Welcome to today's Helios Towers full year results for 2021 conference call. My name is Jordan, and I'll be coordinating your call today. If you'd like to register a question, you may do so by pressing star followed by one on your telephone keypad. I'm now gonna hand over to Kash Pandya to begin. Kash, please go ahead.
Thanks, Jordan. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining Helios Towers full year 2021 results. We during the course of 2021 have significantly expanded our portfolio and invested in quality growth and returns that we're gonna take you through the detail of. Moving on to slide two. Joining me today, as always, is Tom Greenwood, who will be taking over from me as CEO in a little over a month's time on the 28th of April, and Manjit Dhillon, our CFO, who's actually been our CFO during the whole of 2021 in his first full year as our Chief Financial Officer.
To make the point in there regarding our talent development program, Tom and Manjit are great examples of the board's focus on developing internally talent to reach the highest levels of our organization. We have many other individuals who have climbed the ranks into the executive management team, and so on. Let me now move on to what we're gonna cover today. I will shortly take you through the full year 2021 highlights and then hand over to Tom to take us through the business update, and Manjit, of course, will go through the financial results. Noting that there's plenty of time at the end for questions and answers, which will be coordinated through our conference coordinator. I will move straight to slide five and take you through the highlights of 2021.
It's been a transformational y ear through our expansion on entering new markets. We've strengthened our balance sheet and achieved and delivered record operational performance in terms of customer service. Taking the first point on this slide, consistent and strong organic growth in terms of tenancy growth. We've delivered 1,262 year-over-year additional tenancy, some 8% adds to our portfolio, and hitting the midpoint of our guidance, which was 1,000-1,500, that guidance was consistent for the last few years. You will note that we've increased our guidance for 2021, sorry, 2022, which I'll come on to. As I've mentioned, it's been a transformational year for M&A for our business.
During the course of 2021, we closed two acquisitions that we'd announced in the year, adding some 1,700 sites, close to 1,700 sites, and a little over 1,800 tenancies. In addition, during 2021, we've also signed deals to enter Oman, Malawi, and Gabon, which are well on their way in terms of progressing, and we expect to close these during the course of 2022. We've delivered robust financial performance, 8% revenue growth, 6% adjusted EBITDA growth. We've seen a slight deterioration on margin explained by the new volume of towers coming in for Senegal and Madagascar.
As you know, we acquire towers that typically have low levels of tenancies, and then we build tenancies and add margin, add IRR and return on invested capital through additional tenancy growth, which is the model we operate in. An example, the dilution in our margin is driven by Senegal, which came in at a tenancy of approximately one tenant per tower and Madagascar around 1.2 tenants per tower. In addition, we've added some SG&As ahead of the markets coming on stream, and this is quite typical. We'd like to hit the ground running in our markets when we close markets and we want to make sure our customers see an improvement in the service levels we deliver. This SG&A allows us to get ahead of the curve.
For example, in Malawi, we've got an operational team up and running, and this market should close soon. In Oman, we've got people that were recruited and hired that are working in the organization ready for that market to be closed. This is the reason for a slight deterioration on margin. In terms of continuous reduction in our capital costs, well, you know, Manjit and the team have really worked hard in making our borrowing costs more efficient. Now we're at 5.9% blended cost of debt. We, of course, also went through a convertible bond issuance of $300 million during the course of last year and put in some local facilities in Senegal.
We are now fully funded for our acquisitions that we are pending to close, mainly Oman, Malawi and Gabon. Of course, our organic growth is fully funded through our cash flow lines that we deliver. Outlook, point 5 on this slide. Well, as I've mentioned, we've now upped our guidance to 1,200-1,700 tenancies organic adds during the course of this year. That's some 8 percentage points if you take the midpoint of that range. Our contracted revenue stream is just a little under $4 billion, again, demonstrating the strength of our contracts and the revenue we've got ahead of us.
Of course, all with the embedded CPI and power escalators that protect us against any volatility in inflation as well as cost of power and cost of oil, diesel, etc. Moving on to slide six. A little bit of a scorecard, first of all, on our sustainable business strategy. We're delivering value for all our stakeholders. Regarding our customers, we've continued to drive improvement. We delivered record power uptime to our customers in the form of 99.99%, and in some markets even higher than that, to our customers in terms of service proposition. Our people, we've continued to develop and strengthen our local organization. Localization is part of our business excellence strategy.
We have some 97% of our colleagues from the markets we operate in, and we'll continue to invest locally to strengthen our organization as time goes on. Our partners and suppliers, again, we believe in spending money locally, investing in our supplier base and contractors base by not only spending hard dollars with them, but also working hard to invest in their capabilities and training, Lean Six Sigma execution, for example, into our maintenance partners, et cetera, is an ongoing methodology in our organization. We serve communities with our infrastructure close to 140 million people.
As we expand our markets and footprint in the existing markets, we are hoping and focusing on bringing more connectivity to more people in the markets and expect to grow this 139 million served population to a higher number. In terms of environment, I'm pleased to say that during 2021, we managed to reduce our carbon impact per tenant per customer on our towers by some 7%, and that's an ongoing strategy. Finally, in terms of last year's scorecard, we did our first CDP scoring assessment, and we scored B minus. This was ahead of the expectation that we were led to believe before the process started.
We were encouraged by a validation of our strategy and actions that we're taking to drive the environmental impact that our business has in the communities we operate. 2022, our continued commitment to sustainable business strategy and transparency, we're working closely with our customers to engage with them on the carbon reduction program. To some degree, our customers are coming to us for guidance on what we've done, and they're stealing shamelessly. We're proud of that from us in terms of what we put forward as a roadmap for our business. Our sustainable business report, we're about to issue a second report that will be published next week, outlining the progress we're making on sustainability.
Regarding our supply chain, we're now launching our assessment program for our suppliers to understand what their sustainable practices are. More importantly, we will work with our partners in each of our markets to help them go up the learning curve in how they drive the sustainable approach that we're taking. Communities, we're very much engaged in our communities. As an example, we've launched the rollout of a school for engineers internship program across all our markets that help young engineers get qualified that can then be deployed into our business, but also our partners' businesses that help us deliver the service and the rollout of our portfolio in each of our markets. Finally, on this slide, you know, we are committed to our Project 100.
Project 100, in summary, is $100 million over the next 10 years as we approach 2030 in investing in hard dollars to help reduce carbon impact. We've got initiatives planned for this year that equates to $10 million to drive our target of 46% per tenancy carbon reduction per tenant by 2030. That's an ongoing work that we'll be rolling out over the next 8- 9 years. On that note, I would like to hand over to Tom, who's gonna talk through our business update.
Thank you very much, Kash. Hi, everyone. Great to be talking to you today. Hope everyone's well. I'm on the next section, the business update section, starting off on page eight, and I'll talk you through some of the implementation of our strategy, both around organic, inorganic, and then just a reminder of some of the key fundamentals of our markets which drive our business. Start off up on page eight, and here we show how we're delivering on our portfolio expansion, our organic growth, and our diversification, and essentially delivering what we had said we would from the IPO, and that very much continues. First of all, on the left-hand side here, we see our organic tenancy growth year-on-year.
Of course, we’ve delivered fairly consistently over the past three years, obviously with a bit of an uptick in 2021, and you know, tenancies have started fairly strongly in 2022 as well, which you should see when we report our Q1s in the not too distant future. This is obviously all driven through the fundamental drivers in our markets, from low levels of penetration and just simply the need for more connectivity, more infrastructure, more densification of the networks, and I'll come onto that a little bit in a few slides' time. Next up, when we did our IPO, a key part of our strategy was scale growth and diversification geographically.
As you may remember, we articulated at the time the focus to drive from five markets to eight markets and from 7,000 towers- 12,000 towers. Of course, with the acquisitions that we've announced, plus some fairly strong organic growth, we're well on the way to beating those pending closing the acquisitions. We will be in 10 markets, with close to 14,000 towers, in the next few months. Of course, the next question is what comes next? Well, I think as everyone has been invited to our capital markets day on May the fifth, in London, which is also available for dial-in, we will at that point be articulating our new five-year strategy going forward.
Very excited about that and hope to see many of you there. Moving on to the next slide nine. This is a quick update on our acquisitions that we've announced. And here we see the 5 markets, Senegal, Madagascar, Malawi, Oman, and Gabon. As some of you may have seen a few weeks ago, we decided to put pen down on Chad, which was the sixth market, just due to simply delays in moving forward on the regulatory process there. We agreed with Airtel that we would put pens down on that, but I'm pleased to say all the other markets are firing on all cylinders and moving very much towards closing. With Malawi, we anticipate closing that fairly imminently, probably in the next two weeks.
Oman, we're moving towards there well with the regulatory process. We would expect to close that before the end of Q2. Gabon, which is always the one which we expected to take the longest, so we expect to close that in the second half of this year. Senegal and Madagascar, as you know, are now fully part of the business from an operational standpoint, having closed Senegal in Q2 last year and Madagascar in Q4. I'm very pleased to say we've got great teams in both markets led by Karim in Senegal and Jerome in Madagascar. Of course, we have great teams that are being built in the other markets as well, Malawi, Oman, and Gabon.
Very much looking forward to closing those and them becoming fully operational as we move forward. Just a note on here, Ramzi Poulad, Managing Director of Oman, he's been with the business for many years as well, and just another example of our internal development program. Ramzi was originally within our group operations team, worked in a number of different markets as well, within the operational and IT capacity, and then became our Managing Director of Tanzania for a few years and did an excellent job there and has now been promoted to launch Oman and is also now Regional Director covering Tanzania and Malawi as well.
Just another example of our internal development program on which we place a huge amount of focus on. Moving on to slide 10, here we just wanted to highlight and to show everyone what these acquisitions mean, particularly in the short term, because typically, as Cash mentioned earlier, when we're doing these acquisitions of new tower portfolios in new markets, typically, we're buying portfolios with low tenancy ratios. You know, it could be anywhere from between, you know, sort of 1.0, maybe up to 1.3, 1.4 at the top end. Now, as a reminder, our more established markets, of course, have a tenancy ratio of well over two tenants per tower, which drives margin and return on capital.
When we buy these new networks with a lower tenancy ratio, typically we're buying networks which have on day one a slightly lower margin and slightly lower ROIC than the rest of our more established network. Of course, we're buying them to then utilize them fully and lease up the towers up to similar levels of our more established portfolio. I think as you can see from the table on the left-hand side here, we've called out some of the areas which get diluted, which is the tenancy ratio, and you can see that that is diluted on day one for the new acquisitions. Similarly, the EBITDA margin and the ROIC there.
The good news is, and as you can see from the right-hand side chart here we highlighted, the good news is we're buying networks which are underutilized, which we will now begin to lease up with the incremental demand that we see in our markets. As you can see, looking back to 2016 here in our business, which was after a period of large acquisitions at that time, we took the business from, for example, a margin of 37% up to 55%, you know, and a lot of that was driven through the increased co-location ratio over that time. What we see here now, and we're right in the midst of it, is the movement from five markets to 10 markets.
Growing substantially in scale, diversifying from a geographic perspective and from a customer perspective. You see a short-term immediate dilution in tenancy ratio margin and ROIC. Of course, we're then primed for lease up and growth over the coming years. Of course, the demand that we're seeing in all of our markets is still very much substantial and there for the long haul. Moving on now to slide 11, and this is again a reminder of some of the sorts of unit economic returns that we see on our key product of Build-to-Suit. You know why this business just produces such long compounding cash flow returns. On the left-hand side here, you see some illustrative figures for ROIC on an individual site basis.
You can see on a single tenant site, we're getting sort of low double-digit sort of returns. Then as we lease up and put a second and third tenant on the site, of course, the OpEx and the operating costs for the site stay broadly flat with only a small increase, but the revenue increases substantially, thereby increasing the ROIC of the site quite exponentially. On the right-hand side here, what you see is the typical cash flows across a 40-year period for one of these towers depending on how many tenants are on it. You know, of course, these towers, which is effectively steel and civil works, last for a lifetime as long as you look after them well, which we do.
The cash flows you know far exceed the initial investment in the assets. As you can see there's roughly a five-year on average payback for building a new site. Moving on now to slide 12. Again, this is a reminder of some of the key fundamentals driving the organic side of our business and you know the continued delivery of well over 1,000 tenancies each year. Of course, we've bumped our guidance for this year, which Manjit will come onto. Again, you know, our markets are really engines of growth, particularly in the telecom sector.
The dynamics of our markets across Africa and Middle East are significantly rising population, significant urbanization, a very young population, which of course drives incremental demand for mobile services, particularly data, and of course, large GDP growth going along with all of that. You combine that with low mobile penetration, you know, so huge growth in terms of mobile connections forecast, 63 million new mobile connections forecast in over five years across our markets. You know, an increase in penetration of course, which comes with that, and then 4G and data growing significantly as well. All of this drives the need for more mobile antennas, for more dense networks of mobile antennas as more data networks become prevalent.
Of course, as we use more data in the networks, the space between antennas needs to reduce, i.e. the density needs to increase of the network. All of this drives the need for points of service, which of course is how we earn our revenue. We're very excited about the organic growth potential, as we look forward over the next five years and beyond. On the right-hand side here, you can of course see some of our key customers, and the investments that they are making and that we are supporting them with, which is very exciting. With that, I will hand over to Manjit to take us through the next section.
Thanks, Tom. Hi, everyone. It's great to be speaking with you today. I'll be going through the financial results, and starting on slide 14, and where we show our robust financial performance over the last few years since 2019. We've seen continued year-on-year EBITDA growth, driven by organic and inorganic tenancy additions, partially offset by some SG&A growth investments, which are required as we double in scale. Portfolio free cash flow and ROIC, whilst remaining fairly robust, have declined slightly year-on-year. For portfolio free cash flow, whilst we've seen increasing EBITDA growth, we had some higher cash taxes due to transitioning from loss-making to profit-making in our established markets, and increasing expenditure related to ground leases and non-discretionary CapEx due to the increased asset base.
Over time, these costs will be leveraged as we lease up the portfolios. As Tom mentioned, given our increasing scale and given the nature of the assets that we buy, i.e. portfolios, towers, which have compelling opportunities for lease-up and compounding growth, but with low initial tenancy ratios, we'll see some dilution in a few metrics, including return on invested capital. Excluding acquisitions, we're at 13.2%. Again, this has come down slightly from prior year due to the fact we've had higher tax payments, as mentioned a moment ago. With acquisitions, we're at 11.7%. With integration of the other announced deals, the three markets that we expect to close during the course of this year, we should see ROIC turning to a bit further in the short term.
Again, just to reiterate the point that Tom made, we have a strong track record of entering new markets, growing successfully, organically expanding the portfolio and leasing up and driving strong returns. It's this experience and track record which we take into these new markets, and the exciting point is that we've expanded the base and platform to which we can deliver accretive sustainable growth into the medium and long term, and we will see ROIC growing in the coming years. Moving on to slide 15. As mentioned earlier, we've had one of our best years of tenancy growth, both organically and inorganically. Organically, we added 1,262 tenancies, with the bulk of these coming in the second half of the year, and hitting just above our midpoint of tenancy guidance.
Inorganically, we added close to 1,900 tenancies through the combination of Senegal and Madagascar. Tenancy ratio has dropped slightly on a group basis due to the lower tenancy ratio towers we've acquired. On an organic basis, i.e., excluding the new acquisitions, we continue to build our tenancy ratio to 2.15x. Again, that's a testament to the growth potential of our established markets and our ability to lease up portfolios in our markets over time. On to slide 16. We see continued growth in revenue and EBITDA. 8% revenue growth, 6% EBITDA growth year-over-year. Again, a number of tenancies came in later in the year, so we don't have much in-year revenue impact of these, but we'll see these come through during the course of 2022.
EBITDA growth is 6% year-on-year, with growth in the top line being offset somewhat by the investment we've made in our SG&A as we increase our scale, and also due in part to some of the increased license fees that we've seen come in DRC during 2021, of 3% of revenues, which is broadly aligned with license fee regimes in other markets. Final point on EBITDA margin, a slight decline, again, principally due to the impact of lower margin new markets. We'll see this dilute further with the closing of other announced new market deals, but then we'll see this rebound in the short to medium term. Overall, I think our tenancy pipeline is looking strong for 2022, and I'll come on to guidance and outlook in a few slides' time.
Moving on to slide 17, you'll see the usual breakdowns provided, which are very consistent from previous updates. We have a robust business model underpinned by long-term contracts with a diverse quality customer base with strong hard currency earnings. 98% of our revenues come from large blue chip mobile network operators with a diversified mix, with maximum single customer exposure at 26%. We have strong long-term contracts with our customers, and at the end of 2021, we have long-term contracted revenues of $3.9 billion with an average remaining life of 7.6 years, and this is up from $2.8 billion at the end of 2020. This means excluding new wins and roll-outs, we already have that revenue contracted in the bag and provides a strong underlying earnings stream for the business.
Importantly, given the mix of our established markets and new markets, we have 63% of our revenue in hard currency, being either US dollar or euro pegged, which translates to 65% of our EBITDA being in hard currency. This provides a fantastic natural FX hedge for the business, which is further complemented by our annual inflation escalators, which we have in our contracts with our customers. Pro forma for the new markets, that is actually being further strengthened to 72% of EBITDA in hard currency. It's this combination of FX protection, long-term contracts with blue chip operators, which provides a robust business model to capture the growth which Tom spoke about earlier. Finally, a thing to mention this slide, with the new market expansion, we're seeing a more diversified split of revenue per market.
Pro forma for the acquisitions, no single market accounts for more than 30% of revenues. Moving on to slide 18. I wanted to take a moment to quickly recap the contractual protections we have in all of our customer contracts, particularly as we go into a period where we've seen some elevated levels of inflation and fuel prices, at least on more of a macro level. As a business, we're very well hedged against movements in FX, power prices, and inflation. As discussed on the prior slide, we have innate FX protections due to operating in some hard currency markets. Importantly, we also have escalators in our contract which escalate in relation to both inflation and power prices.
For inflation, these are annual escalators, which typically escalate in December and January, with the escalation linked to the revenue that we receive, i.e., if we're receiving U.S. dollars, then it's U.S. CPI, if it's local currency, it's local currency CPI. We also have power price escalators, with a rough split being 50/50 between annual escalator and quarterly escalator, and these go both up or down depending on the local power prices. If there is falling prices, the escalator reduces, and if there is an increase in prices, then there is an increase in the escalator. Over time, and we've seen this provides a good hedge to the business.
I think one thing to flag is that while you may have seen some Brent crude volatility, it does actually take time to see this, translate from screen to actually what we experience in the local markets and local prices. We've shown some analysis of this on the graph at the bottom of the page. Typically, we see a lag between anywhere between three months to even a year to really have an impact locally. Typically, the movements in the markets are far more muted without so many peaks and troughs compared to Brent crude. It's these local prices which we experience with regards to reference pricing for contract escalations and also for our procurement of fuel.
Given the timing of escalators, we may experience a short-term lag between the dates that we have an escalator kick in and when we actually may experience cost movements. In times of rising costs, we may see a temporary negative P&L impact. There again, in times of falling costs, you also see the converse. In general, though, despite this lag effect, the structural mechanisms we have in place have been and continue to be a very effective risk mitigation tool. I think structurally we are robust in our positions. As always, we remain vigilant and proactive in management of potential movements in prices. Moving on to slide 19, a look at CapEx.
For 2021, we incurred a total CapEx of $395 million, of which $242 million was in relation to the acquisitions of Senegal and Madagascar, with $153 million for the established markets, which was in line with the guidance we gave last year. Looking at 2022, we're guiding between a range of $800 million-$840 million, with a majority of that, $650 million being related to Oman, Malawi, and Gabon closings, with a range of $160 million-$200 million being for our seven markets which are currently operating today. Of that, between roughly $30 million will be non-discretionary, i.e. for maintenance and corporate CapEx, and the remainder, $130 million-$170 million being discretionary CapEx.
Roughly $30 million of that will be for upgrade work we'll be completing on some of the new sites we have recently acquired. $10 million will be linked to Project 100, and as Kash mentioned earlier, this is our commitment to roll out carbon and OpEx reducing initiatives, and we'll make our first $10 million investment of that this year on items like solar, hybrid, and other initiatives. Most of these will come in the second half of the year, so we should start to see some impact of these later in the year or next year. The remainder, $90 million-$130 million, is on growth, and that's related to the rollout of tenancies for the year. I'll come on to more detailed guidance shortly.
We're expecting to roll out organically between 1,200-1,700 tenancies for the year, of which 60% will be new sites. As a reminder, the additional $30 million we incurred in Q4 last year to ensure speedy rollout of our exciting pipeline this year has already been factored into these numbers. Moving on to slide 20 and a look at our cash flow. As mentioned earlier, we've seen solid portfolio free cash flow of $168 million, which declined slightly over the last few years. If you look at the table, you can really see that this has been driven by the increases in taxes being paid, as we become profitable in our established markets.
Receivables days has reduced, although still remaining in the broad range of 45-55 days, which we've seen be relatively consistent over the past few years, although a slight decline period on period, which is great. Really, we've reinvested the cash flows we've generated into portfolio expansion, as well as taking on additional capital to support our transformational growth, which actually takes me on to page 21, which shows our summary of financial debt. Our net leverage at the year-end was 3.6x and continues to be at the low end of our target range of 3.5-4.5x. We expect this to tick up towards 4.5x as we close the other markets during the course of the year, but really there is ample headroom, and with leverage very much under continued tight control.
As it stands today, we currently have circa $900 million of available funds, which is more than sufficient for our announced acquisitions, which are due to close, and our organic growth, which for most of our established markets is actually self-financing. In terms of cost of debt, I'm really proud that we've been able to take the momentum of 2020 and continue to do great work to reducing our cost of debt in 2021 with our various financings, for example, with our inaugural convertible bond issuance. We currently have a blended cost of debt of 5.9%, which is 3% less than what it was a couple of years ago when we listed. We sit on a very strong balance sheet with long-tenured debt, and very limited floating exposure.
I think it's good to say that we're in a great position where if we do choose to do any financings or refinancings, we'll be doing this for strategic reasons and where possible looking to continue our trend of reducing our cost of debt. Finally, on to slide 22, here I'll outline our guidance. For 2022, as a result of the portfolio of new markets expansion in 2021, the group is now targeting organic tenancy additions of 1,200-1,700 in 2022. Previously we used to guide towards 1,000-1,500. This reflects the continued momentum in our established markets and organic growth targeted in our new markets of Madagascar and Senegal. 60% of the tenancy additions are expected to be new sites.
Previously we had guided to 45% new sites. However, given the network expansion plans of the M&As, we are finding the mix has slightly shifted, but as indicated in the medium-term target in the dotted box, we expect that mix to shift to majority co-locs over the coming years. In line with prior periods, we anticipate the majority of our tenancy rollout to occur in the second half of the year, and as such, the group is targeting 25% of new tenancies in the first half of 2022, with the remainder 75% in the second half. We expect this kind of cadence of rollout timing to continue into the medium term. Subject to the closing of the announced acquisitions in Oman and Malawi, the group targets medium-term annual tenancy additions of 1,600-2,100.
Adjusted to 2022, we anticipate lease rate per tenant to increase in the range of 3%-5% during the year, and that's gonna be really driven by our CPI and power price escalator movements embedded in our contracts kicking in, which I spoke about earlier. In terms of adjusted EBITDA margin, we're targeting between 51%-53% in 2022, compared to 54% in 2021. That largely reflects the full year impact of portfolio acquisitions in Senegal and Madagascar, with both having lower tenancy ratios but being very much primed for growth, and the incremental group SG&A required for diversification and growth from five to 10 markets. In addition, there's a little bit of short-term volatility we may see as a result of global inflation in energy prices and the lag effect which I mentioned earlier.
We've added Oman, Malawi and Oman with their run rate EBITDA underneath, and depending on closing, we'll see their pro rata impact on our numbers for 2022. I've covered most of the points in the medium-term guidance. Just to recap, we expect 1,600-2,100 new tenancies, including the broader portfolio of Oman and Malawi, and expect the proportion of new tenancies from site rollouts to reduce to 30% over the period, expect the same tenancy seasonality intra-year, and we guide to lease rate per tenants increasing by U.S. inflation after this year, and expect EBITDA margin enhancement of 1%-2% per annum going forward as we grow the portfolios and lease up. With that, I'll pass it back to Kash to wrap up.
Thanks, Manjit. I'm on slide 23, and look, this is the last slide before we go to Q&A. So, as you heard, key takeaways, driving sustainable value for our stakeholders. We've significantly invested during the course of last year and will do so during the course of this year to build a broader, stronger platform across 10 markets with 14,000+ sites once we've completed the announced acquisitions that we will close during the course of 2022. Strong growth opportunity supports high quality growth and returns, and we will accelerate this growth during the course of 2022. We will be making continuous progress against our sustainable business strategies, which we'll report on during the course of this year during our quarterly and half year announcements.
On that note, I'm gonna hand over to our conference coordinator, Jordan, to help with the Q&A. Jordan, over to you.
Thank you. As a reminder, if you'd like to register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. If you change your mind, please press star followed by two, and please ensure you're unmuted when speaking.
Our first question comes from John Karidis of Numis. John, the line is yours.
Thank you very much. Can you say a little bit more, please, to help me reconcile, on the one hand, the guidance you've given for the phasing of the tenancy growth, during 2022, and on the other hand, that the fact that Tom just said that tenancy growth in the first quarter is likely to be pretty good, and also that three months ago you said that you were forward purchasing CapEx because you were expecting a strong start to 2022. That's my first question. Then my second and of two is could you please remind me of the incremental investment you've made in SG&A, and how that sort of changed since you first mentioned that you'll be spending more, and the phasing of that? Thank you.
All right, John, why don't I take it. I'll take the first one and Manjit, if you take the second one there. John, the guidance we've given is 25-75, as you know, for this year. If you look at last year, it was actually more skewed. Last year it was 13% in H1 and 87% in H2. We are guiding towards a stronger weighting for H1 already. The other element is the number of tenancies we're guiding to has also actually increased. It's 1,200-1,700.
In terms of an absolute number of tenancies for H1, that obviously means a higher number than what it would have been a year ago when we were 1,000-1,500. The pre-ordering of CapEx is something that actually is very key for our business and actually a lot of businesses around the world at the moment just simply because supply chains have increased in lead time in general. You know, this has been the same for the last 18 months-2 years, quite frankly, in so much as things that used to take, say, 3 months from order to delivery into our warehouse and market, you know, now take five months, maybe even six months in some circumstances. You do have to order CapEx earlier.
That's what we do in general now. Specifically for last year when we were ordering some additional CapEx, and this was predominantly we were referring to some CapEx for some tenancy rollout, Build-to-Suit, et cetera, in Q1, that is very much the case. Whereas in, say, Q1 last year and even the year before, I think we rolled out something like 70 tenancies, maybe 80 tenancies in the quarter, you know, you'll see several hundred come through in this Q1. There has been a, yeah, I guess a good change in the volume quantum, and you'll see that come through.
You know, just generally on supply chain, we'll be continuing to, you know, be proactive, and the kind of cadence that we have now for our supply chain is to order things, you know, more like five or six months in advance rather than three months, which was the case before COVID. I think that sentiment very much continues given some of the other challenges going on globally today, as well. You know, obviously COVID has maybe slightly gone off people's minds, but there are other things happening which means that we need to stay ahead of the game, which is absolutely what we're doing. Manjit, do you want to just cover the second part?
Yeah. On SG&A, we've announced as follows. In 2020, following the acquisition of Senegal, we then gave guidance that we're adding $2 million. Now at that point we only had Senegal announced and we're in competitive processes on the others. In the middle of last year, we upped that to incremental $5 million. Again, that's due to the fact that we had such a substantial growth that's coming through. For this year, which will be the final piece of really the investments that's coming through, we'll get our estate up to you know the level that we need for all of the new markets coming on board.
There'll be an incremental $6 million, and that's really driven by the full year impact of actually having some of the investments in last year and a little bit of incremental investment coming through in H1. That's a fully baked cost now, and that will mean that we are secure going forward. For 2023 onwards, excluding any new market expansion, that cost will then increase by U.S. inflation.
Thank you both. If I may say to Kash, huge congratulations for everything you've achieved at Helios and the very best of luck going forward.
Thank you very much, John. I appreciate your kind words.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from Alex Rounce with Bank of America. Alex, the line is yours.
Hi guys. Thank you for taking the question. The first one, I would just like to come back on CapEx because it feels like it's a little bit of a step up in 2022 versus 2021. You know, if I remember correctly, in 2021, we already had some front loading of CapEx. I know non-discretionary is increasing a bit this year. I know we've got like a you know bigger growth. But I'm just trying to figure out if you could maybe give us a little bit more color on the different buckets. You know, how much is it gonna be from the BTS? How much is it gonna be from you know new installation? Or how much is it really you know related to those energy supply installation?
Maybe a larger question actually that was my follow-up was new strategy regarding diversification of power supply. I know you've mentioned in your introductory remarks about, you know, some investment and or start of investment into solar and things like that. We've seen, for instance, you know, in Europe, some of the operators and telco even investing in, you know, mini wind turbines. How are you thinking about diversification of energy supply? What's really the split today that you're adding? Is it, you know, 90%-100% on diesel generators or is there any, you know, 20%-30% on the grid?
What are you really thinking, you know, moving forward in terms of target split in energy supply chain diversification, which is obviously highly topical given the volatility in energy pricing these days. Thank you.
Yeah, thanks very much for the great questions. Manjit, why don't you take the first one on CapEx, and then I'll-
Yeah.
Take the second one on the power.
Yeah, absolutely. On the CapEx point, I mean, really this is a consequence of two things. One, the increased number of tenancies we've got year on year. If you're comparing versus 2021, we're now guiding to more tenancies than what we had during that course of that year. Also the split's been different. Now that we're moving from what was previously guided as being about 45% of the new tenancies being new sites to 60%, the impact of that is really north of about 250 sites, if you look at the midpoint of where that guidance is coming out. That has a material impact in terms of looking at it period on period. That's really one of the key drivers that we have here.
Also included within what is termed as discretionary CapEx is also some of the upgrade CapEx we'll be doing on the new portfolios that we purchased as well. If you strip out some of the upgrade items, which is about $30 million, then you're kind of looking broadly, you know, consistently period-on-period, then you're kind of getting broadly back to the numbers that we had year-on-year. I think that those are the kind of main reasons. Tom, on the other one.
Yeah. Thanks, Manjit. Yeah, look, I mean, look, power strategy is absolutely key for us as a tower company operating across Africa and to some extent Middle East. You know, we are also a power company, and you know, we provide all of our customers with very reliable power on each and every site, which means that to the extent the grid does not work 24/7, which it mostly does not, or to the extent the grid is not prevalent in the location of some of our towers, which again is true in some cases, we need to find other ways of providing power to our customers, because that's what they look for us to do, and that's what we're contractually required to do.
If you look at our portfolio today, we get in every 24 hours about 16 hours blended average of grid power, which means that there's eight hours a day roughly that we need to find other ways of delivering power. We do that today roughly half of that, so four or so hours is done from battery solutions or solar solutions, and the other four is from you know generators. It's the generator area that we've got the most focus on in terms of reducing. We published our carbon emission strategy a few months ago in November. In that, one of our key targets was to through to 2030 reduce our carbon emission intensity per tenant by 46%.
As Cash mentioned on one of the earlier pages, we're very pleased actually that the first year reporting of that, we've shown a 7% reduction. We're actually, you know, very much on plan to hit that 46% by the end of this decade and, you know, hopefully exceed it. In doing that, some of the things that you mentioned there, solar, mini wind turbines, you know, they're very much in our thinking. Obviously, we do already use solar today. We to date have not used mini wind turbines, although we have actually been seeing some very interesting new products coming to the market along those lines, and we will be looking at those more as well as other forms of, you know, sort of energy, new energy generation.
There's a huge amount of exciting stuff going on in that space right now, both from battery development point of view, but also, you know, things like, you know, cells and wind turbines, as you mentioned. We are continually assessing and continually looking at what is new on the market. We have a very clear plan of what we're doing though for the next few years in terms of connecting more sites to the grid that don't currently have grid connection, plus rolling out more hybrid battery technology, particularly focusing on the lithium batteries at the moment, and also some solar where it makes sense.
you know, we have dedicated internal teams, both at group level and in each operating company, which focuses on this. They focus on optimizing the energy setup of every single one of our sites, depending on the number of tenants we have on the site, depending on the kilowatt load of that site, depending on the proximity to the nearest grid line, and depending on the you know, the hours of sunlight and the quality of the sunlight, for example, because you know, some places are good for solar and some places are not so good. There's a whole host of factors that feed into our internal algorithms that our energy teams run. you know, this is very much what we you know what we do day in, day out.
In terms of forward looking, you know, we will be reporting on this, as we said in November when we launched our carbon strategy. We'll be reporting on this going forward. Of course, we've set very clear targets on this around the 46% reduction. Yeah, look, watch this space for us reporting on that going forward. We'll be utilizing all of those forms of technology, I'm sure, to deliver that.
Okay. Maybe one-
Yeah.
Very interesting. Maybe one follow-up, if I may, on this topic. Because obviously, you know, all those new technology also require, I would assume, you know, a little bit, you know, more maintenance. Because I mean, you had maintenance before with diesel generators and, you know, some of the, you know, on-site batteries, et cetera. You know, if you've got solar panels in the middle of the desert, like, you need to clean them up, I suppose, you know, relatively frequently.
Is there also, like, a strategy going alongside, you know, the energy power supply strategy to perhaps starting having more of a discussion with operators regarding active equipment maintenance and maybe, you know, bringing that within the fold of the tower co, as we're seeing now, you know, maybe evolving in, I suppose, the more developed market, MSA agreements?
Yeah, no, it's a great point. Look, absolutely. In the first part of your question, you mentioned around the some maintenance required. Absolutely. I mean, you know, solar panels require maintenance, they require cleaning. Obviously, they get a lot of dust on them in certain locations, for example. We have site maintenance across all of our sites. You know, that involves field engineers going to each site at some point, either maybe once a month or in some cases once a quarter, where we can reduce it to that. Our long-term target is to get down to one site visit every six months, you know, across our entire portfolio. That's something we're sort of pushing for, but that will take time.
Yes, there is a maintenance plan really for every form of new technology. It should not increase the amount of visits we need to do to the site. For example, on the solar, it is simply part of the normal maintenance visit to the site each month or each quarter to clean those panels. We shouldn't see any increase to the sort of manpower cost on that in terms of maintenance, which is good. Similar for hybrid batteries and such like. In fact, you can see reduced amount because typically it's the generator that requires the most PMC-type maintenance. If you can reduce-
Mm-hmm.
The number of hours a generator is running, then you're probably gonna be able to reduce the amount of times you have to go and visit that site, which is good. You make a very interesting point on the active visits to the sites. Of course, you know, on all of these sites, you know, active maintenance engineers are visiting to do their maintenance on the active equipment. We have on the small occasions in our history also folded in active maintenance into the passive maintenance. But typically to date, the preference of our mobile operator customers has typically been to split it. Partly that's because active maintenance is always a key part of the offering from the equipment vendors. It's sometimes sort of too complicated to disentangle that.
You know, one thing that we are looking for in the future potentially, and you alluded to it, is the possibility of, you know, after the tower co owning part of the active equipment on the site, which is, you know, perhaps the natural extension of today owning the tower and the power.
Mm-hmm.
You know, owning the base station and perhaps some antennas as well is perhaps the natural evolution of that. Of course, that is happening in some markets around the world already. There's a number of regulatory complications on that in most of our markets, insomuch as our regulators are quite clear on which companies are allowed to own and operate active equipment and which companies are not. There's some regulatory hurdles to jump over in terms of us provisioning that. But
It is certainly something on the topic of conversation with some of our customers, and something that we are definitely looking at from an internal perspective. Yeah, you know, watch this space for that as well. It could be something that comes in over the next few years for us.
Okay, perfect. Thank you so much for the insight and the lengthy answer. Thank you.
Good. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Jerry Dellis of Jefferies. Jerry, please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you for the presentation. I've got two questions, please. The first one is just building on some of the points you made about power price sensitivity on slide 18. So the question is, would you be able to specify for us, please, what power price assumption is implicit in your 2022 guidance? Then also help us understand how higher prices play through margins as we progress through 2022. Obviously, we're mindful of the sort of potential sort of timing differentials between the higher costs hitting and the contractual escalators balancing up. My second question has to do with your Build-to-Suit guidance. Obviously, now guiding that 60% of growth will be Build-to-Suit.
The questions here, please, are does that higher Build-to-Suit activity relate to any specific markets, or is it fairly broadly based? As we look forward, you talked about Build-to-Suit mix declining towards sort of 50%. I wondered if you could sort of help us understand to perhaps a slightly higher level of granularity, what is the sort of appropriate Build-to-Suit proportion to be modeling 2-3 years out on the enlarged group perimeter? Thank you.
Thanks, Jerry. I'll pick up some of these. In terms of the contracts and what we went through on slide 18, there's a cost across all of the markets when it comes to power prices, and we don't kind of provide that. Effectively, we're looking at what the prices are right now with a small, I'd say conservative assumption for how that will move over the intervening period. That's why there's a little bit of impact when it comes to EBITDA margins. That we've kind of baked into our overall guidance. I think the fundamental point here is that with regards to power prices and our escalations, half of the contracts escalate annually, half of them escalate quarterly. With the annual escalations, some of those will be kicking around February.
If there is, you know, intervening increase up until that point, you will see a bit of margin dilution from the fact that, you know, you're not able to pass that on to the customer up until the following February. That's slightly counteracted by the fact that the other half are quarterly, where you will get kind of your catch-ups coming through. All things being equal over a medium-term period, we're actually slightly overhedged on power. If there is, you know, increasing power prices, we actually get a little bit of margin on that, and that's principally because of our co-location ratio. We actually get a bit of a multiplier. It's relatively immaterial, but you know, in the grand scheme of things, we have a little bit of an increase there.
That's why on slide 18, you can see that if there's a 10% price movement, you actually get a positive EBITDA impact on that arrow, which is +2.3%, if you were to get both prices happening at the same time. Really what we're seeing and what we'd expect to see during the course of the year is that if there are price movements, you will get a decline on the P&L from your annual escalators being slightly counteracted by your quarterly. That's what we're effectively baking in our numbers at the moment. With regards to your other question on Build-to-Suit and the split, effectively assume that these will be pro rata versus the operations of which we have at the moment.
Tanzania and DRC really being, you know, taking the lion's share of a lot of the Build-to-Suits, but also having a good rollout in Senegal and Madagascar and our other established markets as well. That's very similar to what we've seen historically and during the course of this year. Also, I should say 2021, where typically, you know, you find about 40% each of our rollouts happening in Tanzania and DRC, and then the rest of the markets picking up the balance. I think that's something that we'll see again during the course of this year. I missed the last part of your question. I don't know if you-
Yes, I think during your discussion, you mentioned that the Build-to-Suit proportion should decline back to 50% or below 50%. I just wondered whether we should be modeling going back towards 40% on a three-year view, or whether we can sort of get a little bit more detail on that, please.
Correct. Yes. What we actually say in our medium-term guidance, which is towards the back end of the presentation on page 22, is that actually that would reduce on a straight line basis to actually 30% over a 3-5-year time horizon. We would expect the majority of the new tenancies, all things being equal, to actually be more skewed towards co-locations. Now, on a year-on-year basis, you can find peaks and troughs like we're finding in 2022 and actually into 2021, where we've had a bit of an elevated level of new sites. You know, over the medium to long term, you'll actually find that the majority will be co-locations. The way to model it is reducing down to 30%.
Thank you. Just to return very quickly on the power price point. I mean, long story short would be that there's no particular reason why we should be expecting power prices to cause some sort of temporary margin squeeze in the first quarter.
Not in the first quarter, but you should potentially see it coming through the back end at the back end of the year.
Thank you very much.
Cheers.
Our next question comes from Simon Coles of Barclays. Simon, please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thanks for taking the questions. To just follow up on the power price one. I guess you don't wanna give too much color, but just to understand from our side, are you basically assuming that the prices don't really change from here for the rest of the year, and that's the impact that you're baking into the guidance? Because I guess we might expect some potentially wild moves in the price of fuel given everything that's going on globally. If the price did go from sort of $120 down back to, like, $70, it would be good to understand sort of how much of that is baked into the guidance and how much isn't. Then-
Yeah.
Sorry, just the second one is just on sort of M&A. You've obviously had a very successful 2021 with a lot of transactions, and there's a couple more to close this year. We've seen Chad is now not going to happen. I guess if you could just give us an update on sort of the M&A plans going forward. Should we expect 2022 to be another, well, an integration year, and then 2023 is when potentially you might start looking at other opportunities again as the balance sheet delevers. Thank you.
Thanks, Simon. I'll take the power point, and then Tom can take the M&A one. On power, no, we are assuming an increase in power prices. We've made a fairly conservative assumption. The reason why we're doing that, if we were to assume power prices remain stable during the course of the year, then you won't see too much of an impact on the margin. You know, assuming that there is some volatility that's going through, then we would expect a short lag effect in our P&L, and that's why we're expecting a little bit of a negative movement in terms of EBITDA margin. You know, again, this is more for conservatism in terms of our modeling.
I think as we look at the EBITDA margins, more generally the guidance that we've given, just to kind of be very clear about this, the majority of that is really driven by the fact that we've got full year impact of the new acquisitions coming through of Madagascar and Senegal, which are diluted to the EBITDA margin. Adding on top of that, the SG&A investments that we're making to increase the platform. Those are really the key moves with a little bit of additional buffer that's put in for some of this lag effect that's coming through. Tom, on the M&A.
Yeah. Thanks, Andrew. Hey, Simon. Thanks for your question. Yeah, look, on the M&A, the focus this year is really on integration, as you mentioned. We're really looking to close obviously the remaining three deals, Malawi, Oman and Gabon, and really get those integrated as well as you know, finalizing the full integration of the new deals that we closed last year, Senegal and Madagascar, which are both very much on track, on that perspective. Of course, focusing on the organic growth of our existing business in all of our markets, including the new ones. That's really the focus of ours, right now, for this year.
In terms of other M&A or future M&A, you know, there are deals that we're monitoring. There are potential opportunities that we're monitoring. I'd say that, you know, most of them are sort of next year's business or beyond. You know, we will be very much focused this year on organic growth and integration and really, you know, driving the existing business forward. You know, we'll obviously take stock and look at any new opportunities that rear their head. You know, right now we're looking at new M&A more for next year's business and beyond.
Sounds good. Thanks, guys.
Thanks, Simon.
As a reminder for questions, it's star followed by one on your telephone keypad. Our next question comes from Abhilash Mohapatra of Berenberg. Abhilash, please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning, and thank you for taking my questions. I've got two, please. Firstly, just on colocation growth, and I'm sort of thinking more specifically about standard colocation growth. Here, I guess we've sort of seen in 2021 that with the exception of DRC, you know, the growth was actually lower this year than it was in 2020 in most of your other markets like Tanzania, you know, and Congo and Ghana.
In the context of your guidance as well, where you're sort of saying that, you know, you expect nearly 60% of the tenancy growth to come from new sites, just wanted to get a, you know, get some color on how you see the prospects for actually leasing up your sites and driving standard colocation tenancies up in, you know, in sort of near to medium term. Then secondly, just maybe somewhat related to that on slide 10, where you show the return on invested capital for your business, and you show that pro forma for acquisitions is on 9%, whereas it's been obviously sort of a much more impressive figure in the past.
You know, do you expect to be able to drive that number back to the sort of 13%-14% mark? If yes, over what kind of time horizon, you know, would you expect that to come through? Thank you.
Thanks, Abhilash. Tom here. I'll take these ones. So yeah, look, I mean, on the colocation growth, you know, you mentioned that we're guiding to a higher percentage of Build-to-Suit this year of 60%. Yeah, no, look, I mean, it's very much driven really by the strategies of some of our key customers and what they're looking at in terms of their own marketing strategies and customer acquisition strategies. And interestingly, what we're seeing right now, to some extent what we saw a bit of last year as well in some markets, was a real, you know, sort of renewed push for new coverage in areas which previously had either little cell coverage or no cell coverage in some cases.
We're seeing that continue into this year, which is why we've guided to 60% Build-to-Suit this year. You know, we have quite a few orders on hand right now, which are building new sites in new locations. You know, I think this is just a natural cycle. Some years mobile operators will focus on upgrading and densifying and you know, maybe upgrading technologies on their existing sites and creating more infill, creating more capacity in areas which they currently cover. Other years they might look at you know, new subscriber acquisition in areas which previously have little or no coverage, and we're in that space now.
You know, which is great to be honest, you know, both from a sustainability perspective and building out more sites in rural locations, providing connectivity to communities which previously did not have connectivity or did not have much connectivity. You know, we're very pleased to be doing that. You know, as you allude to, of course, a Build-to-Suit creates more capacity for future co-location. For every single Build-to-Suit that we build, we always do a very deep assessment of the geo-marketing of that location, checking the viability for future lease up and future demand.
You know, we'll look at things like local population density, local amenities, and all of that will feed into our proprietary algorithms in our geo-marketing tool to predict how many and how quickly we'll get more co-locations on these sites. Yes, absolutely, we expect to drive more co-location in the future from these new Build-to-Suit. As we do from our acquisitions, you know, and of course, we're acquiring sites which typically have a tenancy ratio close to one tenant per tower. It's the same concept. It's buying more scale on day one to then really drive the lease up going forward, which of course is the number one driver for margin growth and for ROIC.
Just finishing off then on the, you mentioned on the page, the slide 10 and the ROIC being diluted, you know, from 13 to 9, which is just simply the natural thing that happens when you buy a underutilized network with a low tenancy ratio. The answer is yes, absolutely. We will be driving forward the lease up, driving forward the growth, and also some operational efficiencies over time to really get that ROIC back up to the levels that we've been seeing. I think the chart on the right actually shows that very well, I think. Because prior to 2016, we'd been on a large acquisition initiative and sort of have established a new platform. You can see then the margins were pretty low.
In fact way lower than they are today, even with the dilution. You know, over the last few years, we've driven that up significantly based on just simply having a much larger platform to sell to our customers and to drive operational improvements. You know, we're absolutely primed and ready to do that now on the newly enlarged portfolio that we now have. Yeah, I think that you know, you can expect all of that to be happening in the next few years.
Great. Thank you. Thanks for the answers.
Thanks.
Our next question comes from Nikita Meherally of Emirates NBD. Nikita, please go ahead.
Hi. Thank you for the presentation, and I apologize if my questions have already been asked before. Could you please elaborate on acquisition plan beyond 2022? I think since you are close to achieving the 2025 target pretty soon, would you be looking at new markets, or would you wait to improve tenancy ratio and maximize return on the acquired assets? In case you look at new markets or further acquisitions, how do you think about funding given the higher costs now? My second question is regarding cash. What sort of cash level are you generally comfortable with? As in how much would you like to maintain?
Lastly, if you could give some color on leverage and what are the medium-term targets here? Thank you.
Thanks very much, Nikita. Yeah, look, why don't I take the first couple there on the acquisition plan, and then Manjit, if you take the ones on the funding and the cash and leverage levels. Yeah, look, in terms of acquisitions beyond 2022, look, 2022 is really us focusing on integrating the previously announced acquisitions and focusing on moving forward with our organic growth, organic performance, and our overall business excellence strategy across the group and making sure that's embedded in all of our markets, including the new ones. That's really our big focus for this year. As I mentioned briefly earlier, you know, we obviously continue to monitor the market for acquisitions. We have a business development team, which is always monitoring.
You know, there are some very interesting opportunities out there. You know, I think that given the timing of these deals and, you know, the sort of gestation period of them, you know, it's very much sort of next year's business and beyond. You know, we'll just continue to monitor the market as we always do to really, you know, we are, as you mentioned, focused on lifting assets, maximizing those returns, getting the lease up, going on those assets, really driving the performance and getting the operation going in some of the new markets. That's our big focus right now.
you know, over the next few years, I'm sure that there will be acquisition opportunities that arise, and we'll look at them in the normal way. you know, we certainly see value in further geographic diversification and scale growth over time. we think that that opportunity is certainly there in the regions in which we operate, being Africa and Middle East. we'll continue to look at that in the future. Manjit, on just the funding cash levels-
Yeah.
leverage. Do you wanna say a few words on that?
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of our leverage levels, we've always communicated that we like to operate broadly within a range of 3.5-4.5x net leverage. As of the 3.6 now, pro forma for the acquisitions will be towards the top end of that leverage range. But as Tom said, you know, we don't see potentially any, you know, acquisitions really coming through during the course of the year. That's probably gonna be for next year and beyond. By which point, and the beauty of this business model is that it delevers very, very quickly. We should have the debt capacity that we require, should we need it, for future acquisitions.
Effectively, the way we always think about acquisitions, well, the waterfall is always, if possible, cash and balance sheet, debt capacity, and then other forms of financing thereafter. That's the way that we'll look at it when the time arises. You know, one thing that we've done during the course of the year, we've been able to diversify our sources of funding. We've got not only our convertible bonds, which we really like as an instrument. We've now got, we've also got our high-yield bonds, which we've had for a long period of time. And we've also got in-market debt financings as well. The combination of all three of those really act quite well and provide us some diversification in terms of how we look for funding as we go forward.
In terms of cash level, we like to keep broadly in the region of around $100 million-$150 million on the balance sheet. You know, majority of that will be broadly held at the group. We keep a, you know, a small balance in the local OpCos. We always do regular upstreaming of funds to our group facilities. We keep enough in the OpCos for working capital and CapEx purposes, but the vast majority of our funding is always held offshore.
Thank you.
Thanks, Nikita.
We have no further questions on the phone line, so I'll hand back to Kash.
Well, thanks, Jordan. Well, look, thank you very much everybody for joining our call, and we look forward to talking to you during our Q1 numbers presentation in May. Thank you. Bye-bye.
This concludes today's call. Thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.