Good afternoon and welcome to Ooredoo's 2025 Capital Markets Day. Today, we're excited to share a closer look at Ooredoo Group's refreshed strategy, our outlook on key growth areas, and our continued commitment to delivering sustainable, long-term value creation. My name is Luelle Pillay, and I'm responsible for investor relations here at the Group. It's a pleasure to have you with us today. Let me take a moment to walk you through today's agenda. Our program is shaped around Ooredoo's refreshed strategy and long-term growth ambitions, featuring insights from our Group leadership and country CEOs. We'll begin with a business overview from our Group CEO, followed by a deep dive into our refreshed strategy presented by our Group Chief Strategy and Acting Chief Consumer Officer. Then we'll shift gears with our CEOs from Qatar, Iraq, Kuwait, and Algeria sharing insights into their respective markets.
We'll then turn our attention to the digital infrastructure platforms, featuring a closer look at our data center company, Syntys, presented by its CEO. Our Group CFO will then review our financial performance and guidance before we conclude with closing remarks from our Group CEO. Finally, we'll open the floor for an interactive Q&A session. All presentations are available on our investor relations website and on this platform. Our speaker bios can be found on our website. As always, we greatly value your feedback. A short survey will appear once the webinar concludes, and we would appreciate you taking a few moments to share your thoughts on today's events. Before we begin, please take note of our usual disclaimer, particularly regarding forward-looking statements and the normalization of the numbers presented in today's slides.
The recording and transcription of the session have started, and by attending, you consent to being included. Finally, please remember to use the Q&A function in Zoom to submit your questions at any time during the session. Let's start. It's my pleasure to introduce Aziz Aluthman Fakhroo, Ooredoo Group's Chief Executive Officer. Aziz will provide a comprehensive business overview highlighting the progress we've made over the past years. I'm sure you won't meet many telecom CEOs with such a diverse background. Aziz has extensive experience in finance, investment banking, and mergers and acquisitions, having worked in Paris, London, and Qatar. He was a board member of Ooredoo for more than a decade and has been leading the Group as CEO for the past five years. Handing over to Aziz, who will officially kick off Ooredoo's 2025 Capital Markets Day.
Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Ooredoo's Group 2025 Capital Markets Day. As a management team, we are proud to present Ooredoo's journey to a record-level profitability, a clear reflection of the disciplined execution of our strategy, our focus on digital transformation, and our commitment to creating lasting value for our shareholders, customers, and communities. Over the past years, we have transformed our businesses by streamlining our portfolio to strengthen our core, delayering our infrastructure stack, building strategic partnerships, and driving greater efficiencies across the Group. With a stronger foundation now in place, we are scaling our verticals and positioning Ooredoo to become the region's leading digital infrastructure provider. The results we will present today speak for themselves. Ooredoo today stands stronger, more agile, and more digitally empowered than ever before, positioned to capture new opportunities across our market.
Today, we will take you through how we achieve these results and, more importantly, how we plan to sustain and accelerate this momentum in the years ahead. Whether you are new to the Ooredoo story or familiar with our journey, today we will take you through our growth story, transformation, and diversification outlook. Let's start by looking at where we are today. We have a diversified footprint across nine countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia regions, including our joint venture operation in Indonesia. Our footprint has a fast-growing population of over 400 million people and nearly 100 million households. We have a highly scaled operation with nearly 150 million mobile and broadband subscribers and a consolidated revenue of $6.5 billion. Most importantly, we maintain leading number one or number two market position in seven of these nine countries, thanks to our scale and best-in-class operation.
Let's take a closer look at our markets across our diversified footprint. In our markets, which are typically two to three-player environments, we have a leading position in seven out of nine countries, providing both scale and competitive advantage. Even in markets where we are ranked third, Kuwait and Algeria, we are delivering top-line growth and healthy profitability. Our business model is customized to each market, providing mobile and fixed wireless services with wireless broadband available in select locations. Our portfolio is well-balanced, combining highly rated GCC markets such as Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman, and high-growth markets such as Iraq and Algeria. From the bar chart, you will note that over half of our revenue comes from GCC markets, providing stability and recurring cash flows, while high-growth markets contribute to the remaining, driving momentum for future growth.
It's worth highlighting that 76% of our revenue comes from markets tied to the U.S. dollars, offering both stability and financial predictability. Here's how we shaped Ooredoo in the Group we are today. Our journey began in 1998 with the stock market listing of Qtel, the predecessor of today's Ooredoo. Between 2004 and 2013, we expanded internationally, building on our success in Qatar. In 2018, we successfully launched the world's first 5G network in Qatar, reaffirming our technology leadership. From 2021 onwards, we have been focused on portfolio optimization and execution of our digital infrastructure strategy. Through the IOH merger in 2022 and our Myanmar exit in 2024, we strategically redefined the Group's focus and growth trajectory. I'll expand more on the impact of this later. We have also achieved significant milestones in carving out and expanding our digital infrastructure and platform businesses.
Today, Ooredoo has a strong foundation, a focused portfolio, clear strategy, and a healthy balance sheet, well-positioned to deliver sustainable growth. Simply put, the results speak for themselves. We can see here on these charts that since 2020, we have delivered on the Board's mandate to strengthen the core and grow Ooredoo. We have achieved an uplift in compounded top-line growth of over 3% while improving and sustaining our margins to well above 40%. We have continued to make disciplined and strategic capital investment with capex intensity of around 16% across our platform. We have been able to significantly enhance our returns with both ROE and ROIC, nearly doubling since 2020. We have achieved all of this growth while significantly reducing our leverage ratio from 1.7x to 0.6x and maintaining high investment-grade credit rating. Our strong financial performance has also translated into superior returns for our shareholder.
We have maintained consistent growth in our dividends, paying towards the upper end of our existing policy range of 40%-60% of normalized earnings almost every year since 2020. As a result, our dividend per share has increased by 160% during this period. This, coupled with the growth in our share price, has contributed to the delivery of nearly 120% total shareholders' returns since 2021. Our strong performance to date underscores our ability to create value and to see further upside, as reflected in the last week's proposed increase to the dividend payout ratio, reinforcing our commitment to delivering value to our shareholders. These moves in IOH and Myanmar highlight our disciplined approach to value creation, focusing on markets where we can lead, scale, and deliver stronger returns. In Indonesia, the IOH merger created a national-scale operator with strong market position and improved financial performance.
Since closing, IOH has delivered over 25% share price growth, solid revenue and margin expansion, as well as $462 million in synergies, extending both timeline and projection. We maintain full operational oversight of IOH, even if its results are not fully consolidated. Our strategic exit from Myanmar reflects disciplined portfolio management, focusing on core high-growth markets and redeploying capital where it creates more value. These moves reflect a clear, active strategy in managing our portfolio, enhancing scale, focus, and shareholder returns. At Ooredoo, our focus is creating value, not simply expanding our footprint. This is what sets Ooredoo apart for investors, and the upcoming presentation will delve into the details. We are a regional digital connectivity leader with strong market positions and generally rational competitive environments. Our portfolio combines high, stable, and cash-generative markets with markets that are growing strongly, supported by a healthy balance sheet and consistent returns.
We operate with a well-invested superior network, premium brand, and strong focus on customer experience, ensuring competitive advantage across our markets. We have a comprehensive digital infrastructure platform and a customer-centric strategy that positions us well for future value creation as the industry continues to evolve. I want to emphasize that we fully own our digital infrastructure, including data centers, towers, and fiber networks. Behind all of this is an experienced management team driving operational excellence, digital transformation, and long-term value for shareholders. To summarize, Ooredoo combines scale, stability, and growth built to create lasting value. We will touch on all these themes again as we go through the presentation. Thank you.
Our next presentation is by René Werner, Ooredoo Group's Chief Strategy Officer and Acting Chief Consumer Officer. Since joining Ooredoo in 2021, René has overseen the Group's strategy, digital services, and carve-out initiatives. He brings more than 25 years of experience in the global telecom sector. He'll now take us through a deep dive into Ooredoo's refresh strategy, which sets the stage for our next phase of growth. I won't steal René's thunder by saying any more. Over to you, René.
Good afternoon. Welcome also from my side to our Capital Markets Day. I first take a quick look back with you on our strategy that we have been executing over four years since 2021, which we dubbed at the time Smart Telco. As you can see in this chart, the strategy was focused on five particular areas where we have delivered strong results. Let me quickly highlight these five areas. Customer experience. For us, absolutely a prerequisite to positive business outcomes are happy customers. Our customer satisfaction has improved sharply, with NPS across the Group up nearly 15 points, voice of customer satisfaction reaching 75% and improving further. People as the next topic. Delivery of business outcomes is only possible via a strong organizational fundament. We've built a leaner, more agile organization focused on accountability, delivery, and performance. Smart Telco evolved the core.
We have augmented around our core telecoms business with a digital service business, with revenues now up more than 70% versus 2021, and substantial contributions from there to our free cash flow. We are ready for telco-as-a-service business models with more than 300 APIs that we have built that follow TM Forum industry standards. Strengthen the core, another area. We've achieved 17% EBITDA growth and a 32% increase in free cash flow between 2020 and 2024 as an outcome of various initiatives addressing efficiency opportunities and top-line growth. Last but not least, value-focused portfolio. We've deliberately and diligently invested in our assets to expand our market positions in an industry that is driven by scale. I'm happy to report that we have expanded both mobile service and free cash flow market shares, indicating our strong competitive performance across our markets.
In addition, we took conscious choices with a disciplined portfolio management. We exited Myanmar, executed the IOH merger to build a strong number two in the Indonesian market. To the creation of our digital infrastructure and fintech carve-outs, we have created optionality in our portfolio. In summary, these results speak a very clear language of execution across all pillars of our previous strategy, with the outcome of a stronger core, a sharper portfolio, and a more digital customer-focused Ooredoo. Now let's talk about value creation. The underpinning and motivation of our strategy we've been following in the last four years is that our industry has a checkered history in efficient capital deployment.
As a team, we took this as a challenge to show that this can be done differently with rigor and science in capital deployment, with driving additional use of assets we had already deployed, by exploring efficiency opportunities, and by conscious decisions across the value chain where we are present and where we leverage strong partners. As Aziz mentioned, our strategy in the last four years, as well as our strategy going forward, has been and will continue to be focused on delivering superior returns on our invested capital. Our strong focus on value creation has been evident by consistent growth in our return on equity and our return on invested capital metrics. Ooredoo's return on equity has more than doubled since 2020, moving from 6% to over 13% in the last 12-month period.
We usually track the top 60 telcos globally, and this is firmly positioning us among the top half. Return on invested capital has also significantly increased, going from below 8% in 2020 to nearly 13% in the last 12-month period, which also gives us a firm position in the top half of the top 60 telcos globally that we track. Our portfolio is well-positioned for further growth. Our focus on value creation and organic profitability, increased asset utilization, and capital discipline is basically the fundament of a good outlook that we can give you. The value creation that we have been able to drive is also an outcome of this portfolio mix, which is rather unique among telcos. Our markets are at different stages of maturity, providing a healthy mix of growth and stability.
In our growth markets like Iraq or Algeria, we continue to expand by capturing new customers, driving data usage, and digital adoption. These markets are key engines of future revenue and subscriber growth. In our growth-to-mature markets, Kuwait and Tunisia, we have focused on building customer lifetime value, growing ARPU through usage growth and upselling, strengthening our B2B capabilities and offers for that segment, and deepening the digital engagement with our customer base. Now, in our more mature markets such as Qatar and Oman, our focus is on maximizing customer lifetime value, strengthening the customer experience, strong CVM practices and loyalty practices, selling add-on services, penetrating deeper into the B2B market with solutions, and focusing on operational efficiency. We benefit, such as in Qatar, from strong market leadership, stable cash flows, and high operational efficiency, which provides the financial strength and predictability that underpins the Group performance.
If we now move over to the market dynamics in our footprint markets, the portfolio we just talked about represents markets with strong underlying fundamentals. This is unfortunately sometimes missed, and I would like to point out a few key strengths of our markets. The weighted average GDP growth across our markets is about 4.4%, well above global averages. We expect the GDP growth, also in the future, to be supported by young and expanding populations, with nearly one in five people under 25. In addition, these young populations are also a key driver of digital adoption. Relevant for a telco, data usage continues to surge across our portfolio, growing at a CAGR of roughly 14%, reflecting rising digital consumption and smartphone penetration, in particular where mobile networks are the key enablers for access to the internet.
Even more relevant for telcos, beneficial price elasticity, which is absolutely rare in our industry. This is in sharp contrast to many European and other developed markets. As said, we're different in our markets. As customers use more data, revenue grows, especially in markets like Algeria and Iraq, with a beneficial price elasticity. What does that mean in summary? Together with the portfolio we discussed earlier, our markets have very healthy macroeconomic conditions, as well as favorable conditions for a telecom like Ooredoo to generate growth. Our portfolio is uniquely balanced across markets, maturity levels, and our position in those markets. We should be uniquely positioned to perform through cycles and capture future opportunities. Together, this creates an optimal mix of assets, delivering both recurring cash generation and sustainable long-term growth across the portfolio.
Now you might ask yourself the question, where are we headed with Ooredoo after we reached a substantial milestone with our smart telco strategy? Let me shed some light on this. Ooredoo's refreshed strategy, we have evolved our strategy, and we dub it RISE, essentially combining three investment horizons that are aimed at providing superior shareholder returns and growth and to guide the evolution of our business model towards a leading digital infrastructure provider. The refreshed strategy focuses on driving the core telco business forward with leading practices in data science, AI, CVM, and other areas. It rests on further scaling the digital infrastructure business, and also it focuses on developing and expanding platform businesses in core adjacencies where Ooredoo can bring an advantage to the table.
Under the umbrella of RISE, we have developed various growth and efficiency initiatives in the four clusters you see here: refresh, intensify, scale, and expand. Which are since early 2025 advancing and have started already contributing to our results. The flywheels are underpinned by a set of foundational enablers that ensure long-term success. People, as we mentioned earlier, an AI-driven transformation, which we drive with the Group-wide program dubbed FANAR. That means in Arabic, Lighthouse. Competitive networks and IT. And most importantly, that is where the heart of the company is, excellence in customer experience. Let's now zoom into the three investment horizons that are key to RISE as the refreshed strategy of Ooredoo. You see here in the overview three areas. I start first with core telco. We serve today nearly 150 million subscribers across nine countries, including our affiliate in Indonesia.
Today, this business represents the essence of our business in Ooredoo Group and represents today 96% of Group revenues. With strong market positions across our countries and presence, and have been, as mentioned earlier, be able to advance our market positions across most of our markets. Our ambition is clearly to lead our markets in customer experience, providing the leading data experience in our markets, and to be the preferred partner for digital service players in our markets so we can provide our customers with the leading propositions in the market. Usually, we are able to leverage strong brand positions in all of our markets. Business priorities in core telco center around continuous improvement of customer experience, creating a loyal customer base, and driving growth via customer value management and applying latest data science and AI models to capture both efficiencies and growth opportunities.
Capital deployment discipline is strongly underpinning this part of our business. If we now talk about digital infrastructure, the Group is systematically scaling its digital infrastructure platforms to benefit from the unstoppable trend towards digitalization, cloud services, and data usage growth. We focus, in essence, on three core platforms: data centers. We have nearly 30 MW of capacity in our data centers today, with clearly articulated expansion ambitions and projects, as well as investments. AI lives in data centers, and our region has a substantial pent-up demand for data centers. We are prepared to cater to this demand, and we'll later talk about Syntys as the home of our data center ambitions. Sea cable and transport fiber. AI and the internet need to make data available across borders. For this, high-speed internet connectivity across borders is required.
We have already interesting assets in this context and have started to build a unique portfolio of assets on top of that, providing in-region connectivity, but also key routes for data between Europe and Asia. Towers, as the last building block, you have heard about this from us previously. We have announced the formation of the leading tower platform in the region with our partner in this. Today, this platform would have more than 30,000 towers ready once regulatory approvals are received. Last but not least, a key pillar as well for our long-term success are platform adjacencies. Around our core telecoms business, we have constantly emerging opportunities that lend themselves to a platform play in the markets we operate.
We selectively pick those where we think we can generally bring advantages to the table as a telco, be it access to our broad sales network, be it data insights, be it our large partner network. Again, we do these choices very selectively. The fintech platform expanding beyond our established Ooredoo Money business in Qatar, or m-Faisaa in Maldives, is one of the examples. We have launched this business also in Oman in 2024, and there is more to come on this. More to come in this area, as I said, we pick selectively, limit our initial investment exposure during an experimentation phase, but are willing to invest once we see expected upside materializing, and with this, the crystallization of shareholder value. Today, 95% of our business belongs to the core telco pillar. We plan to grow both the digital infrastructure pillar and our platform adjacencies to represent.
Circa 15% of our revenues in 2030 from today's roughly 4%, as you can see in the chart. Now, let's have a look at our core telco business. As the first flywheel that today generates 96% of our revenues and the approach we take here. We want to build a self-reinforcing cash engine in our core telecoms business. Despite a solid growth in the telecoms business in our markets, and that is still available, our strategy considers the increasing levels of maturity of our markets. Topics like superior customer experience, leading practices in CVM, and churn management, digital distribution become even more relevant in this market phase. This is reflected in our strategy for the core telecoms business. Let me give you an overview of the five key components. Of this strategy for the core telco business. The key underlying product we sell is data connectivity.
We invest into leading data networks and then agile IT as an enabler to make this connectivity easily accessible, the outcome of which should be a superior customer experience that allows us to attract customers with our core proposition, add a more efficient use of sales resources, and also create a solid fundament of customer loyalty. Branding and distribution excellence is the next area of focus. Excellence means, on one hand, driving brand preference and purchase considerations, and secondly, being present where it matters to sell, digitally online or physically in shops. This should result in an ability to capture the demand that is ideally lined up already when new customers or sell more to existing customers. Not last and not least, churn management excellence as the third pillar. Once we have won the customer, we have to earn his trust and business through repeat purchases.
There's no point in winning the customer and losing him or her again. Loyalty programs, deep customer insights, and state-of-the-art churn avoidance models are key to be successful. If executed correctly, we should see a growth in our customer base, not SIM cards, but customers. If we're at that stage, it's the question to ask. How can we create value out of the base? Upselling customers to products that might even fit better their needs than the initial purchase, selling customers new products from our partners, and winning over also additional business from him or her or a respective enterprise that we can kind of move forward. A strong commercial extraction or monetization is key to this, together with cost discipline in operations, focusing on spend where it really matters and where it is a priority, and being frugal where the priorities might be different.
That should yield a strong free cash flow generation. At Ooredoo, we have improved our free cash flow yield over the last year substantially and continue to find further opportunities in our core telco business. Nevertheless, core to Ooredoo and the success of our business are happy customers based on a superior customer experience. Now, let's kind of have a look at our assets that we consolidate under Ooredoo. We operate the flywheel across a diverse set of markets. What you can see here is twofold. On the very right hand of the chart, you see our focus on building and operating leading data networks in the markets we operate in to provide superior customer experience. The bar to the right indicates we have the leading network.
Second, our focus on driving multi-product penetration as a function of customer trust, loyalty, and our abilities in CVM and data science, which then in return drives revenue growth. We have really solid growth across our operations, as well as strong market positions developed in the last years. Let me now give you a little few pointers back to the flywheel that we discussed, how we walk the talk at Ooredoo. Let me start with network investments. Fast internet speeds and wireless are dependent on fast backhaul of the data traffic from our sites where the customer connects literally to the core network and from there to the internet. The more sites you have fiberized with fiber at the base station, the better you can do this job for the customer. We've invested substantially in fiberizing our mobile sites, crucial for fast connectivity.
More than 50,000 of our sites are fiberized, and more than 23,000 of our sites are one hop away from the next fiberized site. That gives us the ingredients to provide high-speed networks and excellent coverage. This is also dependent on your spectrum holdings. In our markets, we have a very solid position with spectrum holdings in several markets that are second to none globally. This not only has led us to hold global leadership positions, pioneering globally 5G in Qatar, for example, but also having the second fastest mobile network on the planet according to the speed test provider Ookla, also in Qatar, with Qatar operations being number two globally. Let me move on to branding and distribution excellence.
According to AC Nielsen, which measures brand strength for us, we're in six out of eight of our consolidated markets, the number one brand on Brand Equity Index, which gives us a more than solid position for being considered by our customers for purchase. We've substantially leveled up next to the brand. Not only our ability to measure, but more importantly, our capabilities to provide a superior customer experience at our touchpoints with the customer. We're listening and learning daily from our customers and try to improve our operations with the insights provided from this feedback of the customer, which has both beneficial outcomes for our ability to grow revenues and avoid cost. We are also substantially progressing our digital sales and distribution agenda and still have a good runway for growth.
This runway will have both beneficial impacts on customer experience, data insights, and our ability to cross-sell partner services and ultimately also to capture cost efficiencies. Now, let's have a look at the other levers of the flywheel, which we haven't covered yet. Churn management excellence that we pointed out earlier. As our markets shift from a state where the strategic paradigm was to capture customer growth fast to a state where retaining customers becomes more important, we level up our capabilities now in churn management. We are leveling up already with good data science practices for churn management and are strongly focusing on multi-product penetration, to which I'll speak after this. We are at the first stage of many in this area, but we see promising results on which we want to aggressively build further.
Beyond this, we have been an innovator in our markets with attractive loyalty programs such as Nojoom, and we'll refresh that leadership with these programs providing interesting lifestyle benefits for our customer base. Not last, also not least, customer value management. As already pointed out, our markets are shifting in a new phase. Capabilities in data science and AI provide upside opportunities to improve monetization from our customer base. Providing the right offer at the right time through the right channel is crucial. Across Ooredoo, we have laid strong foundations that show strong first results, as you can see on the chart, with significant contributions. This is the start into the journey and not at all the end of it. We see here substantial further opportunities, and this is for sure a strategic focus area for us. Last but not least, cost efficiencies.
We've established strong practices in the past years with our initial programs like Braveheart that we showed earlier and additional programs that followed. We make deliberate choices along our value chain based on detailed cost benchmarks, structural decisions on in or outsourcing, and also leveraging AI increasingly in our daily operational workflows to drive efficiencies. Our numbers and our margin levels speak for themselves. As always in life, we will keep working on this topic to stay on top of our game and leverage new opportunities that are emerging, such as AI for our operations. On this note, I want to mention that we have established a group-wide AI program, dubbed FANAR , to allow for experimentation, but also fast scaling and rollout of AI opportunities across Ooredoo. You will hear more about the practical side of this later from my colleague Amer Sunna when he speaks about Asiacell.
Now, let me highlight also in my role as Chief Commercial Officer for Ooredoo a topic that is of substantial strategic and commercial relevance, our multiplayer framework. As said earlier, our markets are increasingly shifting into a mode where selling another SIM card becomes a game of decreasing returns. What drives returns is to provide customers with an extended set of products from Ooredoo or partners. This approach helps not to only uplift the revenue from our base, but even more importantly, positively impacts the loyalty of our customer base with a markable impact on revenue growth and profitability. As you can see, customers in the multiplayer dual-play category, this is roughly 50%-60% of our customer base, have an overproportionate share of revenues, 80%-85% as a rule of thumb, and an even higher share of customer lifetime value, 90%-95%, when loyalty is considered.
The logic is very simple and compelling. The revenue per customer, ARPU, is substantially over-indexed against the average. As you can see, 70%, 40% higher than the average, while the churn rate is massively under-indexed. Gaining customers in these two segments is hence a strategic and commercial priority and opportunity. This becomes even more interesting if you can attract via superior customer experience also competitor customers in these two segments. The framework strongly guides our market activities going forward and has been already established. We have shifted with this from the old grow SIM cards paradigm to grow value, or in specific words, customer lifetime value, CLV. Execution ingredients reach without being exhaustive in this from the already mentioned loyalty programs to leading data science and CVM practices and attractive product portfolios with digital service partners as one example.
Let me now c ome to one growth field that is frequently overlooked in our industry but provides excellent growth opportunities if approached right. This is SMBs. Small, medium-sized businesses sometimes get lost between the artificial segment boundaries in a telecom, between consumer and business units on one hand. They expose traits of both. They require not a some of this, some of that approach, but a dedicated focus. Ooredoo wants to have that dedicated focus. We want to be here the one-stop shop provider that allows SMBs to focus on their business while we take care of their connectivity and solution needs. With regards to Ooredoo, we want to put a much stronger emphasis on this segment where we feel we are currently under-indexed and can capture market share. The SMB/SOHO segment represents a strong growth opportunity for the company with today. Roughly $300 million in revenue in 2024.
For this segment, we will package our classical connectivity products more strongly with offers from our digital service partners that cover the basic needs of SMBs in the digital economy. We make those available through digital marketplaces. Examples of the products that we intend to offer are, next to our core connectivity offer as a mobile player, also fixed products complemented by digital services for SMBs such as basic cloud storage, off-the-shelf software bundles, cybersecurity solutions. The ambition is to grow SMB revenues by around 50% over the next four to five years, driven by selling beyond our mobile connectivity, fixed connectivity solutions, and digital services from our partners.
For completeness, I want to also mention here our other B2B services, not only for SMBs but also for large enterprises such as Qatar Airways, QNB, Volkswagen, or Tesla that are delivered together with our strategic partners, top companies like NVIDIA, Cisco, Microsoft, Google, Fortinet, where we can serve as a one-stop shop for our enterprise customers. With this, I hope I was able to give you a good overview of the strategic direction for our core telecoms business. We'll talk later also about our approach for the two additional investment horizons or flywheels if you prefer this. Before this, I want to make sure you hear from my colleagues how we execute what are lined out in our strategic section. Let's have a quick look at what you will see now.
For this, we have today four country operations with us where my colleagues will introduce you to their markets and the specific strategic approach in these markets. The markets have today with us present four archetypes in the portfolio characterized by the market position and the growth profile of the market, which each uniquely gives us an insight on how we act in this particular archetype. With market leaders like Qatar and Iraq, where we hold very strong competitive positions and deliver strong operational performance. Qatar stands out as a mature, high-value market, consistently generating significant cash flows and profitability for the group. Iraq, on the other hand, is a leader in a fast-growing market, combining scale, strong demand, and remains self-funded. In the key contender segment, we have Kuwait and Algeria.
Kuwait presents a transition market, combining elements of both maturity and growth, where we're strengthening our positions for premium services, digital innovation, and an expansion into B2B. Algeria continues to deliver solid growth, supported by rising data usage and focused infrastructure investments, sales expansion, and introducing successively new innovations with an impending 5G launch. Together, these markets reflect a well-balanced portfolio where Qatar's cash generation is complemented by the growth momentum of markets like Algeria and Iraq and the evolving potential of Kuwait. With this, I hand over to our country CEOs that will take you individually through a deep dive of the four markets, outlining the macro and market landscape, the competitive strengths, the key achievements, and the value creation priorities. Back to you, Luelle.
We'll now shift our focus to our upcoming CEOs, starting with our home market, Qatar, which contributes 30% of group's revenue and 34% of adjusted EBITDA. It's my pleasure to introduce Sheikh Ali Bin Jabor Al Thani, Chief Executive Officer of Ooredoo Qatar. Sheikh Ali joined Ooredoo Group in 2013, has held multiple senior roles, and has been leading Ooredoo Qatar as CEO since January 2023. Let's take a closer look at Ooredoo Qatar.
It is a privilege to welcome you to this year's Capital Market Day. Today, I'm delighted to share with you the story of Ooredoo Qatar, a company at the heart of this remarkable country's digital transformation and economic progress. Let us begin with a broader context. Qatar stands as one of the world's most dynamic and resilient economies, with a population of approximately 3.1 million.
We operate in a market that is not only young and tech-savvy but also deeply committed to innovation and equality. Our consumers are digital-first, demanding premium services and setting high expectations for excellence. Turning to Ooredoo Qatar, we are proud to be the market leader in both mobile and stationary broadband. We serve around 2.6 million mobile subscribers, holding 64% market share and command 74% of the stationary broadband consumer subscriber market. A key highlight for our investor is our ARPU, which remains one of the highest globally at $28. This figure is not just a number. It is a reflection of our premium market positioning, the strength of our brand, and the trust our customers place in us. High ARPU is a direct result of our focus on quality, customer loyalty, and our ability to deliver differentiated value-added services. It signals robust revenue generation and underpins our financial stability.
Our strategy is clear and forward-looking. We are shifting from focus on volume to a focus on value. This means deepening our relationship with customers, expanding our multi- and dual-play offerings, and personalizing experiences to meet the diverse needs of our community. Our Nojoom loyalty program is a cornerstone of this approach, rewarding long-term engagement and reinforcing our leadership among high-end customers. Our ICT capabilities are a major driver of our growth and innovation. Ooredoo Qatar is a strong ICT presence in the country, supporting national initiatives such as the Smart City Platform TASMU. Through our advanced ICT solution, we are enabling digital transformation across sectors, empowering businesses, and contributing to Qatar's vision of a knowledge-based economy. Our ICT portfolio is expanding, offering integrated solutions that address the evolving needs of enterprise and government, and positioning Ooredoo Qatar as the digital backbone of the nation.
Underpinned by sustained investment in technology and infrastructure, we have rolled out extensive 5G and fiber networks, achieving over 99% household fiber coverage and delivering some of the fastest network speeds globally. Our network covers 99.9% of the population on 4G and 99% on 5G, with balanced traffic between both technologies. These investments ensure that we remain at the forefront of digital connectivity, supporting Qatar's ambitions as a smart, connected nation. Our digital ecosystem is thriving. My Ooredoo app users have grown to 1.3 million, and digital reach penetration has reached 61%. These figures are not just numbers. They are a testament to the growing digital engagement and the trust our customers have in our platforms. At the heart of Ooredoo Qatar's success is our unwavering commitment to customer experience.
Our net promoter score stands at 41%, customer satisfaction at 82.3%, and the brand experience index at 5.3%, all reflecting the loyalty and advocacy we have built. We are not just the technical leader. We are the experience leader, connecting network excellence with customer trust and engagement. Our customer base is highly diverse, segmented by SOHO demographics and customer lifetime value. We have moved from one-size-fits-all approach to a precision-led, data-driven, value-focused business model. We employ the use of sophisticated data science modeling and AI to better understand the needs of our customers and their behaviors. This allows us to identify and prioritize high-value segments, tailor offerings, and create more personalized experiences. It is a shift that is fully operationalized across our organization, driving loyalty and a growing quality over quantity. Financially, Ooredoo Qatar is a powerhouse.
We have maintained robust top-line growth with a 0.2% CAGR since 2020 and consistently strong EBITDA margin above 50%. Our revenue mix is well-balanced, approximately 46% from mobile, 44% from fixed broadband, and the remainder from wholesale and equipment. Our disciplined approach to investment and cost control ensures we remain highly cash-generative, supporting both our ongoing innovation and our contribution to the wider group. Our outstanding position in the market translates into strong financial and operational performance, underpinned by robust stability and high cash conversion. Our strategic asset in infrastructure investment has positioned us exceptionally well for the future, allowing us to maintain our technological advantage while decreasing overall capital intensity. In summary, Qatar is a stable, high-value market, and Ooredoo Qatar is proud to lead it with scale, discipline, and consistent performance.
We continue to evaluate emerging technologies such as AI to identify relevant use cases for both internal productivity benefits and to bring solutions to the market. For the investor community, the message is clear: Qatar offers a unique blend of opportunity, resilience, and growth. Ooredoo Qatar stands ready to capture this potential, delivering value for our customers, our shareholders, and our country. We are excited about the future and remain committed to driving innovation, operational excellence, and sustainable growth. Thank you for your trust, your partnership, and your belief in Ooredoo Qatar's story. Thank you.
Next, we have Amer Al Sunna, Chief Executive Officer of Asiacell, who has been CEO since September 2013. Asiacell, our Iraq operation, contributes 23% of group revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Over to you, Amer.
[Foreign language]. Hello everyone.
I'm happy to be here with you to present Iraq and to present our performance in Iraq. Iraq is a great country. When we look at the growth and the population, and we look at the way it's been evolving for the past years, it shows a very beautiful story for the future. The government took a great initiative to go into digitization and to push the digitization in Iraq. Asiacell played a major, major role as one of the main pillars for this growth, and we are proudly part of shaping the future of Iraq. The Iraq population is 44.4 million people. It's a young, it's a youthful country. The population of youth is around 28%, with a growth of 2.4%. This is driving demand on the network and driving demand for data. GDP per capita is a lovely story.
Looking at the growth, it's a sustainable growth with controlled inflation. This gives lots of trust from investors to come into Iraq and invest, and we've seen that in the past couple of years. We look at the currency. The currency has been stable for the past three years, and this is a positive sign for us. Looking at the market, the mobile market is a three-player market today. We're so happy to say that we are dominating the market when it comes to revenue and on all other KPIs, be it EBITDA, be it margins, be it free cash flow, and net profit. The story of ARPU is a beautiful story looking at it. We've been able to sustain our ARPU even with the prepaid market growth happening to us at $6.1. It's higher than our competitor in the market and higher than the emerging market average.
Penetration is at 100%. It's a prepaid market, as I said, and the potential is big to grow more with the demand and with the growth of the population happening. The broadband market is still not matured yet. This gives us way ahead to be able to push our broadband services and take more of the broadband market share. Leadership. Asiacell is by far leading the market, and it's positioned at the major position, number one player in the market. This was based on a couple of major pillars that we're looking at. It's, as I said, it's a fast-growing market, as the Iraq market. We have been able to dominate this growth. If we look at the data growth coming, it's not only about the growth of data by itself and the growth of revenue. It's all the other pillars that are compiling together to deliver this r esults.
We start by a strong distribution capability at the channel, making sure that we take good care of our customers and we deliver the service needed to those customers at the touchpoints. Network. Leading position. It was done, and we've been always leading in that domain. If we look at the country today and our coverage, we have a full coverage on 4G. We own right now, based on Facebook market share, around 53% of the 4G market share, and the network is ready to activate 5G services. On the operations. We are focused as management, and we're driven by shareholders' expectations. We're controlling our margins.
We've been able to hold a very positive growth when it comes to revenue, with a controlled margin to deliver a beautiful free cash flow to our shareholders and to have a self-funding operation when it comes to investment and comes to the rollout of our network. As I said earlier, it's a prepaid market. We're almost 97% of the market is prepaid. When we look at the ARPU, as I mentioned earlier, ARPU is stable for the past years. We had a little bit of a dip during Corona time. Then we picked up and we went back to the $6.1. Growth of subscribers is a beautiful story. As I said, the country is youthful and it's still growing. We are seeing right now a projection that hopefully we will be able to hit 20 million by the end of 2025.
The other main thing that is adding value to our revenue growth and revenue leadership is the mix of the base. We're trying, and if you look at the top-tier customer segmentation, the multiplay customers are increasing year after year, and this is the strategy that we've set a long time ago to move our customers slowly but surely into the multiplay arena where they can add more value and they can create more value to our shareholders. As our customers are mainly driven by youth, we have major expectations coming from our customer base. They want to have a sustainable, reliable network that can serve their demands. Looking at our network, as I said, we have a majority of the traffic going into the 4G. We see major growth when it comes to data consumption.
We have been able to dominate the leadership from a network performance point of view by maintaining Ooredoo speed score above 19.3% over competition. If we look at the traffic contribution, it is 94% going into 4G. This helps us to monetize and to efficiently manage our investment and manage our capital invested into the network. If we look at network deployment in Iraq, we have limited resources. We have almost 98 MHz available for us if we compare with other countries. If you look at the efficiency and the way we are implementing our networks, it is a 0.2 intensity level. This shows that our investment is done in a proper manner with a very high return on investment.
Fiberization is still a massive potential in Iraq, and this is a major need that we will push, and we're pushing for it for us to be ready when it comes to 5G implementation. Customer experience. It's been always a direction. It's been always a focus area for us. If you look at all the KPIs that are around customer experience, you've seen the massive, massive, massive enhancement and improvement that we've done, starting by NPS, going into the CSAT brand experience, and moving into the application at Ooredoo Group and the digital recharge. Though all the KPIs are going into a very high growth and very high improvement, we are perceived in Iraq as the brand number one consideration when it comes to a mobile operator. AI, e veryone is talking about AI. Just before we start, a disclaimer. I hate PowerPoint.
I hate Excel because Excel, you can go do a gold seek . PowerPoint, you can show a rosy picture of everything. For us in Asiacell, we have to present what we've done. We've been doing amazing for the past couple of years. We've been working with AI, and it's been a journey, to be honest. The way we look at AI is not a project. Today, I'm proudly, happy, and really happy to tell you that we have, as of today, almost 15 up-and-running use cases. The way we looked at it is we looked into segmentation. We focused on our customers, and there is something called Asiacell studio, where all the use cases that are related to customer and customer experience are built in that vertical. We have the corporate, and it's called FAN.
This is in huge cooperation with Ooredoo Group, building whatever use cases that can be built in a location and reused somewhere else. We looked at the network because network is a major element for us on the way we look at and the way we deal with our customers. I'm going to pick two use cases just to show you the value and what it's bringing to the operations from efficiency. Laila is the agent that is a chatbot, but it's beyond that. The challenge that we had there is the language. We have English, Arabic, and Kurdish language. Today, Laila's success rate and CSAT is hitting 80%. Customers are happy to deal with it. It got the emotional part. It got the language, and it's helping a lot.
If I look at efficiency, because our CFO will look into efficiency when it comes to AI, there is a massive, massive saving of potential expense that is coming in Iraq, just for everyone to understand. Call centers are for free. The appetite for customers to call is high. With Laila, with the implementation of Laila, we've been able to avoid major costs coming into that by increasing our customer agents to support the growth of the customer base. If I look at network today, AI is changing the way we're doing maintenance. Right now, we have a prediction model within the AI that predicts failure on networks. This shifted the whole way of our operation. Right now, we're not just doing preventive. We're following the prediction. The success rate of the prediction is almost 80%. This is extremely powerful.
The way we're doing our business right now is shifting from a scheduled type of preventive maintenance into a proactive type of preventive maintenance that goes to the site with high prediction of failure. This is giving us also a leverage on having a happy customer with us because we can predict the failure, we can fix it ahead of time, and it will increase, and it is increasing, the customer satisfaction and their loyalty to Asiacell. Okay. Now for numbers. I love this slide. This slide shows the power and the commitment and the dedication of Asiacell management to deliver shareholders' expectations and sometimes to overachieve shareholders' expectations. Here we see, for over the past years, a very strong financial result, starting by revenue growth, moving into a profitable, sustainable growth when it comes to margin.
Investment and return on investment is extremely, extremely positive, with a high free cash flow coming into our shareholders. We're so proud to be part of Ooredoo Group. We're proud of having, I'm personally proud of having a great management team that have been able to sustain this solid financial result for the past years. I'm sure and confident that moving forward, we will be able to sustain such growth in the future. Thank you, everyone.
We now turn to Abdulaziz Al-Babtain, Chief Executive Officer of Ooredoo Kuwait. Ooredoo Kuwait contributes 30% of group revenue and 9% of adjusted EBITDA. Abdulaziz has been leading the operation since August 2020. The floor is yours, Abdulaziz.
Assalamualaikum. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Ooredoo's Capital Market Day, and I'm pleased to take you through the review of the Kuwaiti market.
Our focus has been transforming the business into a more agile, digital, and high-performance operation, positioning Ooredoo Kuwait as a key contender in the transitional market. Kuwait is a dynamic and well-developed economy with strong fundamentals and growing digital ecosystems. The population of the 5 million is young and tech-savvy. 22% are under the age of 30. The growth of around 2% annually is fueled by naturally increasing expats inflow that support the mobile and digital demand. Economically, Kuwait remains resilient. GDP per capita is above the $30,000, with a projected growth of 2.7% annually throughout the year 2029. Inflation is moderate at 2.9%, and the country maintains strong credit ratings, alongside stable foreign investment inflows and a strong currency. The mobile market is highly penetrated, with 7.9 million subscribers sitting at 157% penetration.
Consumers are increasingly shifting to postpaid and data-heavy usage, with postpaid now reaching 42% of the subscribers. With the Kuwaiti market, Ooredoo Kuwait holds a solid position of 38% subscriber shares and 30% on the revenue, replacing a key contender. Our growth has been grown to $17.3, reflecting an improved monetization and discipline execution. The stationary broadband remains in essence, with penetration just under 40%, and dominated by a single government-owned provider. While the segment remains small, it represents a long-term opportunity as household digitalization accelerates. Building on a strong market foundation, Ooredoo Kuwait continues to outperform, grow the share, and support a strong Our Group, reinforcing its position as a key contender in the competitive three market players. Ooredoo holds a distinctive 30% revenue share with a prepaid leadership and growing potential in the postpaid and digital services.
Mobile drives nearly 70% of the revenue, with the subscriber growing from 2.5 million in 2020 to 2.9 million by the mid of 2025. Our ARPU has increased from $16.5 to $17.3, driven by postpaid uptake among higher-income and business customers. Operationally, Ooredoo Kuwait is high cash-generative, supported by a strong top-line performance and disciplined cost management. Margin and cash flow are growing. Meanwhile, the customer mix shifts toward the higher-value segments. Multiplay and dual-play customers now represent around 70% of the base, around 85% of the revenue, highlighting the success of our premium and converged offer. Building on our strong market position, Ooredoo Kuwait is strengthening its competitive edge through network excellence and enhancing the customer experience. Network leadership remains a key differentiator.
We provide nationwide coverage with 98.6% on the 4G and 90.4% on the 5G, supporting the growing data demand with an average usage rising from 58.8 GB to 75.2 GB per month by year 2025. Our network performance is a top tier, with Ookla speed scoring just below 1%, below the strongest peak. The traffic is balanced across the 4G and 5G, showing a healthy 5G transition. Our infrastructure investments are paying off. We hold 319 MHz of the spectrum above the European average, with a strong site density and 68% fiberized sites, ensuring capacity, speed, and low latency. This positions us for the future upgrades and continued service excellence. Customer experience is central to our strategy. We've been seeing tangible progress in the two fronts. First, customer advocacy. Our net promoter scores have been raising from 37.1% in year 2023 to 48.5% in 2025.
Customer satisfaction scores remain high at 83.7%, and the brand experience index continues to improve. Second, digital engagement is growing with My Ooredoo app users increasing from 1.4 million to 1.6 million, and digital recharge penetration rising to 48.48%, reflecting the growing adoption of our online platform. Together, these improvements highlight how Ooredoo's network is a strength. Digital leadership and customer-first mindsets are driven by real gain advocacy, usage, and brand consideration. As we strengthen our position in Kuwait, two areas are driven by value: customer value management and our expanding B2B businesses. In terms of CVM, it's a key competitive differentiator. Our AI-driven engine powers 100% of the campaigns, delivering a timely personalized offer. The impact is clear. Net incremental revenue is up 6.2% year-to-date. Postpaid churn has been dropped 15%, and ARPU is rising, supported by the close collaboration with the dealers and partners.
CVM shifts from traditional campaigns to AI-led value orchestrations, enhancing the engagement, loyalty, and measurable growth. B2B is gaining strong traction, with wins totaling around $10 million across the public and private sectors. Highlights in the public sectors. Systems integration from the Ministry of Interior in Kuwait valued at $22 million. A mobile account migration from the Ministry of Defense worth $1.9 million, and the range of connectivity and ICT solutions for the Ministry of Social Affairs. In the private sectors, enterprise solutions including Meraki Networks, cybersecurity, and fixed connectivity reinforce Ooredoo as an agile end-to-end provider. Launch of Kuwait's first dedicated B2B applications, transforming the enterprise telecom management with real-time sales, marketing automation, and customer insights. The AI-led CVM and growing B2B footprint are driving sustainable revenue, deepening the customer relationship and cementing Ooredoo Kuwait's positioning as a digital leader in the fast-evolving market.
Let's turn to our growth trajectory, highlighting the dynamic expanding of a strong financial performance. Revenue has grown steadily at 5.6% CAGR since 2020, driven by a customer base expansion, higher ROI, and meaningful market share gains. Profitability is rising even faster. EBITDA has grown at 10.7% CAGR, with an improving margin, reflecting the disciplined and efficient operations. Our growth is underpinned by strategic investments and innovations. We continue to enhance our network, deploying advanced technologies like narrowband IoT. All within the efficient CapEx to revenue approach. The strong execution translates into a robust cash flow profile, with the cash conversion improving from 47% in year 2020 to 72% over the last four quarters. In summary, Ooredoo Kuwait is driving profitability, growth in a stable, digital-savvy market. Strategic investments in network performance, digital services, and AI-driven customer engagement are boosting the satisfaction.
Market share and our Group, strong operational efficiency, and technological leadership are delivering sustainable cash flow and long-term value, positioning us for continued growth and for capturing future market opportunities. Thank you. I now hand it over to Luelle.
Finally, we conclude our country deep dive in North Africa with Roni Tohme, Chief Executive Officer of Ooredoo Algeria, who has been at the helm since August 2023. Algeria contributes 13% to both group revenue and adjusted EBITDA. Over to you, Roni.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm happy to discuss the Algeria market with you this afternoon. Algeria is quite a stable developing economy, expected to grow at 4%-5%. The key drivers are sizable and young population and stable exports of hydrocarbons and other natural resources. The mobile market is rapidly expanding, driven mostly by consumption and penetration expansion.
Our Group has been growing in recent years, again driven mainly by consumption expansion. Ooredoo is the number three player in terms of subscribers and is a very close number two in terms of revenue. Ooredoo in Algeria is a pure-play mobile and predominantly prepaid operator, with a strong history of ARPU expansion in previous years. As of H1 2025, we have served about 14.5 million customers, mostly prepaid. We are rapidly expanding market share and now contesting the number two spot in the market in terms of revenue. Our growth is profitable. We are expanding EBITDA margin while growing the revenue. We are the only international brand in the market, well-positioned to win among the younger and urban audience. 5G and device importation bandwidth are the key drivers of our growth in the near future.
Our network quality leadership is our key success factor in contributing to our leadership and customer experience, CSAT. We are a nationwide leader in CSAT in the last eight quarters. We continue investment into the network, focusing primarily on 4G coverage improvement and 5G readiness. Low fiberization of sites is an obstacle for us. However, in Algeria, we have to rely on incumbents' dark fiber. Digitalization of recharge and customer service channels, promoting the usage of our app, are the key current and future drivers of profitability and CSAT improvement. We have pioneered a very successful approach to network rollout. It combines AI-enabled data science toolkits that help us ensure optimal choices for network densification, which in turn ensures quicker payback and higher return on capital.
Our main focus is to continue building and expanding our strongholds primarily in the center and east of the country, as well as tap into the emerging potential of the south. Our commercial team ensures that full activation is done on day one from opening the new site, thus also accelerating the payback. To end with our financials, we have achieved almost 7% CAGR growth of revenue between 2020 and H1 2025. The last two years, we have shown double-digit revenue growth in local currency. Our EBITDA has grown by 13.6% CAGR. Margin has improved from 33% to 44%. It is a very profitable growth story. Our CapEx to revenue has gone down from 24% in 2020 to 17% in 2025. However, we are rolling out more sites and more efficiently than before.
Revenue and EBITDA expansion, paired with controlled CapEx, ensure that we punch well above our weight in the Ooredoo Group free cash flow. Thank you all.
Thank you to our OPCO CEOs. Those were insightful market deep dives that showcased the strength of our local operations and their significant contribution to Ooredoo Group's growth and strength. I'll now hand back to René, who will provide an in-depth look at Ooredoo's digital infrastructure platform and discuss how these assets underpin our growth strategy as we progress toward becoming the region's leading digital infrastructure provider.
Now back to digital infrastructure as the second flywheel of our strategy. Digital infrastructure is like the pillar theories of the digital economy. Without digital infrastructure, there is no e-commerce. There are no cloud services. There are no AI services like ChatGPT or Gemini.
At Ooredoo, we are today already operating an essential component of the digital infrastructure with our high-speed networks. As such, it's a logical step to assess expansion opportunities in digital infrastructure, infrastructure that is required to deliver to today's and future customer needs. For this, we applied a very disciplined process by which we identified for Ooredoo key opportunity areas. We usually start with customer needs and problems to be solved, as a promising business is always based on a big enough problem to be solved. Areas such as extended connectivity solutions, storage and protection of digital assets with easy accessibility, flexible compute capacity for enterprises, securing customers, SMBs, and enterprises from a plethora of online attacks and scams. We got that identified and channeled through assessments. We've prioritized from the pool of candidates three core infrastructure opportunities, with another option that we will also talk about.
That Ooredoo is focusing on and where we believe we can provide a natural edge and already have assets in play. Data centers is one element. Sea cable and transport fiber is the second element. Towers is the third element. Also recently, we started as a GPU as a service provider in our markets. We prefer, as part of the process, to establish those infrastructure platform opportunities into clearly identifiable P&L units, which open assets that have been used only for our internal demand, also for third-party usage, with a view to create additional value on the capital deployed. It allows us to establish clear entrepreneurial responsibilities with absolute experts and also partners in the field.
It provides financial visibility with regards to progress, investments, and accretive returns, and allows us to obviously also apply financial structures that optimize for shareholder returns and prospectively allow us to crystallize shareholder value. Ooredoo is and will be going forward always be a strategic anchor tenant to these assets and customers, but these platforms have to find and service demand at arm's length relationship with Ooredoo, meaning gaining customers from the outside. Finally, we scale these platforms, deepening the relationships we already have as a group that we can inject, infuse into these assets, and secure new customer demand and driving strong and recurring free cash flow when these platforms are part of the group. Now let's talk about the assets in our second flywheel digital infrastructure with towers, seacable and fiber, data centers, and GPU as a service. Let me first talk about towers.
We're creating a joint venture with Zain and TASC, bringing together well over 30,000 towers across six countries, the largest tower co-owned in the MENA region, and setting the stage for more and efficient, cost-effective rollout of wireless networks in the region, tapping into co-location opportunities as well as future consolidation opportunities that will create value for our shareholders. Given growth in data usage and the need to densify networks with additional sites or adding equipment to existing sites, as in our region, some networks have to still make the next leap into 5G, we see towers as a growth opportunity even beyond the synergies from co-locating operators on a given site. Let's talk about the second pillar, seacable and fiber. We have added seacable and fiber as a clear investment focus for Ooredoo and a substantial infrastructure opportunity with attractive returns.
We're driving major projects like the FIG subsea system in the Gulf region and a new intended partnership such as SONIC that allows us for both in-region connectivity in the GCC, among others, to connect all of the AI data center hubs and the local economies, but also to establish an alternative to the key traffic corridor between Asia and Europe in the Red Sea that carries 30% of the global internet traffic and connects Europe with Asia. The established route through the Red Sea has become insecure, and the traffic on this route looks for alternatives and safe avenues, with the Gulf region being a very valid alternative. Providing a home to this 30% of the global internet traffic and positioning Ooredoo as a key data corridor operator for the region.
In data centers as the third pillar, we've carved out Syntys, now active in Qatar, Kuwait, and Tunisia, with Iraq and Oman, in addition, reviewed to join the Syntys family. We've partnered with Iron Mountain, a global data center operator in 61 countries and approximately 1.3 GW under management to leverage the expertise of an experienced partner for capital-efficient expansion of our data centers in the region. We're fully funded, targeting to quadruple our capacity to over 120 MW of own capacity to meet the fast-growing cloud and AI demand in our markets, but also to be able to absorb global demand for AI learning and basically leveraging the competitive energy cost in the region. Sunita, our CEO for Syntys, will go deeper with you into this topic in a short while. Last but not least, GPU as a service.
In GPU as a service, we are leveraging our network and data center footprint in the region to deliver low-latency, cost-efficient AI compute, becoming the first GCC operator to launch GPU as a service and NVIDIA's NCP partner in the Gulf. This is a nascent and emerging offering, which we want to drive and see if we can drive this as an interesting fourth pillar of our digital infrastructure platforms. Together, these pillars form a connected, scalable digital ecosystem, one that turns our infrastructure strengths into sustained growth and, in particular, long-term value creation for our shareholders. Each of these four verticals is controlled by Ooredoo, or in the case of towers, will be co-controlled by Ooredoo. This enables value to accrue inside the group and leave open future opportunities for further value crystallization. Now let's take a moment to talk about the largest tower platform in the MENA region.
We're progressing well on the transaction to form the largest tower platform in the MENA region. We've advanced the operational readiness for the transaction and are in close discussions with authorities on approvals for the transaction. To recap of what we're building here, together with Zain and TASC, we're combining assets to create a platform with over 30,000 towers across six countries: Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, and Jordan, as we shared previously. The tower core will serve a population of 120 million. It is supporting more than 20 operators once live. At announcement, the platform was valued at around $2.2 billion, with an estimated $500 million in run rate revenues and $200 million in run rate EBITDA after leases, delivering strong margins of around 40%-42%.
Beyond scale, this transaction also established a clear framework for active sharing embedded in the agreements to accelerate rollout and improve efficiency across markets. We also see significant upside from potential consolidation in Iraq, where we expect strong tenancy and synergy benefits. After completion, further consolidation options remain viable that might also provide more in-market consolidation, giving the platform room to grow beyond the initial scale. Let me now talk about our seacable and transport fiber activities. We're building one of the largest seacable and transport networks in the GCC, positioning Ooredoo as a strategic gateway for AI and data traffic between Europe and Asia. The initiative creates a new corridor that connects the region to Europe with lower latency, a strategic alternative to the Red Sea route, which today carries about 30% of the global internet traffic.
At the core of the system are three marquee projects that together form a comprehensive network. First, the FIG subseacable system, which is under development with our vendor, Alcatel Submarine Networks. FIG will connect key landing points across the Gulf. The project is already contracted, spans around 1,900 km throughout the Gulf, and is expected to be completed by 2027. FIG will also open up options to connect the traffic that goes through FIG, through Iraq and Turkey, to Europe and the Mediterranean Sea and becomes a true alternative for the Red Sea. Second, through the intended SONIC partnership with SDC, we're building a high-capacity terrestrial fiber corridor linking KSA and Oman and expected to be ready by 2027.
In Oman, numerous cables from Asia land and via the intended partnership of SONIC, subject to the approvals from the TRA, the local regulator, we can get an alternative route bypassing the Gulf of Aden. This system is expected to enhance regional traffic flows and provides simple cross-connections for global operators. Third, Ooredoo is a landing partner to various cables and also holds capacity on various of these cables. So we have diversity in our assets. A recent addition is the Al Khaleej cable connecting Oman, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, which will further strengthen our position as a multi-landing hub with completion targeted for 2027. Collectively, these projects will make Ooredoo a key data gateway for the region, directly linking both regional and global networks and capturing growing demand from hyperscalers, cloud providers, and AI platforms.
Now I hand over to Sunita, our CEO of Syntys, to give you an overview of our data center business and the opportunity in the region. Thank you.
Thank you, René. A key part of Ooredoo's growth story is our data center business, now spun off as Syntys. Already a market leader, Syntys is shaping the future of digital infrastructure. Leading the company is Sunita Bottse, CEO since May 2024, who brings over 14 years of experience in digital infrastructure, including senior leadership roles at Microsoft and other leading data center companies. Sunita will take a deep dive into Syntys operations, highlighting the opportunities that the company is capturing and its vision for the road ahead. Over to you, Sunita.
Good afternoon, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today.
Over the next 10 minutes, I will walk you through who we are, the market opportunity we are capturing, and why Syntys is uniquely positioned to become the leading digital infrastructure platform across the Middle East and North Africa. Let me start with the foundation. Earlier this year, Ooredoo took a strategic step forward, carving out its data center assets to establish Syntys as an independent digital infrastructure company. One fully focused on AI-ready data center solutions across the MENA region. This was an intentional decision to enable Syntys to act with speed, focus, and to be operationally flexible to scale in line with market demand. Our mandate is clear: scale capacity, optimize operations, and build a trusted long-term partnership that supports the region's rapidly growing need for cloud and AI infrastructure. Where are we today?
By the end of 2025, Syntys and Ooredoo together will operate 29.6 MW of capacity, and we have a defined path to reach 120 MW in the coming years. To get there, our total investment plan is $1 billion, of which $550 million is already secured. That's a strong vote of confidence in our strategy, our team, and our ability to execute. Our combined digital infrastructure today spans five markets across the region. In Tunisia, we operate five facilities with 2 MW of capacity. In Kuwait, we operate two facilities with 2.2 MW, and in Qatar, we operate six data centers totaling 60 MW, with an additional 4.5 MW scheduled to go live by December of this year. The next potential phase in our carve-out roadmap may include facilities in Iraq and Oman, reflecting our ambition to evolve into a truly multi-market platform. Now let's talk about our performance.
As of 2025, Syntys is generating between $40 million-$45 million in recurring revenue, with $8.2 million in recurring EBITDA. These are preliminary figures, but they reflect real contracted revenue, the kind of foundation that allows us to scale with confidence. Our customer base already includes Microsoft and Google, and we are in active discussions with additional strategic partners that I believe will further validate the quality and reliability of our infrastructure. One of the most significant milestones this year was our strategic partnership with Iron Mountain. For those who may not be familiar with Iron Mountain, Iron Mountain is a globally recognized leader in data center operations, with deep expertise in scaling infrastructure and optimizing performance across markets. Their involvement brings not only capital but global operational playbooks, best practices, and strategic credibility, all of which reinforce our trajectory toward platform scale.
To summarize, Syntys is at the beginning of a disciplined and ambitious growth journey. We have a strong financial foundation, high-caliber strategic partners, and a multi-market platform that is already operational and revenue-generating. We are well-positioned to capture the region's rising demand for digital and AI infrastructure. Now let's understand the markets we are operating in. The Middle East and North Africa region has reached an inflection point. Cloud adoption is accelerating, AI workloads are scaling, digital services are moving from optional to essential, and all of this requires infrastructure: skilled, reliable, and carrier-neutral. Syntys was built for this moment. Let me give you some context on the market dynamics. Across MENA, data center capacity is projected to reach 3.3 GW by 2030, more than triple the current capacity.
This growth is being driven by a combination of factors: rapid cloud adoption across both public and private sectors, national digital transformation strategies, and the ongoing expansion of hyperscalers into new markets across the region. What makes this region particularly attractive from an infrastructure investment perspective is the combination of competitive advantages. First, electricity pricing in key markets remains highly competitive compared to other regions, a critical factor when you are operating energy-intensive infrastructure at scale. Second, capital availability is strong. Governments and private investors are backing large-scale infrastructure projects, and that support translates into faster deployment, timeliness, and strong project economics. Third, regulatory tailwinds are in our favor. Data sovereignty requirements are becoming more stringent, which means workloads that used to be hosted elsewhere are now being anchored locally.
At the same time, we are seeing major investments in new subseacable systems, which are significantly strengthening the region's international connectivity and making MENA a more viable hub for cloud workloads. All of these forces together are creating sustained long-term demand for high-quality, carrier-neutral data center capacity. This is exactly where Syntys is operating. Let me walk you through our three core markets: Qatar, Kuwait, and Tunisia. I will explain why we believe we are not just present in these markets but strategically positioned to lead. I will start with Qatar. Qatar is a maturing high-value data center market, and Syntys is the established leader here with 31% market share. We currently have 16.1 MW in operation. We will deliver 4.5 MW by December of this year, and we have 20 MW of expansion planned.
We also have a long-term partnership and hyperscale commitments that provide stable recurring revenue. In 2025, we enabled Ooredoo's sovereign AI cloud, providing the mission-critical infrastructure required to support GPU-based AI workloads, which is currently live. The market itself is being strengthened by the presence of major cloud providers. Microsoft Azure has been in Qatar since 2022, Google Cloud launched in 2023, and Oracle is now advancing its entry. All of this firmly positions Qatar as a strategic cloud and AI hub in the region, and we are at the center of that ecosystem. Now let me continue with Kuwait. Kuwait is a fast-growing data center market in the GCC, with a projected CAGR of 11.5% through 2029, the highest growth rate in the region. Syntys holds 20% market share in Kuwait and benefits direct subsea connectivity to Iran and Iraq.
That connectivity is critical for scaling regional cloud infrastructure and enabling cross-border interconnection. Digital transformation in Kuwait is being driven by Vision 2035, which includes approximately $10 billion allocated for digital modernization. CITRA, the National Digital Authority, is playing an active role in supporting data center and network infrastructure development. There are already large-scale multi-year developments on the way. What this means for us is that we are not entering a speculative market. We are anchoring capacity in a market that is structurally set up for sustained growth. Finally, Tunisia. Tunisia is an emerging market where we hold 25% market share with 2 MW currently operating. Why Tunisia? Because it provides something unique: a cost-efficient alternative to Europe, both in terms of capital expenditure and operating expenses, while still offering high-quality international connectivity.
Tunisia already has five subseacables in operation, with two additional systems under development, and it significantly strengthens the country's position as a regional hub. At the same time, the 5G rollout in Tunisia is accelerating enterprise cloud adoption, and the government is actively supporting digital infrastructure investment. Here is what makes Tunisia particularly interesting. From a strategic perspective, it's the location. Tunisia is a natural gateway, not just to Europe, but also to neighboring markets like Libya and Algeria. That creates cross-border revenue opportunities and positions us to lead what could become a multi-country cluster play in North Africa. When I step back and look at Qatar, Kuwait, and Tunisia together, what I see is not just market presence; I see strategic positioning.
We have established market shares, we have active capacity expansion on the way, and we are structurally aligned with the forces driving digital and AI infrastructure demand across the region. That alignment matters because it's not enough to simply build capacity. You have to build it in the right places, at the right time, and with the right partners in place. That brings me to the third part of my presentation today: how we are built to compete and scale. In 2025, we delivered 8.2 MW of mission-critical infrastructure on time, on spec, and fully operational, proof that we have a repeatable deployment blueprint that allows us to expand efficiently across markets. Our competitive advantage is built on four pillars. First, a regional carrier-neutral multi-market platform.
We operate across multiple geographies, which means our customers, whether they are hyperscalers, AI clusters, or colocation wholesalers, can deploy capacity where they need it, when they need it, without being locked into a single market provider. That flexibility matters, especially in a region where digital infrastructure is still maturing and demand patterns can shift quickly. Second pillar: our AI-ready modular architecture. Our infrastructure is engineered for 99.999% uptime and aligned with global compliance standards. That means we can support everything from traditional enterprise colocation to advanced GPU clusters and high-performance computing workloads. As AI adoption accelerates across the region, that capability becomes increasingly valuable. Our third pillar is a robust contract model. Our agreements are U.S. dollar-denominated, with 10-15 year terms and built-in renewal mechanism.
That provides revenue visibility, protects us against currency fatality, and gives both us and our investors the predictability required to plan long-term capital deployment. Our fourth and last pillar is proven leadership. Our team has deep experience in scalable execution and operations. We know how to design and build data centers, but more importantly, we know how to operate them efficiently, profitably, and at scale. These strengths are amplified by our strategic partnership. We are an NVIDIA cloud partner in the Middle East, and as I mentioned earlier, Iron Mountain holds a strategic minority stake in Syntys. Iron Mountain operates approximately 1.3 GW of data center capacity across 30 sites globally. Their involvement brings not just capital but operational maturity, global best practices, and credibility with international customers evaluating where to deploy infrastructure in emerging markets. Our go-to-market approach is clear and focused.
For hyperscalers, we deliver built-to-suit infrastructure, tailored and designed to their exact specifications. For AI workloads, we provide mission-critical HPC and GPU cluster infrastructure that enables advanced AI application and GPU-as-a-service delivery. For wholesale colocation customers, we offer secure, scalable, cost-efficient solutions that allow them to grow with confidence. Looking ahead, our strategy is clear. We will continue to execute with discipline, partner with intent, and scale with purpose. Our roadmap to 120 MW is clear. Finance is in place, and it's on the way. Syntys is not just participating in the region's digital transformation. We are shaping the infrastructure foundation that will enable it. Thank you.
So far, we have already talked about the first two flywheels, our investment horizons for Ooredoo. Let's now talk about the third flywheel, platform adjacencies.
Platform adjacencies are fast mid-to-long-term investment opportunities where we test for opportunities with limited resource exposure before we scale based on proven demand. You could also call this internal venturing. To focus, we have rigor in the opportunities we select for experimentation, and we are highly selective in our choices. Less is more; in other words, solid execution versus a scattergun approach is what we're aiming for. We are moving here on four tracks in parallel. First, fintech. We are expanding both our proposition and footprint, embedding payments and financial service more deeply into customers' daily digital journeys. You might ask yourself, why? Some of our markets are still cash-dominated. The economies are now ready to leapfrog into digital payments. Prepaid reloads are in these markets sometimes used as a form of payment already.
As a key player in the prepaid market, we are well positioned as well to extend our position into digital payments and leveraging our strong distribution networks. Second area, APIs, or telco-as-a-service, as it's sometimes dubbed, with our ability to protect customers' data to identify and avoid fraudulent banking or e-commerce transactions, to program our network, our industry is in a unique position to advance digital services. Unfortunately, our industry was unable to make these capabilities available on a global scale to digital service providers that operate globally. They are not interested in local solutions. This has changed. Standards have been developed by standards bearers like TM Forum or the GSMA, with its CAMARA initiative that allows standardized APIs to be used.
Among the global telco community, Ooredoo is among the top certified telecom operators to provide APIs and has also joined both Aduna and the Bridge Alliance as a commercial partner. Those two associations market APIs globally to the digital service providers and represent about 4 billion customers of telecom operators. We expect that the monetization of APIs is at the early innings and represents a substantial growth opportunity, considering applications in banking, government services, healthcare, to just mention a few. The third area is for us, again, platform businesses that are based on data science. Which I want to mention here is ATEC, IoT, or data as a service. We are developing cookieless advertisement alternatives where we can qualify audiences but keep customers and customer data protected based on our network intelligence.
We're scaling smart IoT metering platforms in various areas for utilities, for energy providers and water utilities, for example, for governments. We're launching data as a service as a platform where advertisers can run campaigns or small and medium businesses can through various channels that we can provide for their advertisement. Fourth, AI-led solutions for the enterprise market, which are under assessment. We're assessing currently investments into edge compute nodes in our wireless infrastructure, where real-time inferencing with minimal delays is required, such as for autonomous driving. As I said earlier, with GPU as a service, that's a natural fit for us. We're leveraging AI also for industrial video inferencing services with campus solutions, such as for chemical plants to avoid fire hazards with substantial impact to a production facility. We're also enhancing network-based security through AI-driven protection from hacker attacks, spam calls, or similar fraudulent activities.
We have deployed this for our own end customer base already in Indonesia as one of the first telcos in the region. Together, these adjacencies expand our platform, deepen the integration across our ecosystem, and unlock new sustainable revenue streams for Ooredoo. Let me zoom into one platform adjacency that is already up and running: fintech. Our fintech strategy is very simple: develop once, roll out multiple times, and leverage the synergies with our core telco business with regards to distribution presence. Our fintech vertical is aimed to scale out internationally as a business model that we are already very familiar with, literally since more than a decade. In Qatar, we have launched fintech in 2014 and became the first licensed payment provider, processing over $ 6 billion in transactions today. In Maldives, we have launched our m-Faisaa service in 2018.
With this experience, we have also the introduction of a new fintech vertical. We have carved out the existing activities under one umbrella, under one P&L responsibility, and have successfully launched operations in Oman at the tail end of 2024 with our brand walletii. In the first half of 2025, we're able to reach 50,000 registered and 50,000 active users as a first step and see solid growth continuing throughout the year. Licenses in Tunisia and applications in Iraq and Kuwait expand our next wave of markets. We hope to launch another market still this year as we progress also with regulatory approvals. We established for the new and existing operations a group of global partners in the fintech space, from PayPal to Visa, QNB, Microsoft, Ripple, and others, enabling interoperability and cross-border scale. Huawei is among our technical partners.
The platform today delivers $22 million in fee revenues and has 329,000 active users, with a long-term ambition of 3 million- 4 million users and $70-$100 valuation per user. Our fintech vertical now has opened up further opportunities to also scale our business model into related opportunities, such as merchant payments, microlending, insurances, and digital banking, which we are reviewing as of now. We have by now covered all of the three flywheels, ladies and gentlemen, and the key strategic directions for these flywheels. Now, let me hand it over to our Group CFO to provide an overview of Ooredoo's financial performance and guidance. Over to you, Abdulla.
Abdulla has been with Ooredoo since 2013, including serving as CFO of Ooredoo Qatar before taking on his current group-level role.
Hello everyone and welcome to the Capital Market Day.
You have heard my colleagues share the success of our strategy and the direction that we are heading. I will now walk you through how this strategy has built our strong financial foundation. Before we begin, please note that the figures I will present are normalized and differ from our usual reporting. The numbers here are normalized for exceptional items and assume Myanmar was not part of our portfolio and IOH has always been treated as a joint venture. This approach will provide a clear view of performance for Ooredoo Group. Current structure since 2020. We have achieved a solid financial foundation by taking smart planned steps. Firstly, as Aziz mentioned, we have de-risked the portfolio of Myanmar and recognized IOH, allowing capital to be redirected and focused management attention toward higher return markets. Revenue has grown at a rate over 3% since 2020, while improving margins.
A new profit was up around 11% since 2020, reflecting margin expansion and disciplined cost control. This demonstrated that fast-growing countries drive strong growth while GCC markets continue to deliver strong cash flow. Secondly, returning our trading upward. Return of equity and ROIC have both increased by 5 percentage points. Third, our balance sheet is strong, with the investment grade rating giving us flexibility to invest. Our liquidity remains healthy, and our debt is well below the board's target range of 1.5x-2.5 x. Lastly, we translate this strong performance into shareholder returns. This dividend has grown 160% since 2020, and the board has just approved an increase of our target dividend payout ratio to a range of 50%-70% of normalized earnings. A clear signal of confidence is that sustainability of our earning and bringing us closer to peers' payout ratio.
To sum up this s lide, we have simplified the business, improved financial discipline, and built a clear path for efficient operation to shareholder value. This foundation positions Ooredoo for consistent, high-quality growth going forward. Turning to the top line performance. Group revenue reached QAR 24.1 billion for the last 12 months period ending 30 September 2025. Revenue has grown 3.3% year over year since 2020. This growth was driven by network investment, branding, distribution, and churn management efforts. Revenue is diversified across mobile, fixed, wholesale, and equipment, with mobile contributing over 71% of the group revenue, followed by fixed at around 18%. Looking at the revenue bridge from 2020 to 2025, you will note that high-growth countries have accounted for most of the top line growth, primarily Iraq and Algeria, with stable growth in Qatar and Kuwait. In Oman, results were affected by new competition, but we expect the market to stabilize.
As per quarter 3 result, mobile service revenue was stable year on year. Overall, revenue growth is driven by strong country fundamentals combined with operational excellence, and we expected this trend to continue. Adjusted EBITDA margin has been consistently north of 40%, thanks to our driven efficiency and cost discipline. Adjusted EBITDA growth story is strong, supported by revenue expansion and cost optimization efforts. On average, adjusted EBITDA has grown around 4% per year since 2020. The high-rated GCC countries contribute around 53% of the adjusted EBITDA, while high-growth countries make an increased contribution of the balance. If you look at the bridge, you will note that adjusted EBITDA has expanded from QAR 8.5 billion in 2020 to over QAR 10 billion in the last 12 months period. This was driven by adjusted EBITDA expansion on the high-growth countries, averaging over 8% growth per year.
Adjusted EBITDA of GCC countries remained stable, and as mentioned earlier, results in Oman have been impacted by new competition on the market. CapEx intensity has historically trended around low to mid-10s. We continue to make disciplined and strategic capital investment to drive growth. Since 2022, CapEx has increased around 16% per year on average. More recently, this now covers digital growth areas, not just network CapEx. We prioritize CapEx efficiency with centralized oversight. Driven high-return investment, including digital infrastructure, over the last five years. CapEx has been equally split between GCC and high-growth countries, with a higher share being allocated to the latter over time in support of high growth. Free cash flow over the last 12 months decreased slightly due to additional CapEx, especially in a high-growth market.
Overall, since 2020, our free cash flow has increased around 4% per year on average, while GCC countries deliver over 60% of our free cash flow in the last 12 months period. The contribution from high-growth countries has been rising. Free cash flow has expanded from QAR 5.1 billion to QAR 6.2 billion since 2020. Similar story to the EBITDA story, this is a growth pause driven by the higher-growth countries growing over 6% per year on average, compared to the GCC countries growing around 3%. Looking at the net profit, we continue to drive healthy net profit growth, which increased from QAR 2.4 billion to QAR 3.8 billion for Ooredoo shareholders since 2020. We closed the 2024 financial year with record earnings, achieving normalized net profit of over $1 billion for the first time. As a result.
On average, we have seen net profit increase by nearly 11% per year. As mentioned, the GCC market provides high cash generation. Qatar contributes 30% of revenue but generates just over 44% of adjusted free cash flow. Meanwhile, the high-growth countries have shown strong momentum in terms of growth, with countries like Iraq increasing its revenue contribution by 3.3 percentage points. The GCC countries make up just over half of our revenue, EBITDA, and free cash flow. The high-growth countries make up the rest with increasing contribution. This mix gives us a balanced growth, combining the steady GCC market with fast-growing ones. At Ooredoo, we are committed to maximize asset efficiency and deployment. On average, our return on equity has increased more than 5 percents points per year. In 2024, our return on equity of 12.4% was higher than the industry average of 11.7%.
This is impressive, giving the group low leverage return on investment. Capital tells us a similar story, growing around 5 percentage points per year on average since 2020, and our 2024 figures of 12.5% is significantly higher than the industry average of 8.6%. These superior returns demonstrate our efficiency and disciplined operational mindset. Turning to the balance sheet, we have significantly deleveraged and de-risked our balance sheet. As per our latest result, we were at 0.6 x leverage, down from the normalized 1.7 x in 2020. Thanks to our strong focus on cash generation. As we are deleveraging, we are benefiting from decreasing interest payment, which is decreased from around QAR 900 million normalized in 2020 to around QAR 200 million in the latest period. We hold investment grade rating from both S&P and Moody's. We have a strong liquidity profile and have been actively managing our repayment schedule.
We maintain a strong cash balance and have significant under-drawing facility. Our debt has a long and spread-out maturity profile, with the majority coming due 2030 or later. We are structured hedging against further rate increase, as 91% of our debt is on a fixed rate. Most of our debt is in the form of bonds. We are happy to know that we recently repaid the 2025 maturity of $750 million principal of a bond on the 19th of October. Turning to the shareholder returns, Ooredoo has maintained a sustainable and progressive dividend policy. Historical payout moved to the upper end of our 40%-60% policy range, with a dividend increase by 160% from 2020 to 2024. Reflecting our confidence in the group's future cash generation, we are raising the budget payout ratio range to 50%-70%.
This policy reinforces our commitment to balancing growth investment with attractive and sustainable shareholder distribution. Our strong cash position and prudent leverage enable us to maintain flexibility while generating results for our shareholders. To conclude my section of the Capital Market Day, I will present our outlook and guidance. Group revenue reached QAR 18.2 billion, growing 5% year on year, with excluded impact of Myanmar exit. We expect to meet the full year 2025 revenue guidance of 2%-3%. We deliver solid EBITDA margin of 44% and expect it to be in line with our full year target range in the low 40s. CapEx stood at QAR 2.8 billion, up 46% year on year, keeping us on track to maintain our guidance range of QAR 4.5 million-QAR 5 billion. Our full year guidance remains unchanged, with full year 2026 outlook expected to.
Align closely with full year 2025 guidance. The strong nine-month performance, combined with our healthy financial position, clear strategy, and accelerating momentum reinforce our confidence in the long-term growth trajectory. Thank you for your time. Now, back to Luelle.
Thank you, Abdulla. That was a clear demonstration of our strong financial discipline and growth trajectory, and how it continues to deliver sustainable long-term value for our shareholders. Before we head into Q&A, I hand over to Aziz for his closing remarks.
To conclude our Capital Markets Day, you'll have seen that Ooredoo's financial profile aligns both regionally and in developed markets. As I usually emphasize, we believe Ooredoo remains significantly undervalued relative to both our developed market peers and particularly our regional peers.
The market today sees us as a traditional telco, but the reality is we are a portfolio of distinct high-value digital assets, with each vertical reflecting its own value and multiple. Our core telecom business is the bedrock of our business. A powerful cash generation engine with a balanced mix of stable and high-growth markets. Furthermore, our portfolio includes premier infrastructure assets spanning across data centers, towers, and fiber. These are high-growth, high-yield businesses. Layered on top of this is our high-growth fintech platform, a powerful catalyst for future value creation as we continue our expansion into key markets. Despite the clear premium valuation of these individual parts, Ooredoo trades today at a discount. As you've seen from our strategy, we've reorganized the business to unlock the full value of each of our verticals.
Let me leave you with a final thought that captures the essence of Ooredoo and the compelling presentation we've shared with you today. Ooredoo is not just one story; it's a unique and powerful combination of three: the stability and strong cash generation of an established market leader, the high-growth potential of our emerging markets and new digital platforms, and a clear, actionable strategy to unlock the latent value embedded in our world-class infrastructure assets. We have the right strategy, the right assets, and the right team to execute this. We are more confident than ever in our ability to deliver the next chapter of growth and to create substantial long-term value for our shareholders. Thank you for joining us. Looking forward to the questions.
Thank you very much to all our presenters. We've now reached the much-awaited Q&A segment of today's event, and here's how you can participate.
Raise your virtual hand, and I will unmute your line when it comes to your turn. Alternatively, type your questions in the Q&A box, and if you're dialing in via phone line, please press star nine to ask a question. For the Q&A in the room, I'm joined by the management team that you've just heard, and virtually, we have Aziz and our Deputy CFO, Eyas Assaf , online. Okay, our first question—we have two hands raised—our first question comes from Thando Skosana from UBS. Please go ahead, Thando.
Hi, hi, good afternoon. Hopefully, you can hear me, and thank you so much for the presentation. A lot to digest today. I will start maybe with three questions because I've got a couple.
The first one is just, you know, in terms of your medium-term revenue and perhaps EBITDA margin guidance, I wonder if you could give some more color in terms of what do you expect there. Should we continue expecting, you know, that sort of low single-digit growth, or does this now become mid-single digits? You did give a split between, you know, core telco, digital infrastructure, and platform adjacencies. The second question is just on, you know, cost savings that you've spoken about. I wonder if you could also provide some color or quantify what you guys expect in terms of cost savings over the next five years, and then where you see, in which areas you see opportunities to do more cost savings, please. My last one is just on Iraq. You did speak about fiberization of your sites.
I wonder if you've already started here, or is this something you still need to start in the next coming quarters? Maybe if you can talk about CapEx as a result of that fiberization. Thank you.
Thanks, Thando. Aziz, would you like to start?
Yep. Good morning, everyone. Sorry for not being with the rest of the team. Some of the events of the job took me outside the country. Look, regarding the medium-term EBITDA margin, we've announced when we, around four years ago, said we want to get to a low 40s threshold. We're now close to the mid-40s. We're at 44% EBITDA margin. Our goal in the medium term is to exceed the mid-40s and to be between the mid-40s-50s, so around 46%, 47% EBITDA margin on a run rate basis.
Regarding cost saving, look, we're constantly looking for efficiencies across our business, whether it's operational efficiencies, looking at in-house services versus out-of-house managed services, constantly trying to push our procurement efficiencies. Also, cost of sales. There is no single magic bullet. We've done that exercise the first two, three years. We're now at the marginal incremental gain, and it's a recurrent exercise of constantly reviewing our costs, whether cost of sales or operational cost. A big help in cost of sales is through digitalization of sales and distribution channels, which in certain of our markets, as the nature of the market, are still not fully mature, so there's a bit of extra juice we can get there.
Thanks, Aziz.
For Iraq, I'll let Amer answer.
Yes, yes.
Definitely. Yeah, on fiberization, spot on. Yeah, this is a thing that we are working on right now.
Our strategy on fiberization is clear. We're going one to ten hub per ten sites to have fiber. It's a challenge in Iraq, just for everyone to be aware. The fiber is owned by the government, and whatever fiberization we do is basically with the support of the government. Investment is there. We have our rings. Whenever we have a challenge, right now, we're investing more and more into the E-band. E-band supports us on a fiber in the air as a technology. Right now, we're rolling out on that one. The strategy is clear for us. We're moving ahead with it, and we are fulfilling our strategy when it comes to fiber. Mainly, the demand will come more and more when we go to 5G. Right now, we're waiting for the government to issue the license on that one. In general, 5G will drive more demand on fiber.
Thank you, Amer. Our next question comes from Maddy Singh from HSBC. Please go ahead, Maddy.
Yes, hi. Thanks a lot for taking my questions and a great set of presentations. I do have a few questions. Should I just give them all now, or should I do one by one?
Do them one by one, Maddy, please.
Okay, all right. My first question actually is on Algeria. You used to be, I think, number two operator in Algeria, and I saw in the slide, you know, it's now number three. If you could, you know, discuss, you know, the outlook in Algeria, is there a path to go back to number two, and what needs to be done to get there? Thank you.
Okay, good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for the question.
Actually, Algeria, we are already number two on EBITDA and free cash flow. Very soon, by Q2 or Q3 maximum, we will be also a solid number two on revenue. Definitely, there is a potential and a very clear path. First of all, on 5G technology. We will launch 5G very soon, and we see that we will lead with 5G and premium network quality. As a part of a multinational group compared to a two national or state-owned operator, we see this as a competitive advantage. Also, our efficient CapEx investment. Our sites are rolled out based on a cluster approach and in-house data science model, which gives us also a competitive advantage. Our strength in CVM and data science, which will provide to our customer the best products and optimize sales and distribution.
Plus, in addition to that, our B2B, we will empower B2B and ICT offers. For Algeria, we believe strongly that very soon we will be a solid number two player in the market.
Thank you, Roni. Maddy, you want to ask the rest of your questions?
Yes, yes. The second question is on Kuwait. I noticed your subscriber share and revenue share actually have a huge gap. If you could discuss, you know, what's the reason behind this, you know, gap in the revenue share versus subscriber share? What can you do to bridge this gap? Is there a risk of, like, some market share loss if actually you want to, let's say, improve your revenue market share there? Thank you.
Good afternoon. Actually, if we go to the details of the r evenue itself and the market share when it gets to the subscribers, there are so many things in the details in here. The subscribers is basically the prepaid and the postpaid, and this is the majority of the countries going into 80%, roughly 75%-80% prepaid. The revenue that you're looking at, it covers also the FIGs and covers the other ICT services and so on from the three companies. If you go to the details, you will see that the service revenue, which is coming close to the reality, it will be way closer to the other operators. The number of subscribers you're hearing as a standard of telecom, they're reporting the subscriber to the network on the GSM only. Maybe a detail can be explained later on if it's not available, I think, in the balance, but we can provide it, hopefully.
If you could also give some color around the current regulatory situation, you know, has the interconnect rates come into the market? Is there any other major regulatory changes which we should expect in Kuwait?
Okay. Actually, it's a good question because the picture of Kuwait, when it gets to the last year, the stability has been there, especially after the changes in the government level. We've been seeing a good, I think, indicator that things are moving in the right direction when it gets to the stability and going into the prices and going into the options and features. Being in this market as CEO for the past five years, I can tell you the last year was one of the best years that we've been having kind of like a communication at a high level.
Guided by the government itself, as a private sector, it has been kind of tailored and communicated very well. Talking about the prices, the whole country is revisiting the prices, and I think the telecommunication is one major thing which will be, which was promised to be good, and inshallah, we will see some improvement in this area.
Great. Can I keep going, or do I have to stop?
Yeah, sure. Go ahead, Maddy.
Okay, thanks. The third question is actually on Iraq, where the issue, I think, is opposite. You have lower subscriber share, but much higher revenue share. I wonder, do you see any risk to the revenue market share? Like, if somebody comes in with price competition, could that be a risk? Yeah.
Yeah, thank you for the question. I mean, you're taking us by sequence right now, each one of us.
If you look at our strategy, our strategy is clear. We're not behind just being number one for number of subscribers. I mean, for us, we focus on value customers. If you reviewed the presentation, what I went through, we have a couple of areas that we're focusing on. The multiplay is one of our major drives that we're going there. This is creating real value for us. On top of that, we have lots of adjacent services that we're doing right now that we're developing in the market. We're unique in that one, and customers, basically, they really love our services, and they're attached. If you look at even churn rates, it's extremely, extremely low compared with our competition. On top of all of that, when you look at the distribution channel, what we're doing right now is not acquiring customers, as René said, for the SIM card.
We're just getting customers, making sure that they will deliver value for us. In general, our strategy is focused on revenue and good margins by creating value to our shareholders. This is where we drive. We've been doing that for the past years. I mean, if you look at our history for the past years, we're number one by far on the revenue, EBITDA, free cash flow, and even net profit compared with our competitors. It's a strategy that we've adopted a long time ago, and we're still holding to that strategy.
Understood. The next question is on data centers, if I can. I noticed that. Sorry about that. Sorry about that.
One by one. René, get ready.
The question actually is on the, y ou know, I noticed that, you know, you plan to invest about $1 billion, but the ambition is to get to 120+ MW capacity. Is there any significant difference in your costing, you know, like the CapEx required for the purpose of building these data centers compared to the global peers? Because it seems like you are lower than a peer on a per megawatt basis. You know, what are the reasons and drivers behind that, if you could share that? This is especially given that you're focusing on GPU as a service, high-end services as well. If you could talk about that, thank you.
Thank you for your question. Our CapEx investments differ per country. If you compare the CapEx for Kuwait or Qatar or Tunis, Tunis is on the lower end. That is the reason why.
The number, if you compare it with Europe or the U.S., where we have around [$14 million-$17 million] per megawatts, it's a little bit lower in this region. The reason is that when we build on scale, we can have the benefit of the economy of scale, as well as we work with our preferred partners, which we have a great relationship with, where we can get better prices. We also make sure that we order our equipment in advance, whereby we do not have to wait when there are a lot of constraints and the prices might be going up because of a lot of demand. There are different factors, as well as the labor cost. That is also one of the costs that, of course, is like your design, your engineering, your construction.
These are also driving all the prices for CapEx, and that is also different per country. We took an average across our countries that we are aiming to expand.
Understood. Can I keep going, or should I stop?
You can go, Maddy.
Okay, great. Thanks. The next question is on actually TAWAL. You know, given that the approvals are yet to come, I was wondering, you know, when are you expecting the financial separation, or that has already happened? Because what the question I am leading towards is, is there any indication around the impact on expected margin impact or, let's say, income statement impact after the Tower deal is concluded? Is there any color you could provide on that side?
Thanks. Maddy, since our results call, which was a few days ago, the answer really has not changed that much.
We've gotten verbal confirmation that everything should be okay. We were expecting, with our breath held, to get final written confirmation to be able to close the first marshal, which is Qatar. Realistic timeline is if we get anywhere the approval in the next few weeks, we should have a first closing early Q1 of next year. When it comes to separation of accounts, we are running internally separated accounts. We do not report performance till the transaction is closed, especially as there are quite a few adjustments due to the size of portfolio since we announced the transaction. One thing that has not changed much, and I know you were there a couple of years ago during our capital markets day, we spent a lot of time on what would be the impact to our financials on the Tower call model.
Happy to, first, invite you to go back to that presentation and happy, probably at the first closing, to run you through an update of the final impacts of a first close.
For sure. The reason I ask was because since then we have had a couple of transactions in Saudi where the treatment actually has been slightly different. Like both Zain Saudi and STC have taken a more, like a service, managed service route to the accounting, which basically meant that, you know, they did not have any real negative impact on earnings. Just wondered, you know, whether you are exploring that model as well. That is why I flagged that.
Look, we believe that this transaction is value accretive for shareholders, both in terms of crystallization of value through the crystallization of a yielding asset from idle infrastructure, but also from an earnings standpoint.
Do not worry, we are looking internally and also with our external auditors for the best accounting treatments to maximize performance for our shareholders.
Understood. My final two questions, I'll just, you know, give them together. The first one is for Aziz again. Stock liquidity, you know, that has been a major, I would say, investor feedback to us that, you know, it is low, it's still low enough. Is there anything which is in the pipeline or you think you can do to help, you know, on the stock liquidity side? That's the first one. And then the final one on the pricing outlook. Now you operate in many markets, and globally we have seen a major trend towards telcos actually getting pricing power back.
If you could talk, you know, any of those themes which are, let's say, more relevant for any of your markets, are you seeing some pricing support in any market, and is that something which you think is sustainable. In the medium term?
Okay, Maddy, I'll hit on both quickly, and I'll let René expand on the second part of the question. On the first side on liquidity. As you know, you know, Ooredoo has been always working very hard to improve the liquidity of its share. I think Ooredoo was the first company in Qatar to actually enlist market makers around their shares to increase the liquidity profile of its shares.
As you know, we have a structural p art to our liquidity, we have three strategic investors accounting for close to 75% of total shares, which is QIA with a bit more than 52% or a bit higher at 52%, the pension fund, and ADIA with 10%. As you've known, we've been in discussions with the different pools of these strategic shareholders to explain and educate them that a small release of certain shares would probably unlock liquidity benefits, which also would reflect in our indexation within the MSCI. Just the re-rating within the MSCI would probably add half a turn to a turn of multiple within our valuation. As you've seen during this presentation, and it's a deep belief of myself, we are in a number of metrics best in class in terms of a telco.
We're definitely in the top quartile in terms of q uartile, in terms of profitability, in terms of free cash flow. We have one of the strongest balance sheets in the industry. We've got a lot of value accretion during the last four years. We've doubled the market cap of the company, but we've never had a multiple accretion. This is due to, exactly as you highlighted, the liquidity profile. To your last question, is there any liquidity transaction coming? You know very well, Maddy, the rules of the game are we can't pre-announce a transaction till a transaction is actually confirmed and good to go. I can't comment on that. Regarding pricing outlook, look, in all markets, we strive to avoid first price wars. We also, one of our big push, and I think we've demonstrated it across nearly all of our footprints, we've been able to drive significant ARPU growth.
Part of that is to drive some pricing discipline. We were in a number of markets, whether it was Indonesia, Iraq, you have a number of the CEOs here. Unilaterally, the only telecom player to withdraw, for instance, unlimited plans, which are value leakage in terms of the whole pricing model, hoping that the other operators would follow. In many cases, they followed suit. We do try to enhance market repair. On that, I'll let René take a bit more and expand on that point.
Right. Thanks, Aziz. Look, we differentiate by customer experience. Our focus is not to differentiate by being the cheapest in the market, as Aziz was already saying. The point is, and you have seen this on the presentation as well, we're in the fortunate position that in our markets, we have favorable price elasticity.
That means more data usage equates to ARPU growth equates to more top line. We are still fortunate in driving this. Third item in there is as well. We are very focused on driving growth through CVM. That is not price discounting. This is selling additional services to our customer base. This is where our focus is. This is where we center on growth. At Ooredoo. Again, I just want to repeat, our focus is happy customers, great customer experience. That means you do not need to be the cheapest in the market. I hope that answers the question.
Understood. Thank you very much all for your patience. Thanks a lot.
Thanks, Maddy. We appreciate the question. We have a few typed questions, and I think I will start with the data centers.
On data centers from Neetika Gupta from Franklin Templeton, the target of 120 MW capacity backed by the $1 billion investment, could you share more on demand and pipeline? Are these data centers being built on confirmed customer contracts, or are they capacity build-outs expecting future demand? How quickly do you anticipate ramping up utilization at new sites, and what is the current utilization levels?
Thank you, Neetika, for your question. It's a mouthful. Let me answer your first question, the part of the first. It's about our demand and pipeline. Basically, our main target group is the hyperscalers. We build based on their specification. That means we do not build speculative for hyperscalers. Why? Because technology is changing really, really fast. For example, we have traditional air cooling. Now today, there is a demand for liquid cooling.
If you would build your data center based on these traditional specifications, for example, for air cooled, then you would have an asset which you cannot utilize. Today, what we do is we work closely with the hyperscalers. We design the data center according to their specifications, and we build it and we operate it accordingly. That is the first thing. Secondly, for our multi-tenant, we can build speculative because today we still see the low densities per rack. That is something that we can predict for the coming two years. For the AI infrastructure, it is also quite custom-made because the density, let's say last year we were talking about 25 kW-30 kW per cabinet, but today people are already talking about 120 kW or even more than that. To build that speculative is really capital-intensive.
That means that we just c ommunicate with our clients what they want, and then we will build accordingly. I think the second question was about the ramp-up. Our focus is to scale to 120 MW by 2030. Apart from the hyperscalers that are our clients today and that we are operating the facilities for them, we are also in discussion with other clients, which I cannot mention the name. We are in advanced discussions. We are also evaluating across our three countries multiple sites for expansions as well. We aim to achieve our target by 2030.
Thanks, Sunita. From Rian Durhman from Ashmore. For Syntys, can you provide some color on the megawatt capacity ramp-up? Example, do you have a target each year to reach 120 megawatt capacity?
Yes. We have a capacity ramp-up plan based on our pipeline. Next year, we will expand w ith additional 20 MW. We will do our groundbreaking next year for a new facility, which will be fully dedicated to one of our hyperscalers. As I mentioned earlier, we have additional discussions on the way. We will reach our 120 MW by 2030. Of course, it would be great if we could exceed that number.
Okay, great. Our next question is on GPU as a service from Raja Natarajan and from Sancta Capital. How capex intensive is GPU as a service?
I think this question is partially for me and partially for my OPCO CEOs because we as Syntys, we deliver the critical infrastructure. That means that we deliver the power, the cooling. We design the data hall based on the customer's requirements. The customers are mainly the public and the private sector, which our OPCO CEOs are dealing with directly.
It is quite capital-intensive. When it comes to the layer on top of the critical infrastructure, that is the CapEx related to the OPCO CEOs. Maybe one of them would like to weigh in. Or René?
Yeah. Look, the prices for NVIDIA chipsets are known, so I will not tell anybody a secret about this. In addition, you have to do some, let's call it IT plumbing and orchestration. Again, the bulk of the cost asset is the infrastructure enablement in the data centers as well as the chipsets. We are working on this. We will not disclose for commercial reasons the pricing here. I hope you understand that.
Thanks, René. The next question is from Rawan Sheikha from SICO Bank. Is 2026 guidance similar to 2026 guidance or flat to 2025 numbers?
Can take that question.
Maybe I will take it or.
Aziz, you can start, then Abdullah will.
Look, in general. The hospital, okay. In general, guidance, as you know, we can't come out with guidance till it's been ratified by the board. And the board meetings where we issue guidance is upcoming in Q4. As of today, as much as we know as a management what we're recommending to our board in terms of guidance, we cannot outline it publicly today because it still hasn't been ratified by the board, and the board might ask us to change our guidance. That being said, if you look at our historic curves, first, we've always been a bit on the prudent sides when it comes to guidance. Second of all, we've always exceeded our guidance.
Thanks, Aziz. Don't see any more questions. I'll just give it a minute. Okay. No further questions.
That concludes our Q&A session and our 2025 Capital Markets Day. If you have any additional questions or require any further clarity after you've digested the detailed content, please feel free to reach out to me directly. We really do value your feedback. A short survey will pop up after the webinar. Please could you take some time to fill it out? Thank you very much for your time, attention, and your continued interest in Ooredoo Group. Thank you very much.