancy additions. A key question I get is, what are the challenges in actually managing that incremental rollout for the business?
Yeah, the key challenge for us is really anticipating customer demand. By each opco, but also within the regions within these markets, there are vast geographies. Really anticipating that demand is key. We work really closely with the sales teams and our customers day in, day out to make sure we're doing that. It's really about having the right material in the right place at the right time, but also at the lowest possible cost. The cost of everything in the world seems to be going up.
Over the last eight years, we've kept the average cost of our towers flat at $125,000. We've done this in two key ways. One is through value engineering and automation. We've got colleagues, internal colleagues across the group, and engineering, supply chain experts, and project managers who focus day in, day out on incremental gains and improvements to deliver better for our customers. The other thing that we do is we all work closely with our customers, but really developing new products is key. That's going to sustain this business, as Tom mentioned, for decades to come. We've got a number of new products coming down the pipeline. One example is a Lean Tower, which is a standard tower and foundation design, but the power system doesn't have a generator. Therefore, no diesel, no diesel cost associated with that. We're integrating the grid and renewables. We really see fantastic opportunity in the coming months and years ahead.
Just building on a point that Alan's mentioned there, maintaining that cost, we've been able to do that from having standard designs, standard designs that are repeatable to install, repeatable to commission, repeatable to maintain. Not only does that help us deliver things quicker at volume, but it also helps us to guarantee the quality. We do this through a number of our partners. We leverage partners to build our sites, to maintain our sites. You will have seen earlier on in the videos and in the presentation the slogan, "One team, one business." This is not just something that we leverage internally between our teams across the locations, but it is also something that we stand behind with our partners, making sure that we are aligned on common objectives, common goals, identifying where there are opportunities, and collaborating on how we work on those. We are going to continue that focus around partner excellence over the next few years. We are going to focus on developing our partners and actually introduce more around business excellence so that they too can deliver efficiencies through that methodology too.
That "One team, one business" thing is quite interesting, actually. It is all the, sorry, apologies. The simple things, really. When I went to the opcos the first time in 2018, it's daily stand-up meetings where our partners have stood there, our opco team stood there, conversing, just nailing down one, two, three, four, five key priorities, sharing office space. Getting that part right really underpins that performance you can build upon thereafter, particularly in our markets we're operating in. A key next question, I think two of you emailed me on this this week, actually, relates to mobile operator sharing agreements. Had a few in the news the past few months now around a couple of mobile operators sharing their infrastructure. What is the impact of that on our growth going forward?
Yeah, thanks, Chris. I mean, short answer is that it has no impact. In fact, it could be a complementary effect. I'll answer the question in a couple of points. Number one, infrastructure sharing agreements with mobile operators have been around for a long time. In fact, I was involved in quite a few of them during my time at Vodacom. The second point is, it is quite complicated, and there are natural challenges with mobile operators sharing infrastructure on a wide-scale basis, which is why typically you would find that it is quite self-focused and quite specific in what they actually share. The third point, I suppose, in our markets, having engaged with all of our mobile operator customers, the focus on infrastructure sharing in our markets is around fiber and the transmission side. There is a bit of focus on very deep rural, where it is, I suppose, economically difficult to build a site. That is where mobile operators are sharing that. Overall, we see this as a benefit to the ecosystem in which it will drive connectivity and drive further network requirements.
There was one big one in DRC, I guess, quite recently, a question on earlier this week.
Yeah, 100%. Look, I'll cover DRC because a number of you might have heard about infrastructure sharing happening in DRC. Whilst that might be going on, which Sineesh mentioned, this is really related to rural, ultra-rural, and fiber infrastructure. The demand in the market remains available. If you take DRC as an example, there are about 3,000 subscribers to an antenna. You compare that to here, you have about 1,000 subscribers to an antenna. Also in DRC, you have only 40 million of the population today that have mobile coverage out of 100 million people. That is 60 million people that do not have mobile coverage today.
You take a step back and think about it, that is the whole of England without mobile coverage. Right? We think that with Impact 2030, we could cover about one-fifth of that, which is about 12 million people. Just recently, I was in market. One of our customer CTOs said that they've seen over the last six months a 50% increase in data traffic. We are seeing plenty of demand across our product portfolio, be it built to suit, where customers want to take first-mover advantage. In Africa, when people buy SIM cards, they are loyal to it for a long time. Okay? Then colocations or active equipment upgrades, where customers want to add more and more equipment onto the towers because they're just seeing a lot of traffic on their network.
Thanks, Fritz. Final question on the growth piece now as well too, relates to contracted revenues. We highlighted earlier today we have $5.5 billion, initial life being seven years. We are over 15 years old now, so there have been a few renewals and probably more to come. Do you want to talk through how those have gone so far?
Yeah, thanks. I mean, it is exactly that, right? I mean, as a business, we are now 15 years old. We have done a few renewals. We are currently in engagement with customers on a few others, and there will be a couple more to come. My point being is that this is part of our DNA. This is what we do. It is part of our customer engagement, customer experience excellence. Of the ones that we have done recently over the last couple of years, I mean, we renewed 7,000 tenancies, absolutely zero churn. Given our strong focus on customer experience excellence, founded on our operational excellence and business excellence programs, it makes these conversations fairly straightforward and fairly easy to get there. Yeah, looking forward to more of these discussions with customers.
A big one in Tanzania as well too, I better go to there.
I think in Tanzania, we have successfully negotiated major contracts, one including the customer we represent or cover nearly 10% of the group tenancies. We have extended this contract for over 10 years while we kept all the key contractual terms to that contract, be it pricing, protection, or auto renewal. We have been able to succeed the extension because of two major reasons. Number one, the customer, they know by rolling up their network with us, they are making a 30% discount or price. Advantage to them vis-à-vis them owning or building their own towers. Number two, over the last 15 years, we have demonstrated and represented customer experience excellence on rollout speed as well as network uptime quality to the extent they are very comfortable to continue working with that. Our renewal has been in a win-win position to the extent we have seen after that a mutual growth between us and our customer. In fact, on our side, we have seen a 20% tenancy ratio increase per annum with that particular customer.
Yeah, thanks, Mukisa. That is the key growth questions that we get. Now focusing on OpEx and returns expansion. We spend about $200 million on OpEx per year, and two-thirds of that is allocated towards power. Going to start there with you, Lara. One of the key questions we often get is, how do you actually deliver 99.99%? How unique is that skill set? Could you maybe talk through how we've got there?
Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, our customers really value us for having that reliable power. Our focus has really been around our operational blueprint, and we believe it's a winning operational blueprint. It really looks at our people, our processes, and our products. It's about having the right combination of technical and local expertise that we're continually evolving and training on new technologies. It's also about business excellence. We've spoken a lot about that today. I was actually certified as a black belt from Ohio State University before joining Helios Towers.
I've seen firsthand, not just here, but in other organizations, really the benefits that come across operational processes when you apply some of the Lean Six Sigma methodology. It really does work. It's continually evolving our processes to drive efficiencies. It's also then looking at our products. We've done quite a lot around our products. We've got a couple of products here actually upstairs that I'll take you through in a little bit more detail. I think, look, taking a step back, that operational blueprint that we have, it really does work. If you look at the acquisitions that we've done recently in the four markets, we've seen on average a 90% improvement in power availability. That means more revenue for the customer, a happier customer, happier subscribers, happier communities. I really believe what we've got is working.
Thanks, Lara. I do encourage all of you to go upstairs to try out the Rectifier 5. I haven't seen one before. It's very, very fascinating, actually. That's the customer side of things. As I mentioned, it's two-thirds of our total cost. I guess. What process, what technologies, what things are you seeing that make you excited about what you can do the next five years in terms of reducing that fuel cost?
Yeah, no. Look, I'm super, super, super excited about what we're going to be focused on over the next couple of years. Just to put this into context, around 30% of the energy that we provide to our customers currently comes from the diesel generators. As Chris mentioned, that reflects around 60%-70% of our power cost. DRC has actually got the biggest opportunity. Around half of the sites in the DRC network do not have access to the grid. We supplement that with other forms of power generation. If you look at product development, and I am going to talk to you about two key products that we are looking at at the moment, solar. The energy that you can produce from solar has doubled since we first started installing solar in 2017. Space can often be the constraint in terms of how much energy we can produce from renewables. The fact that we can produce double the energy that we could before is really important for us. The second one is around lithium batteries. Actually, over the last few years, we have seen a 30% reduction in battery cost, but also the product and the efficiency of the product is also improving.
Those two key elements are really important for us. We have an ambition over the next strategy cycle to have 100% of our sites connected to the grid or installed with solar. Look, as Manjit mentioned, any investment needs to have the right returns. What we've spent our money on so far under Project 100, that $100 million of commitment to reduce carbon, we've seen at least a three-year payback.
Chris, covering more on DRC, where we have the biggest opportunity. Look, fuel is one of the biggest OpEx opportunities we have in DRC. We have an operationally disciplined approach to how we tackle this. What are we doing? We're connecting more and more sites to the grid and working closely with grid providers such as SNEL and IPPs or independent power providers. We also have dedicated grid partners that help. Us maximize the use of the grid once the sites are connected to the grid. As Lara mentioned, we have alternative power sources such as solar and hybrid. We are leveraging on these alternative power sources to be able to reduce fuel consumption in DRC. Also, we have remote monitoring of the sites so that we are able to respond in real time to events on the sites and also keep our site configurations intact. For us, overall, in DRC, fuel reduction is a huge opportunity. It is not just cost reduction, but it is also margin expansion.
Sounds like a good opportunity. Do not make it competitive, Alan. What are you going to do on the non-power side in the next five years?
Yeah, no, there is a lot going on. Listen, everything we're doing on the digital side is massively complementary to what we need to do in DRC and across operations. At Helios, we've been on a really strong learning journey the last couple of years on all things digital. We've been learning about AI, about large language models from first principles. We're doing Python coding camps. We've got a number of initiatives to engage the organization with a view to digitalizing our already award-winning Lean Six Sigma program. We're going to combine digital and Lean Six Sigma to really support what's been discussed here this afternoon. ChatGPT can't build our towers yet, but we'll give it some time. We're really doing this in two key ways. One is through foundation-type projects, where we've looked at every single.
Process within our company, and we've identified 60 different processes that we're going to digitalize over the next period. That's going to help us drive significant value and engage the whole organization on this digital journey. The second thing that we're doing is we've created what we call a flagship program. That's really digitalizing our customer experience from end to end. This means all 15,000 of our towers, we're going to digitalize every knob, bolt, washer, steel member. We've got 400,000 active assets on the towers. We're digitalizing those, as well as all the power equipment and all of the signaling. We're bringing that together into one common platform that is going to give customers an experience that they've never had before. We're really excited that that's going to help us drive lease up and also drive out significant cost. But don't take my word for it. We've actually got VR headsets set up up the stairs so we can transport you to Tanzania, and you can see a tower in action.
Yeah. By the way, just last September. In Tanzania, our vibrant local Thata colleagues, they went through a two-week coding camp training where they learned how to use the Python modeling, AI, and data analytics. A month after, I'm seeing a lot of transformative, innovative ideas coming from them. By the way, they have started some of the high-value project initiatives, be it on reducing fuel or increasing tenancies, which is supporting the customer experience. With digitalization within Helios, the future is very bright.
Hopefully, you can get to do my slides next time as well too, actually. Anyway, moving to hail risk associated with the business. It's the final section. And there's three questions here, really. The first one relates to DRC. Most investors here will never set foot in DRC yet. We'll read all of the negative news in the U.K., in the U.S., on just how bad it is. I've been there. You've been there far more than I've been. What's it actually like operating our business in that market? Perhaps reflect on the conflict earlier this year as well too.
Yeah. Look. Every time I go to Kinshasa, I find it a really buzzing city. You've been there a few times.
In the five times we did it pre-IPO, we took out many people as well too. I think it's got such a great atmosphere there as well too within Kinshasa. I really like it.
Yeah, I agree. We appreciate the complexities in DRC. We appreciate the challenges, but equally the opportunities. To our investor community, bienvenue Kinshasa. Always welcome to Kinshasa. A few of you I have met whilst in market as well. Look, it's a vast geography. To put it in perspective, flying from Goma in the east to Kinshasa in the west is 1,500 km. That's equal to flying from London to Ukraine. The vast nature of the geography itself has its own inherent challenges, complexities, and equally, opportunities. Whilst you might have heard about the Ebola outbreak and the conflict on the Eastern Corridor, we have many years of experience in managing these complexities under our belt. Earlier in the year, when the conflict escalated on the Eastern Corridor, myself and Lara were in market. We were meeting partners, holding workshops, and meeting our customers. For us, this is not new to us. Okay?
In these locations, life goes back to normal quite quickly. We have localized teams managing localized towers. There is just one important point I want to make. In these communities that the towers are located, they are protected by the communities because they do not have any alternative to communicate to the outside world. There are no alternatives. There are no landlines. They protect this asset because they understand how valuable it is to them. Operationally, we have a playbook. What do we do? We increase spares and fuel supply to nearby clusters to avoid any supply chain disruption. Our teams rely on automated alerts. We work closely with our partners and customers to make sure that service levels remain reliable. The overall impact is really minimal. As we speak, we have about eight towers out of 2,800 towers that are currently impacted.
These towers are still there, right? For us, like Chris spoke about health and safety earlier, lives of our people is really important. We do risk assessment of this location, and when it is possible, we send the teams back to these sites to bring them up. Based on the risk assessment that has been done recently, we think that in the next couple of weeks, these sites will be back up. Also, we see this as a barrier of entry for our competitors because they do not have the many years of experience in managing these complexities like we do.
Thanks, Chris. That was a really good response, actually. Kees, similarly, I think that the last one month, actually, I met one investor earlier today. The first question they asked me around too was Tanzania because it has been politically challenged the last week or so. Madagascar before that. Do you want to talk about how you've kind of proven operational resilience to those occasions?
Yeah. First, I would love to declare, and we're proud Tanzanian, as well as Pan Africanism as far as Madagascar and the entire African countries, they are. Just in a brief, in both of these two markets, we had some political unrest. In Madagascar, it was on the dissatisfaction of the critical services, grid, and the water supply. In Tanzania, it was lamentation on unfair general election processes. All of these were being led by youth. It is good to know the situation has now calmed down, and life is continuing well. By the way, one of the investors or the banker is flying to Dar es Salaam tomorrow.
I'm happy for that. Back to your question. Our business is naturally operational resilient. I will just explain that in two folds. Number one, we have been operating in these complex markets for over 14 years. When I say complex, I really mean it. For instance, in Madagascar, you can be hit by cyclone five to 10 times. Do not forget the difficult terrain and the poor grid or no grid at all, as Tom mentioned before. Over those years, our local teams have built DNA shields to navigate during those tough times. Number two, conception of data and communication or mobile communication conception is part of the key life essentials after food and medicine. If you want to prove that, just stay away from your phone for a week, then you will appreciate it. Even during those tough times, people have been d emanding data and communication services very well.
Life is continuing. For that, as Fritz touched base, at Helios , we have built our operational skill set, BCP, be it on supply chain, be it on handling and managing the towers out remotely. We are being able to visit our tower for maintenance and repair on a quarterly basis instead of a daily or a weekly and months. We are resilient. Summing up all of these, I wanted to tell you we were not affected operationally at all during these times. We even observed a bit of a different trend. In Madagascar, during that month of September, October, we reported the best network uptime ever since that market started of 12 seconds downtime per tower per week while we started almost 40 minutes four years ago.
In Tanzania, at the mid of that crisis for that one week, I remember Saturday and Sunday. We had zero network outage, which was even appreciated yesterday. We had a group stakeholder, and one of our biggest customers, group CTO, appreciated the network stability during that time. For me, what keeps me awake is not the challenges in those markets, which are inherent and we have a blueprint cover for it, but it is when I think we have 50% of the community or the population not connected to mobile communication.
Thanks, Gwakisa. That is a comprehensive answer. One final question, quick fire, then Q&A from the audience thereafter. Last final question. Alan, you have been spending a lot of time on this. Satellites, how does it impact our business?
Yeah, no, it seems to be a question that everyone is discussing. Satellites are not a threat to Helios Towers' business model, and they're not a threat to terrestrial networks as we know it. This is for one key reason. It's the laws of physics. Not even Elon Musk can change the laws of physics. A satellite antenna delivers 3,000x less capacity than a 5G antenna. I was going to sit here and talk about sort of physics the next 20 minutes, but Tom and Manjit didn't think it was a great idea. In the breakout session, I really encourage you to join us. We've actually got a short demonstration on electromagnetic theory that will help really explain this in more detail and bring it to life. How do satellites work? They're operating 350 km-500 km above the Earth's surface, which is almost equivalent from London to Paris in terms of distance.
It's the equivalent of putting active equipment on the Eiffel Tower and expecting to operate a telecoms network here in London. It's just never going to happen. Satellites clearly have a role to play. In maritime and aviation, we can all now work on flights. Some people like it, some people do not. Also in rural areas, whether you're in the West Highlands in Scotland or you're in remote Africa or the Middle East, it brings coverage to people that do not have it. We've all experienced, sorry, that does come at a cost. Both financially, but also in terms of interference. Satellite signal is really susceptible to interference. We're going to talk a bit about that later.
Here in London, we've all experienced sort of interference or poor network coverage, whether you're at a football match or a concert or on a Thursday night, even it's hard to get a network in the city because it's really congested, the network. That's the satellite experience. Do not take my word for it. I'm really pleased to say Marcus Weldon and my colleague Neville are going to run a session on this. In Marcus's time at Nokia Bell Labs, Marcus was in charge of the teams that developed the active equipment on these satellites and also developed the terrestrial networks as we know them today. Please come along and ask any technical or commercial questions that you may have.
If I can maybe add to that, Chris. I mean, from a customer perspective, we, of course, engage with our customers all the time. On this topic, they see it exactly the same way as Alan just described. Of course, satellites have a role to play. It has absolutely no impact on the terrestrial infrastructure network. It has a role to play in terms of the drive for ubiquitous coverage. We see potential opportunities, in fact, perhaps even from a backhaul service provision. These are early conversations that we're starting. Overall, yeah, our customers fully support what Alan just said.
Yeah, thanks, guys. One final quick fire. When we have our next CMD, and we've delivered Impact 2030 three, four, or five years from now, how can this audience judge what each of you have delivered? What's your key thing in deliver through this strategy?
For me, it's quite simple. I'm going to enable the organization to really deliver in excess of our 10,000 tenancy target that we've set out.
For me, it's driving more and more connections, increasing EBITDA, and accelerating free cash flow, as Tom and Manjit assured us.
Yeah, for me, it's expanding tenants' leisure in my region from the current 2.5x approaching 3x. While I'll be doing that in between years, in 2027, we have the African Cup of Nations, which will be hosted in Tanzania. I would love to invite everybody of you to be part of that. Maybe within that tournament, Tanzania underdog soccer team might be fighting and battling Ghana, a giant team. If we beat my brother Fritz, I'll pay for him for a vacation in Zanzibar.
We'll see about that. I still want him on business.
Very good. I'm going to be focused on driving efficiency, reducing our dependency on diesel through high return investment.
I'm focused on driving customer experience excellence, deepening our customer relationships to achieve and even exceed our stated targets. But Chris, what about you? What are you looking for?
FTSE 100. Thanks, everyone. Really appreciate that. Thank you. It's one of my beautiful updates. Thanks, guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Q&A will be managed by the Headland team here as well too. Please raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question.
Yeah, I'll come through. Right, it's John Karidis here from Deutsche Bank. Thank you for today and warm congratulations to everyone at Helios Towers for what you've achieved to date. I wanted to ask two unrelated questions, please, regarding the $400 million buffer in the $1.3 billion number. How often during the next five years will you sort of sit back and decide whether to keep it on the balance sheet or distribute it? Then secondly. Regarding the sort of inorganic in-market acquisitions, is it possible to give us a little bit more color. About. What is likely, what is not? You talked about 10,000 potential towers. What is the sort of probability-weighted number, if you like, over the next five years, based on the specifics of the markets that you know? Thank you.
Thanks, John. Manjit, do you want to take the capital allocation one?
I will take the acquisition one. Unsurprisingly, every single day, we will be looking at that $400 million. I mean, this is what we spend the majority of our time on, how we utilize that capital. That probably dominates our conversations, actually, between me and Tom and the broader management team. What we do not want is for that $400 million to be sitting idly. We will always do something with it. I think what I find really exciting, particularly about this next strategy, is that you've got that $400 million, you've got that deleveraging profile, the capacity of this business becomes incredibly powerful over the coming years. It's our job to kind of put that to work.
On acquisitions in general and yours specifically on the in-market opportunities, this plan is first and foremost primarily organic growth. That's the clear line of sight that we have ahead. We all know all of the structural trends that are ongoing and the total addressable market and the reasons why that's growing. We have the proven execution capabilities to deliver on that consistently as we move forward. First and foremost, that is the priority. Of course, we're going to keep our eyes out for opportunities to acquire smaller portfolio bolt-ons in markets should they come up. But the value generation that we're targeting over the next few years does not rely on that at all. It's really all about delivering the organic growth, and that's our primary focus.
Are there any questions from the back five, or if so, let me know. If not, then staff can take it.
Thank you. Did you limit us to one question?
No. We're fine. We've got all day.
It's David Wright from Bank of America. Thank you very much. And echoing John, congratulations on the results and the outlook. A couple of questions. The first one is a little more operational. It might be to Lara. It might not. But when you have the challenge around the, i t might be yourself, actually, around the electricity provision and the ability of the grid or any other means to provide that uptime. Do you find you're getting met in the middle more now by the operators as there's so many more network energy management solutions in the actual active layer? Do you find that they're sort of coming to you and the actual demand for the energy in the networks is almost easing a little? That's just a bit technical. Secondly, I love the slide on the ROIC evolution through colocation. Where you do have rural sharing, how does that evolve? How does the ROIC evolve when you have operators sharing on the active side? I'm just trying to understand that a little more. I just couldn't help but, you said satellites are no risk at all. I feel like that's quite a strong statement. I mean, I can get 150 meg Starlink. I've got it today. Why can't someone in Africa? Those three questions, please.
The first one on the power provisioning. I think more and more as we move forward each year, the criticality of reliable power is even more high up the priority. The simple fact is the users across our markets more and more demand the best quality of end user experience. They are mobile between different operators, partly dependent on the network quality. It is a real USP. From a mobile operator standpoint, network quality is one of the key deciding factors for subscribers. If the power's off at the site, then the network's down. That just doesn't work. Users just become more and more demanding on that each year.
On your point on the fluctuations of power, I mean, the reality is that the fluctuations are, in the grand scheme of things, tiny. That does not create sort of destabilization within the grid. The reality is either the grid's on or it's off, or there's load shedding going on. It's not really a site is 5 KW-20 KW, which is sort of negligible in the grand scheme of a grid. That is not driving any volatility. It is our job to provision each site individually. Each site in our 15,000 portfolio has its own tailored power configuration plan. That is a dynamic plan because the kilowatt load changes over time if you add more tenants or more data's going through and the kits are using more power. The plan needs to be dynamic, but it needs to be tailored for that site, depending on location, depending on even just the space around the site. Can you fit solar around the site or can you not, for example? That is a dynamic thing that moves all the time and is what our teams just focus on 24/7.
Should I tell the return one? Actually, just on the power one upstairs, we are going to show a rectifier with battery technology. We will show you how the brain of that site works in practice. I definitely say look because we also show the power fluctuations when it comes to solar, using grids, etc. That is another reason to come upstairs. Then on the rural rollout, this is a global phenomenon. Why is it that rural is more challenging? It's more challenging because you've got less people in that vicinity and it's going to cost you more to get there. As a consequence, the barriers for building out can sometimes be higher. That's no different in Africa. It's no different in the U.K. When the network operator's looking to share the active, we don't allow that. This is going to be on their own piece. We don't really know what that would be, but ultimately, that's something that they're trying to work on together. The first and foremost thing that we try to do is try to look at what we can do ourselves to minimize how we operate. Can we build a site differently? Can we maybe look at some of the SLAs and how we operate? Can we make lean sites?
Can we operate the site 100% off solar, for example, and battery? Minimize the amount of commute time and utilizing generators. There are always workarounds, those more challenging solutions. Again, that's our job. We do try to find those solutions. We do not want to say no to volume to the customer. We want to try and find a middle ground. Yeah, that's kind of the ultimate output. If they are going hyper-rural, then that might be the thing which the MNOs look to share. Last point, that could be a catalyst because if you are sharing a tower, for example, and people start to utilize that tower more frequently and the user base goes up, those MNOs will want to start kind of monetizing that and potentially try to look at more of a macro tower where we come in. It can be a catalyst. The last one is on satellites.
On satellites, we have our resident expert here, so definitely encouraged to come upstairs. On Starlink, on the DISH solution, you can get 100 MB-150 MB per second as long as there are barely any other users within the vicinity. A lot of this comes down to the beam from the satellite. The beam diverges as it comes down to Earth. A satellite beam covers between about either 25 km up to 100 km wide. An antenna on a terrestrial site covers about 1 km. Assuming you have the same amount of spectrum going through each, remember, spectrum is a finite source, then of course, you get just a much more concentrated beam within the terrestrial. That is what a lot of it comes down to. There's also other factors at play, including the antenna size within a device. That's why the DISH solution works a bit better than the direct-to-device solution because the DISH is that big. It's connected to mains power, and the uplink can be better. Remember, the antennas in these phones are the size of a pin. They're omni-antenna as well. The signal just goes out like that, and it's super, super weak. For good data consumption, you need the antennas as close to these phones as possible. That's partly because of the uplink from the pin size antenna in the phone itself. Those are the sort of sub-reasons for it. The main is just the laws of physics from the spectrum density within the beam.
Thank you. Lindsay Zastani from Morgan Stanley. Many congrats on all the announcements today. I just have two questions, please. You had a graph earlier showing kind of tenancy growth and EBITDA growth pretty much perfectly correlated. Now you're forecasting around 6% tenancy growth and over 9% EBITDA growth. What's causing this divergence going ahead? The puts and takes there would be super helpful. My second question, please. Historically, you tend to kind of upgrade guidance. Looking ahead at today's guidance you released, would you say it's perhaps a bit conservative? Thank you.
Very good question. On the 6-9 flow-through, that's all leased up effectively. Because you're adding those colocations, you're going to continue increasing from 2.2- 2.5. You're going to have all that high flow-through that comes through because, again, the cost base is broadly fixed. All of that incremental revenue is going straight to the bottom line. That is why you see the divergence. That is a positive. We are really, really pushing that. 9%+ EBITDA growth for the foreseeable is no easy feat. Whilst we do like to kind of beat our ambitious targets, they are ambitious targets. As we go forward, is there capacity to do so? Yes, absolutely. We will have to see how that volume kind of comes through. Depending on that, we will then give updated guidance in due course. I will hold it steady with what we said so far, please.
Thanks, Chris, Manjit, and Tom for the presentation. Rohit from Citi. Two questions, please. Firstly, just trying to understand, Tom, Chris, Manjit, how do you look at when previously you had a strategy of expansion and M&A and you're changing the strategy with focusing on deleveraging, being in a high-interest rate environment. Now you have been in your leverage range. We see interest rates going down. I mean, what are the constraints about not going back to your M&A strategy? On the same lines, I mean, you mentioned some of the deals that you have rejected. If you can give us some sense, what was the reason you have rejected those deals? Because you had some framework of M&A, if I remember a few years back, that you have guidelines that you have followed. If you can give some color on that. And secondly, on the tenancy additions, 2.5x tenancy ratio target, I mean, if you see the majority of the tenancy growth that comes from your key markets, that is Ghana, sorry, that is DRC and Tanzania so far, I mean, which has reached almost 2.7, 2.6 ratio. I mean, are you banking more on those markets, or are you expecting other markets to continue to contribute more so you reach that 2.5 target? Thank you.
Yeah, thanks very much for the questions. On M&A, it is ultimately a question on capital allocation. In terms of investing that incremental dollar, where do we get the best return from that? On M&A, first of all, the market is relatively quiet at the moment and has been for the past two, three years. Although it is not zero, it is relatively quiet. Quite simply, the returns that we see on organic investment are more superior. That will, and that's what we anticipate for the foreseeable. We see a huge demand in our markets on organic growth and network proliferation. We know how to operate there. We've got great teams that are delivering each and every day. We will continue to roll that out, be that the built-to-suits that we showed you, the colocations, and some power investments. That's right within our fairway. That's what we'll prioritize. We'll always assess any investment based on its merits. That's the reality today.
I think that the real constraint, to use your kind of terminology, is going to be what other opportunities we have and our return thresholds. We'll be disciplined to that. We don't need to chase M&A. We've got all the opportunity there. We will be very disciplined about allocating that capital accordingly. Why did we do the M&A that we have done? It was to diversify our portfolio, increase our hard currency earnings. You are seeing that come through. It was the right decision. Now we are going to be kind of really banking on that as we go through for the next few years. You asked about the lease-up across other markets.
Yeah. Look, there is ample headroom in our DRCs and our Tanzanians. Frankly, it is going to be pretty pro-rata, I think, is the reality. Tanzania, DRC, despite all the rollout that we have done so far, the population growth is still so vast that actually you are kind of only just touching the surface. There is a huge amount of incremental volume to go with massive amounts of upside as a consequence. We'll see that again across other markets too. They're such large markets that actually they'll continue to drive the business. I am feeling very positive also about Oman, obviously. I've got to say it for my Omani brothers and sisters. Also, around Senegal and Madagascar in particular, we're seeing a lot of volume in those markets too. I think we're broad-based, but definitely kind of linking more towards a higher kind of share of market in DRC and Tanzania.
Maybe as well Malawi. When we were acquiring it three years ago, it was around 1.6. It has now reached two tenants already within three years. Absolutely.
I think we've got two more questions. When we're upstairs, we can do Q&A up there as well too. Yeah, there's a little time. We'll be around for Q&A upstairs as well.
Yeah, thanks very much, Graham Hunt from Jefferies. I'll just ask two quick questions. First one, I think following up on that. What's really standing in your way of going faster on the organic side? I mean, two and a half to three and a half times leverage is not very high relative to a real estate company, for example. And if you're generating 30% incremental ROIC on discretionary, why not step that up? Second question, just on a topic that I don't think you touched on very much in the presentation, but on AI and inferencing workload. How much did you think about that when thinking about the five years of growth that you've got ahead? Could that be a sort of incremental upside or an accelerator for Helios Towers looking forward?
Yeah, certainly AI is becoming more and more of a factor internally, but also. It's generating some of that extra demand for data coming through the networks. I think that's going to grow exponentially in terms of users across our markets over the next five years. Internally, there's opportunities for AI across every single part of our business. We've already started using it in some parts, and we have large plans afoot to use it a lot more and more. That's going to drive incremental savings, incremental margin as we move forward. In terms of the organic growth we're taking, I think, a strong and measured approach to it. We've delivered consistently. The past three years, we've done about 2,500 tenancies each year. That's our latest guidance for this year. That moves between markets. Some years, it's big in this market, but overall, it's around that. We've guided to 10,000+ .
That's 2,000+ each year if you spread that evenly. Yes, there's opportunities in some years probably to do a bit more than that. As we sit here today, we're very confident in delivering all of the numbers that we've put here. We'll continue to work with all of our customers to see where the demand is, first and foremost, and see where we can be most effective in deploying that capital. I feel very confident about this plan that we've put forward. Of course, we'll always be looking at ways to augment that as we go through it.
Just to add on the two and a half tenancy ratio by 2030, do also bear in mind that we're going to be building a lot of sites too, and that has an impact on tenancy ratio. You're building that base to then drive further lease-up. I think our tenancy ratio today is probably top tier in the region. We are leasing up quickly. We are making the right investments, and we'll continue to do that.
Thank you. Andrew Singer, private investor. Two questions. Buried deep in the annual accounts is a section on contingent liabilities where you've got four tax claims against you in Congo Brazzaville and DRC amounting to just under $200 million. Quite a lot of money. Now. You've not made any provision for that in the accounts quite deliberately. I've worked in 15 African countries, and I can only think of one where the court system I could rely on to uphold contracts. That's Mauritius, which is hardly African but considered to be Africa. I'd be worried in the sense that you're up against the tax authorities in situations where you probably can't rely on the courts to uphold contractual obligations. I'm a bit surprised that you're not making a provision. Would you like to say more about that? Yeah. Second question, if I may. You've got a lot of constant, I mean, it's great that you're in nine markets, but you've got a lot of concentration in two. Tanzania represents about a third of your business, which is a lot. I'm just wondering whether you've considered or whether you are about to or willing to have an actual policy regarding capital allocation, whether you might reduce your capital allocations so as to spread your political risk. As we've discussed already, both of those have high political risk involved. That's the second question. Thanks a lot. By the way, congratulations. I'm a very happy private shareholder.
Very good. Yeah. Fundamentally, when it comes to tax, the baseline is we utilize independent tax advisors to review every single case on their merit, not their quantum. That's critical. You have to look at what the underlying rationale is behind each individual case and then react accordingly. Today, we have of the overall claims in the region, probably about 1% provision. I would say look at history as the example for this company. If we were to have massive swings in tax due to claims and other items, I potentially agree with you. When you look at the actual materiality of the specific claim, we're doing it absolutely correctly. We validate, we validate. It's one of the things that I worry about the most as well, as well as our Audit Committee Chair sat in the front row. We debate it a lot. Yeah, I wouldn't make an increased provision just because of quantum.
Maybe to add on that, in Tanzania, three, four years ago, we had some tax claims and tax cases when I used to be the Finance Director. We won 75% of those cases. Yeah.
Then CapEx allocation. I'll pick that one up. Our CapEx allocation policy will be specific to returns, not the political risk. Frankly, Tanzania, DRC, these markets, they post the best risk-adjusted returns. As part of our capital allocation framework, I won't go into the underlying details of it. We take into account a multitude of different factors for differing hurdle rates by market, factoring in these things. Despite that, we're still finding a massive surplus. It does come into our hurdle rates, but we're definitely finding the right investments there.
I remember we've operated in both of those markets for almost 15 years through different political cycles. The one constant throughout is the unrelenting demand for mobile and therefore infrastructure. We do use the core systems as well, and they do uphold the right decisions. Yeah, 100%. Brilliant. Chris,
questions of time now. I think we'll move up to the 26th floor to look at the four really exciting deep-dive presentations. To get there, just go down the escalator, then up the elevator. That's it. I'll be here to guide you.