Apologies for the slight delay at the start. We're just sorting out some echo issues here. But I hope we are good to go now, and you all can hear me. Great, thank you very much. Welcome to the Ooredoo Financial Year 2021 Investor Call. My name is Andreas Goldau, I'm in charge of Investor Relations, and it's a pleasure welcoming you together with my colleagues. Let me start by introducing our panel. We are joined by our Managing Director, Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo , whom you all know from the previous calls. We also have Sheikh Mohammed Al Thani with us, Deputy CEO and CEO of Ooredoo Qatar, our Group Chief Financial Officer, Abdulla Zaman, and René Werner, our Chief Strategy Officer. All the bios are in the deck. We are also joined by a new colleague in the Investor Relations team.
I'm pleased to have Ahmad Al-Naama with us, who joined us from our treasury team. As usual, Aziz will start the presentation with the consolidated results. He will mention some highlights of the year, and he will discuss the Indonesian merger, as well as the outlook and the guidance for 2022. Then we move into the opco section. Sheikh Mohammed Al Thani will start with Qatar, Kuwait, Tunisia, and Algeria. Then, Abdulla will cover the remaining four opcos. As always, at the end, we will leave ample time for your questions. This session is being recorded, so by joining, you agree to the transcription and the recording as well. I would also like to remind you on the legal disclaimer with regards to any forward-looking statements on slide number two.
To begin, I now hand over to Aziz. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us, and we're actually extremely pleased to present the sets of results. We've had a very strong year. If I can have the first slide, please. What you have seen probably already in our release is that we've managed to grow our revenues by 4% year-on-year to QAR 30 billion. That's actually excluding effects, is a 7% growth at the top line. If we look at the EBITDA level, we've increased our EBITDA margin for the full year from 42% to 44%, taking EBITDA at QAR 13.1 billion. This is 7% growth of EBITDA for the year and 11% growth if we exclude the effects of FX.
One of our strongest performance and a reversal of previous trend is for the first time since 2017, we've actually significantly improved our free cash flows. That's an extreme performance where we've increased our free cash flows by up to 30%. I think this is a true statement to the group wide transformation initiative we started at the beginning of the year. I'll touch a bit more on this. For the net profit, our net profit actually for 2021 attributable to shareholders is only QAR 47 million. If you adjust this for all one-offs and non-cash impairments, this is mainly driven, if you remember, we took a big impairment in the Q2 for our Myanmar operation.
Our actual normalized net profit has grown 61% for the year. This is also allowing us to increase our dividend yields per share by 20%, taking up from QAR 0.25 to QAR 0.30 per share. We've also achieved significant milestones which we announced, which were quite aggressive. One was the disposal of the tower sales remaining of our towers in Indonesia. More importantly, we've actually completed and closed the merger with CK Hutchison, creating Indosat Hutchison Ooredoo as a very strong number two player. Can I have next slide?
As I touched on, these strong results were driven by five core pillars which we embark on, which were at the center of our strategy this year and will be in 2021, and is still the core focus of our strategy for 2022. One is excellence in consumer experience. We've embarked in a strategy of being first a data leader in every single market we operate. We've been ramping up 5G across most of our markets. 4G coverage has been extended in Algeria and Iraq. We've won across different markets several awards for the fastest network. It's not just about network and being a data leader. We're really trying to be the operator of choice for consumers by enhancing the customer experience.
We've focused a lot during the year on strengthening the core, the basic of our operation. You've seen this in our results. This has been led by a program, transformation program we call internally Braveheart, and this has yielded the results you've seen. Focus on top line growth initiative, focus on operating cost initiative, and as you'll see, also focus on CapEx rationalization. None of this would have been possible without a focus on our people. We want Ooredoo to be an employer of choice. We've actually pioneered certain work environment. As such, we were the first employer in Qatar to open up work from home freely for the year. We won the award of Best Place to Work in 2021. We've also strengthened and enhanced our management team. We've done quite at the group level.
If you look at our CXOs, we've promoted a lot of people internally into senior positions, but we've also been able to hire and attract senior talent at the group level. We've also been embarking in what we call a Smart Telco, so it's evolving beyond the core and the peripheries. There we've seen extremely strong performance. We have more than 20% jumps in our net revenue from digital services. We've signed a number of significant agreements, digital partnership with Fintechs, Visa, Mastercard, but as well with major players such as Google, Microsoft, and also in the gaming space. The last point is we're still focusing. We focused, delivered, and continue focusing on rationalizing our portfolio.
This is consolidating our position in Indonesia, disposing of our tower sales of our remaining portfolio of tower in Indonesia, and going forward, looking at the TowerCo initiative and other initiative to rationalize our portfolio. Next slide. I think this is one of the landmark transaction for the year. It's the Ooredoo, Indosat, and CK Hutchison . Three merger. This has created, as we've heard before, a strong number two player in Indonesia. We went from probably 17%-18% revenue market share to a 25%-27% revenue market share on a combined basis. It's a transaction with an enterprise value of $6 billion, which should yield tremendous value for our shareholders.
I think the belief in it was the resounding confirmation at the AGM for validating this transaction in Indonesia, where 98% of shareholders voted for this transaction. We're looking at run rate pre-tax synergies of close to $300 million-$400 million per year to be realized from year three to year five. Next slide, please. This is a very strong impact. As we said, we also believe that IOH will benefit from a number of things. One is the commitment from two very strong shareholders, anchor shareholders. Ooredoo Group on one side, which operates in 10 countries, and CK Hutchison, which is also a very strong telecom operator across Europe and Asia. The combination of the both of the strengths of these shareholder can only benefit CK Hutchison.
Actually, in the first months of the completed merger, so in the month of January, the working environment and the way the teams have been working and delivering is actually exceptional. We also believe that this will bring a lot of value to our shareholder. As I mentioned, $ 300 million-$ 400 million run rate synergies from year three going forward. This come from optimizing our network, rationalizing our network. We estimate close to 25% of duplicate sites that can be rationalized. Rationalizing also our spectrum, which will enhance the consumer experience. Also the scale. We're looking at more than 100 million subscribers on a combined basis. This gives us tremendous scale.
As mentioned, we were able to close and have all the regulatory approval for this transaction on January 4th of this year, and now it operates as a combined entity. Next slide. The numbers in a bit more detail. What you've seen is we're close to QAR 30 billion in terms of revenue for 2021. That compares to QAR 28.8 billion in 2020. It's a 4% jump in revenue, and if you adjust it for FX, it's actually a 7% jump. We've been consistent quarter-on-quarter with that growth. As you see, Q4 is very consistent. On the EBITDA, we've been slowly improving our EBITDA margin. What you've seen for the year is an 8% growth in EBITDA from QAR 12 billion to nearly QAR 13.1 billion. That's a very significant jump.
Actually, if you remove the effect of ex-FX, we are close to 11% growth in EBITDA. Q4 was actually a very strong month where we've seen significant improvement where we're nearly 11%. This has been driven by increase in profitability across nearly all our markets except Oman. Next slide. Net profit. As explained, as you know, we had a series of impairments this year. These were non-cash events, but significant one-offs. The biggest was the impairment where we took a full provision for a full impairment for our Myanmar operation, given the circumstances in the country. That means that our net profit attributable to shareholder actually dropped by 96%, year-on-year.
If we normalize it and remove these one-off effects, which is on one side, the impairment of Myanmar, and on the other side, the proceeds from the sales of the towers in Indonesia, which is QAR 1 billion to the group. We actually see a significant improvement in their profitability, jumping to 61%. Next slide. CapEx. So in CapEx, again, I think this is the fruit of the Braveheart program. We've been driving much more CapEx efficiency. What we've seen is an overall drop in CapEx utilization by 16% for 2021. In Q4, it's slightly more pronounced, it's 20% but that's due to, 23% is due to the cyclical nature. This translate in a significant uplift in free cash flows.
As mentioned before, our free cash flows have jumped by 30% year-on-year from QAR 6.2 billion to QAR 8.2 billion. A big part of that is CapEx enhancements, which nearly account for half of this, free cash flow enhancements, but the other half of the free cash flow enhancements is actually driven by the EBITDA uplift of 8%. We're extremely proud of this performance. Next slide. Our total customer base has slowly and surely been growing. We've gained 1% to 121 million subscribers. This is mainly driven through Indonesia, Iraq, Algeria, Qatar, Oman, Maldives. We've had strong momentum across all our markets. Next slide, please. Net debt.
In line with the Board guidance and given the free cash flow generation, we've seen that now our net debt ratio is actually at the bottom of the range given by our Board of 1.5x. This is far below all the bank covenants. This is a drop of net debt to EBITDA of 6% for the year. Next slide. In terms of guidance for next year, on the back of this very strong performance, what you'll see, first of all, is the pro forma numbers are actually adjusted for the deconsolidation of Indosat. As you know, Indosat will now be considered as a joint venture, as is joint control with CK Hutchison. We're looking at, on a pro forma basis, at a revenue of nearly QAR 22 billion, excluding Indosat. That's...
With a guidance of 2% ±. EBITDA, a guidance of QAR 9.2 billion, pro forma for the year, excluding Indosat, and a guidance of -3% to 1%. CapEx, what we're looking at just as comparison, if in 2021 we did a pro forma of 3.1%, we're looking at a slight reduction in CapEx to QAR 2.75 billion-QAR 3.25 billion. Next slide. I'll now hand over to Sheikh Mohammed for the operational review.
Thank you, Aziz. Now we can start with Qatar. Ooredoo Qatar maintained its position as a leading operator in both market share, infrastructure with a fixed mobile network. The business of Qatar contributed to the growth of group with revenue increase of 6% to QAR 7.5 billion. Healthy margin EBITDA level. From a growth perspective, Ooredoo Qatar are the main contributor for that growth in revenue coming from postpaid, Ooredoo TV, B2B revenue, mobile financial services, which is part of our digital services. Also from digital strategy, we have been through e-gaming, and we have been proud to announce a major partnership during the year with Quest . It's the first and largest Qatari company specializing in the e-sports and e-gaming branded as Ooredoo Nation – Gamers' Land.
Additionally, we launched a different portfolio of products, and one of those successful products and service is called Aamali. And that enables us for small business to customize their services, voice, data, et cetera. In September, we've been very proud to announce a partnership with F1. And recently, Ooredoo Qatar has been recognized as a Microsoft Qatar Partner of the Year and for MoneyGram's Partner for the Decade. If we move to the next slide of Kuwait. From Kuwait market, COVID-19 has an impact and continues that negative impact on the economy. We have expected a pressure on our revenue due to that pandemic from low pricing and economic, let's say slowdown.
There have been lockdown on and off, which affected also the business itself. However, Ooredoo Kuwait stayed resilient and reported slight revenue increase of 2% with also enhanced EBITDA margin and absolute value from EBITDA margin from 25% to 29%. Customer base reached 2.5 million as the company also continued in its deployment of its 5G rollout and strategy. Testament to our commitment also to our customers through providing the world-class service. Ooredoo Kuwait has been recognized as the fastest network in Kuwait by a leading independent research company. If we move to Algeria. Algeria company or our OpCo in Algeria is showing a sign of slow recovery despite the continued depreciation of Algerian dinar with which was depreciated 7%.
While revenue stood flat at QAR 2.3 billion, local currency revenue increased by 8%. Driven by company focus also on efficiency cost optimization, they have really increased their EBITDA margin by 6%, and it was a quite healthy margin of 35% EBITDA margin. Customer base also increased by 2% to 12.8 million customer. Part of our digital strategy from the group, Ooredoo Algeria has launched their app, which is it's called YOOZ, which is a prepaid digital app offer targeting the youth segment that has been quite successful downloads and also subscribers. If we move to Tunisia. Next slide, please. Ooredoo Tunisia reported also a good result despite a COVID-19 impact and some turbulence from the politics and political situation there.
Our revenue increased by 7% compared to 2020. EBITDA has decreased by 4% due to some transformation initiatives, which is part of our transformation journey on a group level. Customer base also decreased to 6.9 million. That is due to change in a prepaid definition from customer lifecycle of 90 days. This is not only restricted to Ooredoo Tunisia, but also applies across all the mobile operators in Tunisia. Customer number by that, regardless or regarding this, across all the mobile operators, if we take that away, our customer number increased by 12% year-on-year. I will hand over now to our Group CFO, Abdulla.
Good afternoon, and thank you for being here today. I'll be covering Indosat and Oman and Iraq and finally, Myanmar. From Indosat perspective, Indosat Ooredoo continue to deliver a stronger growth, reporting 14% increase in revenue to reach QAR 7.9 billion. The EBITDA also increased by 22% to QAR 3.9 billion. This mainly driven by solid top-line growth and cost optimization. Healthy customer base growth by 6% approximately. The good things in 2021, we have done a launch of 5G in several city. One of them, for example, Solo and Jakarta, and also we've been utilizing the LTE 4G. Ooredoo and CK Hutchison, as you are aware, have approved the merger by January 2021 to 2022, actually, creating a strong number two telco operator in the market.
This will be a very good, I would say, merger that will position Ooredoo and Hutch in number two in the market. I wanna remind you that we have concluded a successful tower deal that generated approximately QAR 750 million to the company. Next slide, please. Iraqi economy was impacted by weakened purchasing power, followed by approximately a 20% devaluation of the Iraqi dinar affected by COVID and by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We see a decline in the QAR, as obvious, you see it, but in the local currency we see revenue increasing by approximately 9%. In Iraqi dinar or local currency, EBITDA improved by 13% and EBITDA margin by approximately 46%.
Customer base also increased, and there is also a significant increase on the consumption of the data after Asiacell extended its 4G coverage to approximately 90% of the cities. Next slide, please. Oman has been impacted heavily with the COVID-19 pandemic, which has impacted overall their macroeconomics. This is, we can see it obviously on the prepaid revenue, which was being also offset by the postpaid revenue growth. EBITDA for the period decreased by 10%, mainly due to lower prepaid revenue, as I mentioned earlier. EBITDA margin stood at 52% level. The third mobile network, which is Vodafone, has launched during Q4 of 2021, which is impacting the overall telecom in Oman. There is also further 5G rollout in Oman.
In October, northern Oman was also hit by a tropical cyclone, which has impacted our 400 sites, which has got recovered within seven days. This is just for your information. If we can go to the last slide, which is Myanmar. Authorities in Myanmar, as you are aware, have proclaimed a one-year state of emergency in February 2021, which has significantly impacted Ooredoo Myanmar. With the slight easing of the data restriction and uplifting of the price floor by regulator, business improved in second quarter, I would say, of the year. Ooredoo Myanmar reported 9% decline in revenue to QAR 1,068 million, impacted by FX depreciation. But in local term, revenue was up by 8%. A 20% increase in EBITDA to QAR 376 million, supported by cost control.
Ooredoo App had over 2.7 million monthly active user, and this is a very good sign to us, by December 2021. The company also launched a new game called Oomanji on My Ooredoo App, which has been played over 25,000,000x since its launch. This also will be contributing to My Ooredoo App from revenue, hopefully by 2022. Thank you very much.
All right. Thank you very much, Abdulla. We can move on to the next slide, please. We are very much looking forward to hosting our next Capital Markets Day, and we are now looking at a date in September. At the moment in Qatar, there is still some COVID-19 related restrictions. From some countries you would have to stay in a hotel and I think if we push it out to after the summer, we are very much looking forward to seeing you IRL, in real life, without Zoom microphone issues and seeing you face-to-face. That should be great. Very much looking forward to that. Yeah, now we are coming to the part where we have a Q&A session, and I would like to open up the floor.
You can type your questions in the Q&A function here, or you could also raise your hand and we can open the microphone for you as well. Ahmad, my colleague, is gonna start the Q&A session. You might wanna read out the first Q&A question from the chat if you want to.
Hello, everybody. We have quite a few questions from an anonymous attendee. First question is, what will be your pro forma debt, cash, for full year 2021, assuming deconsolidation? Net leverage guidance for full year 2022 after deconsolidation? Second question will be, given the improvement in market share in Indosat this year, which markets resulted in decline in your customer base this year, and what is your strategy in these markets? Third question will be, how do you plan to manage FX risks and volatility given it's impacting your EBITDA ultimately? Fourth and final question is, do you plan and are you reporting any tangible ESG targets that you are monitoring in your near medium term?
I suggest we take them one by one. Regarding the pro forma debt, and I'll let Abdulla Zaman, our CFO, expand on this, but if we take pro forma debt, our net debt to EBITDA ratio, excluding as a consequence of the deconsolidation of Indosat, is roughly at 1.25 x. Abdulla, if you want to expand, please.
Yes, Aziz. Actually also the leverage in terms of the proceeds that will be received in 2022 will be helpful also for us to improve the leverage ratio and this is what we also have highlighted in our presentations, that today our EBITDA level or the debt ratio level is 1.5x. I hope I answered the questions or if there is any clarification more on question number one.
Okay. Can you repeat question number two, please, [Ahmad]?
Second question, again, is given the improvement in market share in Indonesia this year, which markets resulted in decline in your customer base this year, and what's your strategy in these markets?
We've experienced customer base expansion in nearly most of our markets, from Indonesia to Iraq, Algeria, Qatar, Oman, Maldives. In some markets we've experienced stagnation. We're still focused on every market to become a strong number two player or number one, depending on or consolidate our position as a number one. In certain markets this year, there was a small attrition or stagnation on the customer base. Part of it was due to reduction in the expatriate population of these markets.
For question number three, how do you plan to manage FX risk, given the impact on your EBITDA? Today, one of the main markets FX risk that we are today observing, it's coming from many more. What we see in quarter four, this is coming to our favor by positive, I would say, FX impact on us. Hopefully we are trying to manage this risk by improving the top line in order to offset any FX impact on us. This is the only thing that currently we can do for certain markets.
We also, just in addition, a couple of points. We also try to have as much of our contracts, especially on the vendor side or on the service side, from service providers in local currency. We also try to have as much as possible leverage at the OpCo level in local currency. These are the only mitigants we can have against FX. A last point on that, on 2022, if you look at our forward-looking assumptions, they seem quite conservative versus the performance we experienced this year is because we've taken actually very conservative approach to FX impacts in most of the markets which have strong volatility.
On the fourth question, for ESG reporting, do you plan in ESG reporting any tangible ESG targets that you are monitoring in near or medium term?
Yeah, I'm happy to start on this one. Actually, we published an ESG report already. The first one was published last year, and we are currently in the process of updating that together with our annual report. The next edition will be published at our AGM on the 8th of March. We are planning to focus more on ESG. We're actually working together with a couple of investment banks and are looking into further defining our ESG strategy, but we are already quite active in all areas. In the environmental space, we have many programs looking at limiting the use of environmental emissions and reducing energy consumption. We're using more lithium batteries. We connect more base stations to the grid and the various other initiatives.
In the social space, Ooredoo is very active, sponsoring, incorporating with various ministries, offering certain products for minorities, working heavily on reducing a digital divide, have been very active in supporting disaster zones with recovery support. On the governance side, we actually have an award-winning governance team and a very transparent disclosure when it comes to decision processes, governance process and various committees in place, risk committees and so on.
Thank you, Andreas. We have another question from Ziad Itani. He's asking: Why is the dividend payout at the lower end of the range at close to 30% of normalized EPS? Why is the EPS increase +20% year-on-year lagging the normalized EPS growth 60%+ year-on-year? You are already at the lowest end leverage target net debt to EBITDA at 1.5x. Any M&A plans or heavy investments in the pipeline, e.g. CapEx and target given?
We've increased, as you've rightly noted, the dividends per share by 20%. We are at 40% normalized earnings per share. This excludes the effects of FX. At the same time, as you rightly noted, we're at the low end of our debt threshold. We're still holding cash. As you know, we're embarking on a strategy of creating a TowerCo. This might require some investments on our side, given the friction costs, but also we have minority shareholders in a lot of our operations, which might need to be taken out.
We also reserve some of our cash to further invest and expand in strong areas of growth, which we see important, for the group which are in salient areas, whether it's data center strategy and also ancillary services in what we call the Smart Telco realm.
Thank you very much, Aziz. We have another question from Jonathan Miller. It's a multilayer question, so I'm gonna be breaking it down in two parts. The first part of his question is: Once you receive payment from Hutch of $387 million, do you plan on paying a special dividend, especially since your net debt to EBITDA is very low and your cash flow generation is very strong?
The proceeds will come in Q1 of this year. We currently have no plans, no immediate use of proceeds. We're looking at different strategy of what would be the best use of proceeds for this. To the extent we do a dividend, we'll announce it, but right now this would take a board resolution, and at the same time, there is no plan for it.
Okay. Jonathan's second question is: Should we expect the dividends to grow stronger going forward because your net debt to EBITDA is now very low versus regional and global players, and cash flow generation is strong. You can thus pay at the higher end of your dividend policy range.
We retain our guidance to be between 40%-60% for the, for looking forward. It will depend on the performance. We're confident in our performance, but we'll revisit this, question toward the same time next year.
His third question is: Are you looking into acquisitions in new countries?
For the time being, we have no acquisitions planned or announced.
His final question is: Why do you have so much cash on the balance sheet? Why not use some of that to settle outstanding debt?
It's a bit conflicting. You're asking why is our debt so low and why do we have so much cash and why don't we reduce our outstanding debt. We're constantly looking at optimizing our debt profile and also reducing our debt servicing costs. To the extent there's a negative carry between our cash and the debt position, we'll redeem to the extent it's possible positions of debt if we don't have better use for the cash.
Thank you, Aziz. Moving on, we have another question from Vikram [audio distortion]. He's asking: Are you planning to pay a special dividend from the stake sale in Indonesia?
I think we've already covered this question earlier.
Yeah. Thank you. Moving on to a question from [audio distortion] : What is the rationale behind the dividend increase, and how does management look at dividends, moving forward?
Again, I think we've covered this question quite extensively. Dividend increase is driven by the increase in performance and the normalized net profit target. We always had the guidelines of 40%-60% payout ratio, and we're sticking to this target.
Thank you, Aziz. If there is any additional questions, please do type them into the Q&A chat.
I think we have one question from an anonymous investor there asking about if we are looking actively at M&A opportunities in any of our existing markets. Maybe that's a question for our Chief Strategy Officer, René.
In general, as a comment, we always look, we remain open to any M&A opportunities to the extent they are value accretive to our shareholders and to our businesses. Currently, we have no M&A announcement, and no position there.
Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. I don't see any more questions at the moment. As Ahmad said, you can still type or raise your hand virtually. If there are no further questions, then I would like to thank you all for joining this session. Please refer to the Ooredoo Investor Relations site where you can see the investor presentation. Follow us on Twitter, and feel free to contact the Investor Relations team for any follow-up information.
I saw a hand raised.
Oh, sorry. Yeah?
I don't know who raised it.
This is Maddy. Hi.
Hi, Maddy.
Hey. I have a few questions. Thanks for taking them. Firstly, I just wanted to understand the competitive landscape in Algeria. I understand, you know, Djezzy is right now facing some shareholder action, right? So beyond probably looking to use the put option there, have you seen any change in the behavior from Djezzy in the marketplace, more aggressive, less aggressive? And in that respect, how do you see your outlook for the next year or so in the market? That's the first question. I have three more. We'll do one by one, I think.
Okay, I can take that. From Algeria perspective, as explained earlier, there has been a slight recovery. There is no major honestly change on the competitiveness of the market. However, our Ooredoo Algeria management remain, you know, resilient during this situation with the macroeconomy, i.e., also from COVID-19 as well as what the change happened from the competition. However, there is no major shifts. The market is still competitive, and we have seen a sales recovery from Ooredoo Algeria because of the transformation journey that they have taken, alongside the group initiatives and program that we're having, as well as being efficient on their cost initiatives they have been delivered.
From digital also, they have been quite successful in also launching some digital applications for prepaid, which we also see that there has been good uptake on this offer. It's still our journey to go ahead with that under the umbrella of digital strategy of Ooredoo Group.
Great. Thank you. Second question I have is on the strategy in Indonesia. Post-merger, how should we see the commercial strategy of the business? I understand that historically you have had a few changes from volume to value, back to volume. Where we are now in terms of commercial strategy in the market? And just trying to also understand the, you know, general control of the business because now you have joint control with Hutch. How would a day-to-day operation, how much influence Ooredoo will have on those things? And then, you know, if briefly you could also talk about your network strength in terms of number of towers, population coverage together with Hutch compared to the market leader, Telkomsel.
Maybe in terms of governance for Indonesia, we've spent a lot of time in the shareholder agreement, and as you recall, we actually delayed the announcement of the merger to actually fine-tune the governance of the structure. As you highlighted, joint control is not always the most efficient and could be destructive if not planned and thought through carefully. Actually, what I can tell you is as of the month of February, we've now been operating as a joint control company for close to a month and a half. The business is operating extremely seamlessly. The teams on the different sides of the business roles have been attributed between each function depending on who was more efficient in each OpCo.
We're currently enjoying quite a good cooperation and integration at the working level is going very well. In terms of alignment of interest between both shareholders, Hutch and ourselves, we're extremely aligned in terms of the performance we want to see out of the business and also the fact that we want to see the realization of the synergies. One of the reasons of having joint control was to ensure that no one got paid in advance for the synergies and therefore there was a disalignment of interest at the shareholder level. In terms of commercial strategy, we're we can't comment too much on it for competitive reasons. We now have two very strong brands with different positioning.
We have Indosat, which is more a high-end brand, and CK Hutchison, which is more a youth brand, and these are extremely complementary in terms of market targeting.
If you could talk about the network strength compared to the market leader population coverage, if some statistics is available there.
If someone can take it. I know high level, the combination of our spectrum in terms of both entities gives us one of the best spectrum coverage in Indonesia. We're probably the leader in the Java region in terms of coverage. Ex-Java, Telkomsel is quite strong. The combination of both networks and of the spectrum enhances this value proposition, but also there's a lot of synergy coming from the duplication of network and decommissioning of sites.
I mean, I appreciate that because I was more indeed thinking about the coverage outside of Java itself, yeah. My third and fourth questions are-
Maybe to touch on that. The combined strengths and the synergies and the decommissioning of sites between our core networks within Java, because a bulk of it comes from Java, gives us additional investing capacity outside Java.
Okay, that's very interesting. Thank you. The third and fourth questions are should be quite quick. Just wondering about your long-term plans in Myanmar. Do you have plan to like your competition, I think, is planning to exit, so what are your views there? Quickly on the fourth question is about towers. There is a theme right now about tower monetization within GCC as well. So wondering what is your view on that. Is there any tower sales in pipeline at all? Monetizations?
On both sides, we, I'll start with Myanmar. Myanmar, currently, we have no plan to exit the market. We're managing the operation. It is hard to have a long forward-looking view in Myanmar. We're managing the business to maintain, one, its profitability, two, its performance to our customers, but also the safety of our employees. As you can imagine, Myanmar is a very dynamic situation, given the political situation in the country and also the fluctuation in terms of currency. We've taken quite conservative assumptions in terms of impact of FX, for instance, for Myanmar going forward, even if we noted significant uplift in FX on Q4 from Myanmar. In terms of TowerCo, we've this is one of the five pillars, if you remember the slides, which we call portfolio optimization.
We are looking at our whole portfolio of towers across the remaining of our footprint. We have close to 22,000 towers across our footprints, ranging from Qatar, Iraq, Algeria, etc. We're looking to optimize the situation. We've engaged a process to at least do an internal carve-out. This is a very lengthy process given the different regulatory constraints of each market and some of the markets we operate in have never seen any of these tower sales or carve-outs yet.
Great. Thank you very much for your detailed answers. Appreciate it. Thank you.
Thank you, Aziz. In the meantime, few more questions came in. Jonathan Miller is asking, "Would you consider buying back shares since they are so cheap?
No, we are not considering a share buyback. Actually, it would create some shareholder value, of course, but at the same time, it will also limit the liquidity of our shares in the local stock market, and we're trying to enhance our liquidity, versus restrict it.
Thank you for that. Ankit Bansal is asking, "Are you planning to make more heavy CapEx into data centers and mobile money-related projects?
As you've seen our guidance in terms of CapEx, we're looking at a CapEx which is actually slightly reducing for next year. We are putting a focus on our data centers, infrastructure. We have for our own uses a lot of data centers which we can enhance the yield and the profitability by actually using them in co-location, transactional hyperscalers. One of the typical example is the partnership we've done with Microsoft and the one we've done with Google in Qatar. We're trying to leverage the group to enhance this footprint, these types of partnerships across our footprint. Going to MFS. MFS is an area of strong focus. Again, this is part of the Smart Telco initiative. As you know, we have MFS at different level of maturities in most of our OpCos.
In Qatar, we actually have a very successful Ooredoo money proposition. We represent close to anywhere between 17%-22% of the monthly remittance market. This is a very big area of focus for us as we can see strong growth. At the same time, we see some different markets. We have the GCC markets, where are mostly remittance-based, and then we have our ex-GCC market, if you look at Iraq, Palestine, Algeria, and Tunisia, where generally these are markets which are underbanked, so have a very. An MFS is a valuable proposition for these markets.
Thank you, Az iz. More questions coming in from Nishant. He's asking, "Will Myanmar currency impact on Forex income continue despite the impairments undertaken? And how much is the intercompany dollar loan to Myanmar?" The second question is: What was the reason for EBITDA margin pressure in Qatar in Q4? How is the outlook for full year 2022?
I'll take the Myanmar and let Sheikh Mohammed take Qatar. Myanmar, I think we've covered. It's extremely hard today in the current environment to predict fluctuation in the Myanmar currency. We're trying to denominate most of our contracts, supplier contracts, in the local currency to mitigate that risk as much as possible. At the same time, looking forward, we've taken a very conservative assumption in terms of effects from Myanmar. As you'll appreciate, it's hard for us to predict, and it's something we look at on a daily basis. Moving to Qatar, Sheikh Mohammed?
Thank you, Aziz. So regarding the pressure on the margin in quarter four, there has been some costs booked in Q4 due to some transformation projects within the company and part of also a group transformation. As well as there have been some activities and partnership which includes also, as everyone knows, the FIFA Arab Cup, which is part of the FIFA World Cup that we are sponsoring. This has been booked in Q4, where the period started end of November until 18th of December when that event happened.
Just to clarify, by the way, there's no intercompany loan with Myanmar. Sorry, I forgot to answer that question.
Thank you, Sheikh Mohammed and Aziz. Final two questions from Josh. He's asking, how do you intend to enhance the stock's liquidity in the market?
We're working well by doing more and more investor outreach, also trying to enhance the appetite of foreign investors for our stock. At the same time, Ooredoo has appointed direct market makers. This is not a new practice, by the way, to enhance the velocity of our share in the local stock market.
Thank you, Aziz. The final question in hand is, if you can elaborate on the impact of the third operator in Oman.
I'll take that. The third operator started in Q4. Our strategy for any entrant for its price war, and we have been quite conscious looking for value creation and not to have any price war. However, there has been an aggressive offers in the market when the third operator started. Hopefully with our innovative and initiatives that we are having from product portfolio that we have and service that we are having in Ooredoo Oman, we try to minimize any price war. We have seen quite slight, let's say recovery or consciousness among the market for the last or beginning, let's say, of the year. Hopefully that healthy sign can continue. We are watching the market closely.
We are being honestly conscious of being healthy. We do our best to be innovative and bundling and create innovative products and service for our customer, and they stay competitive in the market.
Excellent. I'm afraid we're running out of time now, but I'm glad that we could answer the additional questions. Sorry that I didn't see the raised hands there. I started a bit later, I wanted to finish early, but I'm glad we had this very interactive, active discussion this time. I'm looking forward to your further participation at our next events, namely our Q1 results, which are due at the end of April. We have the AGM coming up on the 18th of March and then the Capital Markets Day in September. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feedback, do reach out to the investor relations team. Thank you very much again for your continued interest in Ooredoo. This concludes our call for today. Thank you, everyone.