Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. Glad to have Liberty Latin America CEO, Balan Nair, for the very first time here presenting at our conference. Balan, thank you very much for joining us. I guess, look, maybe just we can get the chance that this is the first presentation. Why don't you tell investors about your equity story, right? If you can provide, like, an overview on the business, I think that would be great.
Thanks. Well, thanks for having us, Diego. Perhaps I should, you know, assuming everybody knows that story well enough, to be in this room, maybe talk about a few points on why we're excited, about the business. Give you five different angles here. The first one may be catalysts. What are some of the catalysts to our business? I think, you know, I'll probably highlight three. One, the first one is we have this joint venture in Chile, with our partners, Claro. I think that's a big catalyst for us, and I'll get into the details in a second. Second, synergies. We have a tremendous amount of synergies dropping, starting in the fourth quarter of 2023 from our AT&T acquisition in Puerto Rico, a Telefónica acquisition in Costa Rica, our Claro acquisition in Panama.
Clearly there's some synergies dropping over from our UTS acquisition in Dutch Caribbean. Of course, in Chile, and we'll talk about that as well. Second, Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has been a great business for us. We've doubled down multiple times there. After the hurricane, we doubled down, rebuilt the whole infrastructure in Puerto Rico. We doubled down by buying the AT&T business in there. It's now a quad play business. It's essentially us, Claro, and T-Mobile in there. Three great operators, all very pragmatic and very rational. We have more homes to pass there, more upside. We've got a lot of Uniendo fundings, a lot of FCC. It's really between us and Claro that got a lot of the FCC funding. You've got a lot of good things going on, investments going into that business.
Logically, if you think about Puerto Rico, if you NPV the cash flow that we generate there, and it's about a $600+ million EBITDA business, and if you do the NPV on that, really you should come to a number between $800 million and $900 million in that business. But let's even say it's $700 million, the value of just Puerto Rico alone. Puerto Rico alone at $700 million is worth more than my whole company combined. Essentially, you get Puerto Rico and leftover, you get the rest of my business for free. Panama, our subsea business, Chile, you know, all the Caribbean islands. It's like insanity. So really, that's the second part about why we're excited about this business. Thirdly, you know, after our transaction in Chile, we are about 75% U.S. dollars.
It's not like a typical Latin America business. We are 75%, and a lot of it, there's a lot in our subsea business. It's all mostly contractual business, contractual revenues. You've got not only U.S. dollars, but contractual US dollars as well. Fourth, let me come back to Chile. We are really excited about this joint venture. We are partnering with a great company. Essentially, you have now a business that was all fixed, that's now fixed and mobile. You have tremendous amount of synergies that's coming out of this business. This is so accretive to both sides of that trade, both Claro and us. You've got now us both investing in a country that I think is a great country.
Chile, you know, a lot of folks are like, "Why don't you just exit Chile?" Chile is a great country. It's just going through a tough period right now. I mean, the currency is out of whack, you know, social unrest. They just had the constitutional vote, which suggests that most people in Chile are very rational because it got rejected. We think the future of Chile is really bright, and we wanna be in Chile. We think this business, this joint venture with VTR and Claro will have tremendous upside that's not captured today. I think in three years, people are gonna be surprised, the amount of synergies that's in it. Fourthly, I'd say in Chile as well, this consolidation is good.
This is just the beginning of the consolidation between us and Claro, and I think there will be more coming in. You can see publicly, Entel's put their fiber business for sale. I think some of the other folks that relied on very low-cost funding are gonna be in for a surprise. I think in three years, Chile is gonna be a lot different than it is today, and we'll be in there. Like I said, we've got a great partner. Fifth, I'd say, you know, I break my business out into two buckets. One, our high-growth business is a high single digit, low double-digit growth, and stabilized business. Stabilized, let me start with the stabilized business. Stabilized business is like, we can really, if I lump them all together, it's like an infrastructure business.
These are businesses like in St. Lucia, St. Kitts, you know, Grenada, a lot of the Caribbean islands that are not gonna grow very much. They're like 2% grower, 2-3% grower. You know, in St. Lucia, all these small islands, it's just like there's no population growth. It's not gonna grow much, but it doesn't require a lot of capital. It's all duopolies, and it generates a ton of cash. You've got this whole bucket of businesses. We've got a whole bunch of pretty high-growth business, and that's in Panama, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Cayman, Bahamas, Puerto Rico. In three years, you'd say Chile would be in there as well. For sure now we've got. By the way, our LatAm B2B business, these are B2B attacker businesses where we go in B2B without any consumer business in that.
We've got a lot of that upside as well. You look at these five things, it really differentiates our company dramatically, and that's why we're excited about it. Clearly, there's a disconnect right now and a huge dislocation in our price versus where we think the value should be, which is why, Chris, our CFO, and I are aggressively buying back stock. You know, John Malone always tells me, you know, if dislocation is sometimes not a bad thing. It's, you take advantage of it. That's where we are today.
That's super helpful, Balan. Thank you for these. Look, let's explore a little bit more about Chile, right? Because you have been facing, let's say, growing competition on the fixed side. There are, like, some newcomers coming with a pure FTTH approach. You had to cut your price significantly early this year. Why don't you tell us what's going on in the competitive landscape, what you can do organically, and then, if we can, touch on the potential JV with América Móvil, what can change, you know, how this business can change, you know, your position in Chile.
Sure. You know, Chile has been, you know, our best business for the longest time. Things started to go south, in October of 2019 when the social unrest happened. I mean, this place has never had any problems since Pinochet, and then suddenly in 2019, you have millions of people on the street, some of our stores getting burnt down. That was the beginning of some changes. Then four months later, of course, COVID hit, and, you ran into some issues. The challenge for us in Chile is structural, and there's two parts to the structural issue. One, after the social unrest, the peso dropped dramatically from about, let's say, CLP 600 to today it's about CLP 900. It touched CLP 1,000 recently. That's been, you know, so that's one challenge.
Essentially, you look at a $300 million EBITDA business, and you lose about 30-some% currency in U.S. dollars at least, that's quite a bit of bleeding there in U.S. dollars, not in local currency. Secondly, we are the largest broadband market holder. We today have 31% market share of broadband. That's a good and bad thing. The good thing is you have 31%. The bad thing is when there's six operators, there's only one fishing pool to get from, and you have 31%. We've held that 31% at a significant cost to us. Essentially, what we've done is we've just taken price reductions all across the board and to hold market share.
We can do one of two things, give up market share and keep our high ARPU or give up ARPU and hold market share, and we've chosen the latter. It comes with two problems. One, you have a back book issue because we have a back book that's quite a bit higher than our front book, so that eventually has to come down. You see then that's the bleeding on the EBITDA. Secondly, you distract your team because your team is, like, constantly playing defense on that. Now, I'll tell you this, people say infrastructure and all that, it's all just BS. You know, in March and April, I decided together with my team to take our prices down to just be at not the lowest, but close to the lowest.
We were about the same price as where Entel in their promotion, where Claro, actually slightly higher than Claro's price, just slightly higher than Telefónica's price. It was our best month. Just in the month of March, when we just took that price down, we grew 100,000 RGUs in one month. Now many would ask us, and even my partners would, Claro would ask us, "Why did you then take your price up if you were having such big success?" The answer is mostly because you have a spin down effect of your base. We were quite surprised that the spin down from the base that hit our bottom line was more than what we had budgeted for.
What we said was, "Here's what we're gonna do. We'll take the price back up. We'll get the JV done." The synergies on the JV, of course, together with our partner, with the new CEO, and I'll talk about him in a second, we can then decide what our business plan going forward. Clearly, we've proven the model. If I wanna play the price game, we'll play the price game and then suddenly you can start growing. It's gonna be very destructive to the whole market. You have to decide, you know, how much of the market you wanna take down with you, on that. Now lastly, we just announced, we didn't announce it, but we made an internal announcement, but Entel had announced it internally, and my partners in Claro had announced it internally as well.
We just picked up by all the local papers that we are bringing Alfredo Parot, who's from Entel. I couldn't be more excited about him joining us. Well, he'll join us, the JV once the deal is approved. Claro had hired him to be the CEO of Claro Chile. A super smart move. My partner there, Daniel, and the folks at Claro did some really good work on that. You know, credit to them. They brought Alfredo's name to me, and I looked at him. We flew him to Denver. We met with him. We got excited about him right away. They made the hire. When the JV is approved, he'll become the CEO of the joint company. Tremendous guy. We think the future in Chile is bright.
Their currencies will get better. The people are rational. We think consolidation, we started the consolidation with this deal with Claro. We think there's more consolidation to happen there. You bring rationality. Today there's no pricing power for anybody in the market. At some point in the future, that may come back. If that comes back, this thing is just gonna pop.
You mentioned about like further consolidation in Chile, which is something by the way that I truly agree that makes a lot of sense because Chile has been, you know, a very competitive market. If we think about Latin, it's probably the most competitive market we have in the region. Would you participate in any further consolidation? I guess the question is how the regulator would eventually view, let's say, the consolidation, either like on the mobile side or on the fixed side.
Certainly going forward, I can no longer make those decisions by myself. I have a partner now, and we'll just jointly make the decisions. But I think we would both be like-minded in trying to consolidate. I think it'll be harder to consolidate on the mobile side than the fixed side. On the fixed side, I think there should be room for consolidation, more partnerships. There's a lot of infrastructure players there. One of the things we can decide to do is, I mean, between these two very deep-pocketed parents, we can just literally build out fiber to every home pass in a very short period of time if we choose to do that. Or we may choose to partner with another fiber infrastructure company, you know, to use their network.
I mean, the options are limitless to us. I mean, that's really why we're really excited about this partnership.
Interesting. Yeah.
We're bullish on Chile. I certainly am. I think my partner is too. I'm pretty sure because if they weren't, they would've just sold us the business.
Yeah. Well, we are looking to them. Here we go. Hopefully they are.
Yeah.
Excited as well.
Yeah.
Look, maybe just some final question on Chile, 'cause we've been seeing like some, you know, some news flow regarding like political change. Any implication from what's going on in Chile right now for the business or for the industry that we should be aware of?
No, we were happy that, I gotta be careful how I say it, the constitution reform got turned down. It shows pragmatism in the citizens of Chile. Another reason why we're so bullish on the country. I think consolidation's gonna be a positive. I think the currency is gonna eventually improve once things stabilize. Commodities are doing really well. Copper will come back. Lithium, I guess you can talk to anybody from Elon Musk down, lithium is becoming more and more rare and it's more and more valuable. Chile is sitting on tons of deposits. The country's got unlike any other country in Latin America, I'm quite bullish. We spend $ billions in capital in there. My partner spend $ billions in capital in there. Both of us wanna make it work.
Synergies. Did I tell you the synergies are.
Yeah.
Publicly said $180 million plus a year. I tell you, we're gonna blow past that. You NPV that synergies, this is a $1 billion dollar plus synergies. That funds a lot of things. Just the synergies alone, we can build fiber 20x over in Chile.
Yeah.
Just on the synergies. We don't even have to raise capital between the two partners.
Mm-hmm.
You know, this thing, we are just sitting really well. John Malone told me, I mean, you know, when we partnered with Claro, what his words, and I mentioned this to Daniel as well, we're dealing with the A team here. This is two A teams coming together. It's gonna be quite magical.
In this scenario where VTR and Claro, you know, they consolidate themselves, how should we be thinking about like the leverage, right? Because I was just trying to do.
Yeah.
Some math, like at a consolidated level. I think you should be probably in the range of 5x-5.5x, right?
Sure.
How should we be thinking about, let's say, the trends and the overall progress for your leveraging there?
Sure. There's two parts to it. One, we're gonna naturally delever. We already talked about the synergy numbers. I mean, we're gonna just naturally delever, and that's within 24 months or so. Secondly, the way Liberty works, you know, there's a lot of secret sauce with this, but there's not really. I mean, it's just all common sense stuff. But we are very disciplined on our debt. Two parts. One, we silo everything on our debt, so there's no cross-contamination. You know, John being a nautical person, this is, you know, bow, you know, bulkheads on each one of our debt. So everything is siloed correctly. Secondly, unlike anybody else, we hedge everything. We have very, hardly any exposure on our debt at all, currency-wise or even, rate-wise.
Between the two of that when you look at Chile, and we just talked about the currencies, we are sitting on some significant derivative value here. I mean, pretty significant. In the second quarter, we kinda hinted or we mentioned that we monetized some of that, gave a number to it. Let's just say that that's not all of it. We're still sitting on a ton together with our partners. Once the JV is closed, we can decide what to do with that. We're bringing in a lot of value into the transaction. Just those derivative values alone, you know, delevers things quite a bit. Where the debt's trading, you know, we think, it's the debt's not gonna be an issue for either company.
We have no covenants on the debt either. They are long-term debt, so it really, you know, if you look at the tenor of the debt, and I'll talk about LLA in general, but certainly applies to Chile. We have really no debt exposure until 2027, 2028. We have that one convert sitting out there, in 2024. Really, we have no debt exposure. Everything's hedged. We're sitting pretty good. In Chile, like I said, the derivatives are so much in the money right now. I mean, all the swaps we together with, you know, between Chris and Carlos, we are if they decide to snap their finger, that's $a few hundred million.
Yeah. Good. Maybe let's shift gears here to talk about Panama, right? Which is a quite interesting market for you. You just concluded the transaction to buy Claro's operation in that market. We also had Digicel announcing that they, you know, could likely exit this market, right? Because of the very strong position that both Liberty and Millicom are enjoying in this market. What can you tell us about, you know, Panama at this moment, and how should we be thinking about your progress in there?
We really like the Panama market. One, it's all U.S. dollars. Two, on the fixed side, there's two operators. On the mobile side, there was four, now down to three. The third operator is under receivership or, you know, I don't even know what the right word is. The government is really running it for them. They've, you know, clearly, they were not happy with this when we did the Claro announcement because, you know, Digicel thought we were the right buyers for their asset. And there's a law in Panama that prevents it from going to three to two. Really, the strategic options are quite limited once we announced the Claro deal. That deal, we closed about a month and a half, two months ago.
You know, it's one where many people have challenged us, did we pay too much for it? You know, we do our math correctly and, you know, the business came to us in a way where there's some things that were in like all transactions, you know, you get surprised by a few things. But there's nothing there that we are too terribly worried about. The synergies are quite good. It'll turn out to be a good transaction for us. We've always said publicly that when we do M&A, you know, it's just one part of all the things that we do. In M&A, for us, getting bigger is not our goal. Making money is our goal. We don't buy bad assets. We're not fixer-upper guys. We are good operators. We operate really well.
We don't buy bad businesses and think we're geniuses that can turn them around. We're just good operators. We buy good businesses and just make them slightly better with scale and some of our, you know, operating secret sauce. The Claro Panama business is a good business. We bought it. The synergies are gonna be great. Combining it would be really good. We are down to two fixed operators, three mobile operators, all U.S. dollars. We've got a good partner in the government. We like Panama.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sounds interesting, I guess. Maybe just remind me, you were targeting roughly $70 million of synergies, right?
OpEx and CapEx, yes.
Yes, OpEx and CapEx. How long it should take for you to get there?
Usually, it's about 24 months for us to get synergies. Because there's some dis-synergies in the beginning. You've got to invest on some parts, especially on IT, et cetera. In this case, the government put a, you know, a remedy on us that don't allow us to combine stores or commercials until like first quarter of next year. You know, so essentially, I've got a Claro store and my Más Móvil store right next to each other, and I can't shut down one or the two of them.
Okay.
For another seven months or so, six to seven months. But eventually I can. I've got two headquarters. Eventually, it'll be one. I've got thousands of towers. They've got thousands of towers. We're gonna combine it. I don't need 3,500 towers, you know. So all that will come to us. Just be patient.
Yep.
We have a very methodical way of how we do integration, and it's a playbook we applied many times, you know.
You mentioned OpEx and CapEx. Is there anything on the revenue side that could eventually, let's say, boost these numbers?
I think on the revenue side, it comes from what eventually happens to Digicel. Right now, both companies, Millicom and us, Tigo and us, are picking that up. I think we'll see what happens there. If the government is so inclined, we would love to make it a two-player market on the mobile as well.
Yeah. Yeah. This will definitely increase your pricing power significantly, right?
It would. Let me tell you one thing that we do in our company. I mean, I give a lot of latitude to all my operating managers, but there is one operating a few, but this one everybody knows. If you wanna take a price increase, you need my permission, and I don't approve price increases. We wanna run our business not by taking price increases. I say that in the context of price increases make you lazy. People that, you know, put in their budgets, my growth and yeah, I'm gonna take this price increase.
I mean, I tell my managers, "You wanna grow revenue by taking price increase, that skill set I can find very easily." I mean, even a high school kid can come in and tell me how to grow revenue by taking price increase. Growing revenue by volume and by controlling your costs, growing your margins by controlling your cost, that's a lot harder, and that's the kind of managers I look for, and that's how we run our businesses. No, there will come a time in some years ahead that I may take a price increase, but we haven't done in the last couple of years. We don't see any price increases in the near term.
Even in a high inflationary environment?
You just have to manage your costs. You become a better manager that way.
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
I don't think so. Maybe just to make sure that we touch on both Puerto Rico and Costa Rica. As you mentioned, the opportunities you have after the acquisition of AT&T in Puerto Rico and Telefónica in Costa Rica. Let's start with Puerto Rico. What is the situation there? How the business is progressing so far?
It's a good business. Great business actually, I think for all three participants in the market. There's really two quad play players there, Claro and us, and then you've got T-Mobile. T-Mobile's a fierce competitor, make no mistake. We compete with two of the best. It makes you sharper. I mean, Claro is a you know, a hugely successful company. T-Mobile is a hugely successful company. You just gotta up your game every day. I've got a good management team on the ground. It's one that Chris and I spend a lot of time on. I mean, we spend a lot of time on all of our businesses, but this one is special for a couple of reasons. One, it's a pure play U.S. business. We've doubled down, like I said, twice.
One, with rebuilding the whole market after Hurricane Maria, Irma, and secondly, buying AT&T. Third, we have this small little business today in U.S. Virgin Islands that came with the AT&T acquisition. We announced that in 36 months, I will fiber to every home in U.S. Virgin Islands. It'll be one of the few places in the world where you're 100% fiber. How do we do that on all of it? We, the U.S government, through the FCC, has this funding program on mainland to bring broadband to rural America. In Puerto Rico and U.S. Virgin Islands, they called it Uniendo. In Puerto Rico, the Uniendo funding was really split between us and Claro, and both of us are building and upgrading. In U.S. Virgin Islands, we won 100% of it.
All the Uniendo funding in U.S. Virgin Islands, we got. We're putting it to good work. We're really bullish on that. That thing is gonna explode in the next 36 months as well in such a positive way. In many ways, between the Uniendo funding, the upside of more homes that we can pass, we have a great network in there. We've got quad play, the AT&T business, our business. We've got the synergies coming in. We've got a very rational market. Yeah, very little to not like about Puerto Rico.
I want to touch on CapEx later.
It's all US dollars. Did I say it's all U.S. dollars?
I want to touch on CapEx later, but I'm very curious about the unit economics of these two projects you have. What is the cost for you to put like fiber on the ground.
Sure.
Like with a FTTH approach in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands?
It is much, much more expensive. Good news, bad news. The good news is it's much more expensive because you build some more. It's not like Chile, you know, any of the other places in Latin America where you can aerial connect and you can build homes, you know, fiber under 100 bucks a home pass. In Puerto Rico, it's very expensive. All the poles are owned by, you know, either Claro or the power company or us, and really hard to attach to, and a lot of underground, and it's really hard to dig in San Juan with the old places. The cost there is not much different than United States. It's aerial is very expensive, 3x. Underground is even more expensive.
You don't have much labor in there, so you have to fly in people from mainland to come build. It's only 3 million people, 1.1 million homes, so there's not much. It's not like some of these other places, right? In Colombia, where you've got, you know, 60, 70 million people, or Peru or something like that. The barrier of entry is pretty high, there. We are spending most of our capital on 3.1 and fiber to new areas and fiber upgrades in San Juan. What's the return on that? Well, I'll tell you, it's a lot better when the government funds and provides you funding to do that work. Yeah.
Interesting. Thank you, Balan. I guess, moving on to the Subsea business. I mean, we saw some news flow in the past suggesting that, you can analyze, let's say, some strategic options for this business, right? What is the status in there?
Sure.
Are you considering either monetizing this asset or bringing on board a new partner that could eventually, you know, better evaluate these assets? How should we think about the Subsea business?
You know, this is one that's really tormented me for a while. I'll say, you know, my board is mostly on the page of why are you even thinking about selling this business? It's a huge cash generative business, long-term contracts. We ourselves, so we are about 25% of the revenue in that business, ourselves. So a lot of intercompany transfers. We sell it, we provide immediately 25% guarantee. The next largest customer is about 5%, all U.S. dollars, long-term contracts, great network. The only resilient network in the market. But it generates a ton of cash, and it's cash that we love. It funds a lot of.
You know, we are a levered equity model, so you always every levered equity model business needs one machine that's like good and bad, dark days, bright days, it just the cash just keeps coming, and this is our business. So I hate to sell it. As a matter of fact, when I talk to buyers, I sometimes even try to talk them out of bidding into it so that I can hang on to it. We did test the market because a couple of my board members did ask me to test the market on that. I said, "Sure, we ought to." Just the math behind it, and it's a very high bar for me to want to sell this.
Now, fortunately or unfortunately, when we did put it out to market, we had at least a couple of bidders that hit that bar. One, you know, I mean, it's a SPAC that we said show up with the money, and we'll, we can talk. The second one, I think, would want to do it and, but the debt market closed down on them because they were gonna lever it up. They would say to me that, you know, "Hey, give me another 10 more months." We're like, "Well, when you get the cash, show up." I mean, in John Malone's world, in Liberty world, everything's for sale.
You come back at the same number you just gave me, yeah, we transact, but I'm not holding my breath and not neither. I love that business, and hopefully, they don't come back. If they come back at the same number, yeah, we'll sell the business. In the meantime, what I've done is I've put a new general manager over the business, a good friend of mine, and Ray Collins, he's now my Senior Vice President of Infrastructure. He's gonna run that business. A lot of the strategic things we were contemplating with this buyer, we would just do it ourselves. It doesn't require a huge amount of capital, and the upside is great. We've been running it for cash, by the way, for the last four years.
The next four years, we'll probably run it just slightly differently. We're really quite bullish on it. You know? Quite bullish on it.
Can you remind the unit economics of this business? Is there anything that you can share with us?
Let's put it this way. It's about, if you know, really take a lot of the IRUs and all that out of there, it's in the $230 million range EBITDA, very low CapEx. Most of it dropped to the free cash flow line. It's made up of two businesses, the subsea business and the AT&T LatAm B2B business. Most of the capital actually goes to the AT&T LatAm B2B business. That's in Dominican Republic, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, and it's lots of upside. We're small, so everything, you know, in Colombia, we own it, like, $60 million in revenue, so it's really small. Easy to go get 100% growth there to $100 million. Yep. Yeah, it's really good.
Maybe talking about, like, the B2B business that you mentioned, I mean, what is the outlook for these? How fast do you believe this business, you know, can grow in the coming three to five years?
B2B is a great segment for us. We break it down to four categories. B2B, that's an incumbent B2B. We have a lot of, you know, telco-like businesses that's incumbent, so it's a lot of defense/offense in there, 'cause we own a lot of the government contracts, et cetera. Second, we have B2B that's new entrant. That's the B2B LatAm. We're going into markets where we have no consumer business. Third, we have B2B where we have the cable company. Cable companies didn't invest much in B2B, so there's a lot of upside on B2B there. Then fourthly, our wholesale B2B, the subsea business, which is doing great. All four of them have positive growth stories behind them, so we are quite happy with that.
Which one of them is growing faster at this point?
The fastest is the LatAm B2B Attacker business.
LatAm B2B. Yeah.
It's also the smallest number, so the denominator is small, so it's clearly, you know, sometimes when you have a 10-dollar business going to 20 is a lot easier than if you have a billion-dollar business going to 2 billion.
Yeah.
Don't mistake the percentage growth with the overall contribution growth. Yeah.
Understood. This is interesting because one of the key question we get from investors is regarding, you know, the potential for you to consider and evaluate, you know, some cross-border M&A, right? So you mentioned that the B2B business is going to new markets for you, right, where you do not operate as a B2C.
Yeah.
Or a company. What can you tell us about cross-border M&A for you?
They're all just, on the B2B side, they're all just small businesses.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're quite happy with that. We're not willing to put in big capital on that, nor do I think it's necessary. It's not, you know, we'll never make an all-in bet on the B2B front. On other M&A, I'd say we'll be opportunistic, but most of the M&A that I wanna do, we've done.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we wanted to bolster Puerto Rico and get a mobile business there. We did that. We wanted to get a mobile business in Costa Rica. We did that. Claro in Panama, that was opportunistic for us. The opportunity came. We had a good counterparty there, so we said, "Let's do that." The joint venture in Chile, I think that's hugely accretive. We did that. I don't see us wanting to do more unless, you know, something comes in front of us that's really accretive, we do it. I'll tell you this, it's gonna be really hard to be more accretive than my stock today.
Yeah.
I mean, it's insanity. I just told you, just Puerto Rico alone is worth more than my whole company. It's really hard to compete with my buyback. You know, we're just good capital allocators. We're not, like, married to anything, you know. We just move capital to where, you know, it's most valuable and best return. I mean, people ask us, even in Chile, does that require a lot more capital? We're like, in Chile, if the management team comes to us and say, "We can grow the business, and we can do all these different things," and we look at the IRRs on that, if it's better than my stock buyback or better than anywhere else I can deploy capital, we do it. If it's not, we won't. You know, there's no need to.
You know, we just put money to work and right now, it's really hard to beat the IRRs on my stock buyback, you know?
Yeah. I agree. Although there are like several other companies that are trading at a very, let's say, low multiples at this time, right?
It's not so relevant. Everybody's whatever they trade, and everybody a lot of people say they're sellers, but then they put a price up. They're really not sellers. I mean, those prices, everybody. There's no harm, no foul. I mean, we would value ourselves a lot higher than where we trade as well. Yeah. I don't see anything distressed in Latin America where anybody needs to leave. At one point, Telefónica wanted to really leave, but I think they've got a new round of love for the region. I don't think they maybe they'll leave, but we're not. Let me state again, we're not interested in getting bigger. We're just interested in making money. If just because somebody's for sale doesn't mean we'll wanna buy them. No. Yeah.
Usually, for the numbers to work for us, it probably won't work for the seller.
Yeah. No, that makes sense. I guess, just to make sure that we can touch on these, I mean, your leverage is right now slightly above 4x.
Yeah.
If I'm not mistaken. What are the goals in here? I mean, if I would think about, you know, everything that is going on, Chile, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Panama, plenty of synergies, you know, for you to enjoy in this market. What is the process here in terms of the leverage, right? What is your goal in there?
You know, from a capital allocation, we can buy back stock and pay down debt, give out dividends, fund internal projects, go buy another company. Let's say those are the five choices I have. In rank order, dividend would be the last that we do. Second last would be paying down debt. Third last would be buying another company. Fourth would be internal projects, and then the best thing right now is buyback. Now, why did I put dividend and debt paydown last? Dividend, I think, we think is highly inefficient. Debt paydown, we'll just naturally de-lever based on our long-range plan and our intel, you know, we're gonna just naturally de-lever. Most of our debt's not due until 2027, 2028. We have that convertible, which we'll probably take care of in 2024, which is relatively small.
It's not a big deal to us. 2027, 2028, we'll deal with it. By the time we get to 2027, I mean, our leverage ratio will be, you know, significantly lower than where we're at. Now, we may decide to recap, you know, Chris and I, if we, if the rates become favorable again, we may recap and buy back more stock, or we may recap and do something with it. If the rates remain high and the cost of money remains high, we'll just naturally de-lever.
Yeah.
You know, I think the options in front of us are pretty good.
Yeah.
I mean, the goal, primary goal is we gotta operate well and generate the cash. We got it to a good number this year. We had to reduce it because of the Claro Panama acquisition that, you know, based on the numbers we saw after the acquisition, we adjusted our, you know, our guidance down by $30 million. That's just a one-time thing. We will adjust it, and we'll get the synergies. It's just lasting a little bit, that's all. It's fine for us. Next year, we're gonna guide to a number I think people will like, and then I think every guidance on free cash flow from here on, people are just gonna like it. Yeah, I think it's been good.
Yeah.
Pretty happy.
Good to hear that, I guess.
Yeah.
Okay. Look, I guess, we are running out of time. Balan, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you for having me.
This was great.
Thank you for having us.
Yeah.
Yep.
Great.