Hello, everyone, and welcome to Millicom's Second Quarter 2021 Earnings Call. I'm Michel Morin, Head of Strategy and Investor Relations at Millicom. This event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO, Mauricio Ramos and our CFO, Tim Pennington. And after their prepared remarks, We will have a Q and A session.
By now, you should have received a copy of our earnings release, which is available on our website along with the slides that we will be referencing during today's presentation. Now please turn to Slide 2 for our safe harbor disclosure. We will be making forward looking statements, which involve risks and uncertainties and could have a material impact on our results. We will also be referring to many non IFRS metrics throughout the presentation and we define these metrics on Slide 3. You can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release and on our website.
Now with those disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio Ramos. Mauricio?
Thank you, Michel. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today on this video conference call. I hope you enjoyed the short video. This is how one of our colleagues in Panama described in his own way our San Gertigo culture.
This video actually went viral inside the company and we wanted to share with you because it gives you a sense of the pride, the enthusiasm and energy Of each one of our 21,000 employees, thanks to them we had an outstanding second quarter. So let's get started on that on Slide 5. As I said a minute ago, we had an excellent quarter. Our strong performance in Q1 continued into Q2 and we're still gaining momentum, Which is setting us up for a solid second half of the year. I will go in more detail on each of these points in the next few slides, These are the key highlights.
We have double digit service revenue and EBITDA growth and more importantly you will see that we're also growing compared to 2019. As you also know, we now have more and more satisfied customers, better networks, more revenue, more EBITDA, more growth And more cash flow than we did before the pandemic started. We're now seeing growth in every one of our lines of businesses. Our home or cable business is growing double digits. We continue to have solid net additions, track penetration higher on networks and grow ARPU.
Mobile is also up double digits and we had one of our best quarters ever for postpaid net additions, especially in Colombia. And B2B is now back to positive growth as we're seeing a strong demand for our digital solutions. And finally, we're seeing these Strong results across the board in every country. Said differently, every part of our business grew in Q2. And let's go into the details beginning on Slide 6.
There are two messages on this slide. 1st, Our service revenue and EBITDA grew double digits this quarter. I know that we had an easy comparison versus a very difficult quarter last year, But look at the charts on the right. You can see that we're also growing compared to Q2 twenty nineteen. We're up more than 3 And more than 4% on EBITDA compared to Q2 2019 on an organic basis.
We now have more revenue and more EBITDA than we had before COVID And we're now also growing faster. And as you can see on Slide 7, all engines are back on and every business is now contributing to our growth. This chart does a good job of describing our journey over the past year. Obviously, Q2 of last year was a low point for Mobile business was hit very hard by the lockdowns last year, but prepaid recovered quickly and it is now our fastest growing business. Postpaid, as we expected, took a bit longer to recover, but it is now accelerating at the fastest rate.
And as you know, It is a segment we have been focusing on and one for which we have high expectations going forward. B2B has taken longer to recover, as you know, We have started to see it come back gradually. We're hopeful that this will continue to improve as economic activity recovers along with rising vaccination rates in our countries. Finally, our home or cable business has been our most resilient one throughout the past year. We lost some revenue last year when we decided to provide basic connectivity Services to customers in need.
That was a great decision, as you know. We have seen increased demand for broadband and Pay2B product And our revenue and our growth recovered very quickly. So let's go to Slide 8 to look at our home business in quite some detail. On the top left, you can see that we continue to add customers at a very, very rapid clip. For the 4th Straight quarter, in Q2, we added at least 100,000 new HFC customer relationships, which means that over the last year, if you do the math, we have added more than half 1,000,000 customers to our growing cable business.
Our home or cable business is growing its customer base indeed at an amazing speed. We now have 4,000,000 home customers. That's 15% more customers than we did 1 year ago. This is largely coming from increasing penetration on our network, now 33%, which is helping return on capital and cash flow efficiency. And we also continue to expand our network as we see ample room for growth going forward.
We added another 160,000 homes passed in Q2 And about 500,000 in the past year. We're adding all these customers while also preserving our Growth profile, but it now has scale as well. From what it was only 5 years ago, it is now a $1,600,000,000 business for us. And As you can see from the first half results, we are turning that into a run rate of about $1,700,000,000 for this year. And you also know that we're far from done.
We will continue to both reach more homes and to drive penetration The pandemic has told everyone that broadband is a necessity for every household. Now let's take a look at our postpaid business, which also performed We're extremely well in Q2 as you can see on Slide 9. As you saw earlier, postpaid was hard hit in the early days of the pandemic. Customers began migrating from postpaid plans to prepaid and would face temporary challenges in collecting unpaid bills. And we ended up disconnecting around 450,000 postpaid customers in Q2 of last year.
With live end products and we continue to strongly invest in our networks to improve customer experience. And now we have seen the strongest recovery in postpaid that we kind of hoped for. Q2 in particular was one of our strongest orders ever in terms of postpaid net adds, and this was driven mostly by our exceptionally strong performance in Colombia. We now have more postpaid customers than we did before COVID, and we have strong momentum to continue growing. Let's look briefly now at the quarter on a country by country basis on Slide Tim, Tim will talk about some of this later, but this slide speaks for itself.
The main message is that every single one of our markets grew this quarter, And most of them grew double digits. El Salvador had another amazing quarter, driven by strong mobile results and it grew 21%. Bolivia performed well in all business lines and Guatemala continues to thrive, while in Panama we continue to execute on our integration playbook, Which is driving very strong growth in the customer base. Let's do a deeper dive into the results in Colombia and our newer markets of Panama and Nicaragua on the next Three slides, starting with Colombia on Slide 11. I am sure there were expectations for our performance in Colombia this quarter.
The short answer is that we're very pleased to report that, one, we added a record number of postpaid customers, 220,000 in the quarter. Our postpaid customer base is now up 26% year on year in Colombia. 2, And we were the biggest winner on portability in the market. 3, that we now have the best mobile network in Colombia without an inch of doubt And as you know, this is typically the most important attribute for postpaid customers. In Colombia, we bought the spectrum, we built the networks, we increased our commercial distributions and our customer service capabilities.
And this, which you're seeing on this chart, are the results. And our home business also continued to grow in Colombia in Q2 with 32,000 new net adds. These impressive results in Colombia come despite the large public demonstrations that affected the country during Q2. These disturbances indeed had a negative impact on our commercial particularly prepaid and yet we were still able to continue to grow very strongly as you see on this page. Now let's look at Panama on Slide 12.
As you know, we bought Cambly Onda in December of 2018 and then we bought our mobile asset 8 months later in August 2019 from Telefonica. We have since successfully integrated businesses, proceeded to modernize and expand our mobile network, Prove our fixed network and successfully introduced the TIGO brand earlier this year, all despite of and in the middle of the pandemic And with a recession on Morin. As you know, Panama's GDP contracted 18% last year. The results of our strategy are clear on the top part of this Hi. We have grown our customer base in both mobile and fixed, especially during the pandemic, and we're now seeing very rapid revenue growth in our consumer business.
We expect that B2B will follow once GDP growth comes back. Said in a simpler manner, we have positioned ourselves extremely well for when the Panamanian economy kicks back into high gear and we expect that it will do just that sooner rather than later. Finally, let's look at our other mobile acquisition success story, Nicaragua. We acquired a mobile business in Nicaragua in May of 2019, Giving us a leadership position in a 2 player mobile market and one where we had a very small fixed business with very big growth potential And a tremendous cross selling opportunity. Similar to our playbook in Panama, we entered Nicaragua with the expectation that we would invest to upgrade the mobile network to add capacity bringing up true quality standards and that investment is paying off.
Our mobile customer base in Nicaragua is up 11% since the acquisition And we have continued to make important inroads with our home business, which is growing very rapidly, now supported by our larger brand presence and the ability to cross sell to our mobile user base. The key message is that even with all the challenges that the country is facing, we have remained focused on executing our integration plan and we're seeing the synergies do come through. Revenue in Nicaragua is now growing double digits while EBITDA is up 20% year on year and up almost 10% in dollars from where it was when we bought the business 2 years ago. Let me turn it over to Tim to go over the financials for the quarter.
Thank you, Mauricio. So let me get straight into the financials turning to Slide 15. On the Slide 15, you can see our usual bridge from the IFRS reported numbers to the LatAm segment numbers of $1,400,000,000 in service revenue and $620,000,000 in EBITDA that we're discussing on this call. If you let me start on Slide 16 with the macro backdrop. We have seen Economic activity gradually recovering in most markets.
In Central America, there's been record levels of remittances and economists are forecasting GDP E growth of 3% to 5% for most countries. Inflation is climbing somewhat, but it's still at manageable levels. FX rates have been generally stable and indeed we have seen almost a 1% revenue growth coming from FX tailwinds. Vaccination rates are below 25% in most of our markets and COVID has certainly not disappeared from Latin America. Indeed, on many accounts, it may now be one of the most affected regions in the world.
That said, we do not see a return to the more severe levels of Mobility restrictions that were in place this time last year. Mauricio has covered most of the factors behind the double digit Latam revenue growth, so I'll move to the next slide, which shows the revenue growth by operation. On slide 17, you can see that all but 2 of the operations posted double digit service revenue growth in the 2nd quarter. And whilst Q2 2020 was a low bar, we are also comfortably ahead of our 2019 numbers, demonstrating the strategy is effective. El Salvador is storming ahead driven by mobile, which is benefiting from spectrum and network investments.
Guatemala is a game search with another impressive performance up 12.2% year on year. And remember that Guatemala was one of our less impacted to countries by COVID restrictions this time last year. Finally, I want to pick up on Paraguay, Where a one off adjustment reduced revenues and EBITDA by $4,000,000 Now excluding this one off revenue growth would have been 4.3%. Turning to slide 18, EBITDA grew by 14% year on year or $76,000,000 driven by revenues. We've already talked about the substantial pickup in, amongst other things, postpaid subscribers, but you can see here on this chart that the impact was felt In much higher sales and marketing costs than we normally expected to see.
We believe this investment is well worth making especially in Colombia. Moving on to Slide 19, EBITDA growth was double digits in almost all countries and in El Salvador and Bolivia up Around 50%. Now this largely is because we took high bad debt charges in those two countries last year, whereas today we are back
to more
normal You'll notice that in Colombia, we did not grow. I think Mauricio has explained this pretty fully, but the margin contraction largely stems Significantly higher customer acquisition costs that I've just mentioned. And I think on that point and despite this higher investment, it's also worth Mentioning that the overall LatAm EBITDA margin was higher in Q2 2021 than this time last year, and it stands at over 40%. Before turning to cash flow, I want to spend a few minutes on CapEx on Slide 20. Now this time last year in the eye of the pandemic, we stand hard on discretionary spending, including capital expenditure in order to preserve cash flow.
In fact, as the business showed resilience, we started to ease back into CapEx spend in the 3rd Q4, ending the year at just under $1,000,000,000 invested. We invested in network upgrades and bringing quality customers onto the network and that has paid off. We told you that coming into 2021, we were accelerating the investment. And on this slide, you can see some of the things we have been investing in. We've taken on about 10 times the number of customer additions in home than we did in the first half last year.
B2B installations have increased by 13% and so on. This has all had an impact in higher And we are expecting to spend a further $100,000,000 to $200,000,000 on CapEx in 2021 Compared to last year, and this is funded out of higher EBITDA. So let me now turn to the implications for our cash flow on Slide 21. On slide 21, you see the operating cash flow bridge. Remember, we define operating cash flow as EBITDA less capital expenditure.
And the first thing to say is that we are on track to hit our $1,400,000,000 target for 2021. Now we have only invested around $400,000,000 in CapEx in the first half, but our CapEx is always back end weighted, And I expect that to be the case this year. So based on higher CapEx in 2021 and on the EBITDA run rate that we expect, We are comfortable in confirming that we're on track to hit our OCF target of at least $1,400,000,000 for this year. Turning to our debt and leverage on Slide 22. Once again, we made very good progress towards our leverage targets.
Net debt reduced by $224,000,000 partially reflecting the sale of our remaining Helios Tower ships. Plus, as we lap the weak Q2 2020 with an increase in proportionate EBITDA, Our leverage has reduced by 24 basis points from Q1 and 31 basis points from the start of the year. It now stands at 2.7 times. Leases remained stable in the quarter, taking our underlying net financial obligations to just over $6,300,000,000 or 2.89 times Finally, on Slide 23, with Strong subscriber growth, revenue and EBITDA growth, our cash flow on track, net debt reducing and leverage below 3 times. We have today announced the resumption of our share buyback program.
So with that, let me pass it back to Mauricio to wrap up.
Thanks, Tim. Before we take your questions, let me recap the most important takeaways today. First, we have invested in the and in our networks throughout the pandemic, and this is clearly paying off. We've increased our customer base and our market share in most countries, and we're winning in Colombia. 2nd, our growth is accelerating and that's why we expect our CapEx to be higher in the second half because it is directly linked to our subscriber gains in postpaid and in home And to more available network coverage and prepaid, which in turn yields more usage and revenue.
3rd, our operating cash flow is on track To hit our full year target of at least $1,400,000,000 And 4th and finally, now that our strong operational and financial performance, Our confidence that we can further continue to reduce leverage and fully continue to invest in the business and our favorite outlook for the remainder of the year, We're resuming shareholder remuneration with a share buyback program of about $100,000,000 that Tim just mentioned. Our growth now gives us room to continue to invest in the business, Continue to deliver rapidly and resume shareholder remuneration. We also happen to think that our stock is one of the best investments we can make today. And with that, we're now ready for your
questions. Thank you, Mauricio. Thank you, Tim. So we'll now begin the Q and A session. Would like to ask a question, please let us know by e mailing us at investorsmillicom.com and we will add you to the queue.
When I announce your name, please unmute your line and make sure that your video camera is turned on. And then please mute your line after you've asked the question. So our first question is coming from Marcelo Santos of JPMorgan. Marcelo?
Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my questions. I have actually two questions. The first one is on Colombia. So we saw you had a very good result in terms of net adds On your new postpaid campaign, I would like to understand a little bit better outlook for margins.
We took a bit of a hit this Quarter and as well as the ARPU, which was a little bit softer. So that's the first question. The second question is on Bolivia's performance, Which although it decreased a lot on a year over year basis was one of the few countries that had quarterly sequential declines Both in service revenues and EBITDAXO, if you could comment a
little bit more on boliva, that
would be very helpful. Thank you.
Sure. Thank you, Marcelo. Good to see you and thanks for your questions. On Colombia, generally speaking, we're, As you can see, very, very pleased with our results in the market. It's been a quarter in which we've been able to Show all that we can do with the new network and with increased commercial distribution that we have.
And you're seeing now the results in terms of just strong, strong net adds. We can talk a lot more about Colombia later, but specifically on your question on Net outs and the outlook for margins, we like the new normal where we win in Colombia. We're happy to reinvest Our continued customer and revenue growth into our margins because Colombia for now is It's a good strong game of volume and we are gaining volume in Colombia. So we're very happy with the outlook That we have for our increased position in Colombia. And again, we can talk about more strategically in a minute.
And Bolivia, you're right. It's one country where we are not yet back at the pre COVID levels, but it's coming back very, very strongly. We envision that it will be back there very, very soon. In Bolivia, as you know, we went into couple of years of political and the macro turmoil, things are a lot more stable today than they are. We like the stability that we're seeing in Bolivia.
The business continues to perform every day much stronger than the day before. Despite competition on mobile, we see some Stabilization really happening in our marketplace and that's where very positive that will be back to pre COVID levels later on in the year. And The home business in Bolivia is just like hitting back in all years. A few years ago, we didn't have a home business in Bolivia. Now we have a very strong home or cable business that we built over the last 5 years and we continue to grow With strong ARPU and subscriber growth and as a result of that we're bullish that we're going to come back to Bolivia Perhaps later this year, back to pre COVID levels.
Thank you very much.
Okay. Thanks, Marcelo. Our next question will come from Stephane Goffin at DNB. Stephane? Stephane, you may still be on mute.
No, there we are. Can you hear me? Yes.
First, I would like To continue on Colombia, we saw this with the network performance versus peers. And you're still lagging on one of the key metrics, coverage. Just Give us an understanding where you're versus America Movil in terms of 4 gs network coverage in Colombia. Secondly, the investments in cable homes past That accelerated again this quarter after being a bit slow during the pandemic. How should we expect that going forward?
Are you trying to come back to higher Coverage on of the cable network. And then just thirdly on El Salvador reporting 20.5% Service revenue growth, which is exceptional. Can you just what explains this development and what should we
Thank you, Stefan. And those are obviously excellent questions. Let me be hard State Colombia a little bit more holistically because I know we're going to get a lot of questions on Colombia. So I think it's better just to go at it In a more holistic manner than just the specific bits and pieces. So let me go Actually, financially and strategically, and hopefully that will give everybody a complete picture of what's going on in Colombia.
Let me start with the short term. Our quarter results we view as outstanding. We, as I said earlier to Marcelo's question, we like in this quarter To have been the player in Colombia with the most net ads on postpaid of the entire ecosystem there. And you can go and look at the portability numbers in Colombia yourselves because they're public and you'll see that we're the net winner. So we actually love The Colombia results this quarter is what we expect that we would be doing today.
And remember, we're talking about this net gains in the context of A new entrant in the market. So there are nothing short of, we think, very, very strong. Now what's going on operationally first in Colombia? On mobile, we had record postpaid net adds in Q2. We've never had this kind of record net adds in Colombia.
And that's happening Because we're number 1 in portability as I said. Now the reason for this as you very well point out and I'll address your question Stefan directly is because we now have the best network in Colombia. And we're marketing it as such. And this is according to various number of sources. And we're also on the back of it providing best quality of service.
And as you know, we've doubled the size of our commercial distribution network for postpaid, so no surprise that we're getting the results that we're getting. Now that one area In the network that we're missing coverage, you should not be at all focused on that because Colombia is a huge, Huge, huge market. And I urge you to look at a map, which shows the Amazonia and the Orinokea, right? So a specific geographic coverage of Colombia is not something that we aim to win on because we already cover 99% of the urban population and where it matters. As Already have and the coverage that matters indoor we got as a result of the 700 megahertz and the fastness with which we have built the network.
We'll continue to gain a little bit in coverage next year, but it is not the one area that consumers focus about. We win in All the other relevant categories by far. Now our home business just to continue holistically what's going on in Colombia continues to grow Very, very strong. We have 32,000 net adds this quarter, which is pretty darn good. And if you do the math, our home revenue is growing double digits In Colombia with much better penetration, 32%, 33% almost in Colombia.
And that goes to the point, I think, on your second question, I'm going to mix it with Colombia, is revamped cable growth. You saw that if you go back a year or so, we've built about half a 1000000 homes. We will continue to build homes at a rapid CLIP, we have a target of reaching about 60,000,000 homes, which we don't really call a target, we call a horizon, because Obviously, it can continue to grow after that as the socioeconomics in the region improve. There's been one key development In Colombia, which is that we can now get to build homes in Colombia, build homes in Colombia using the openFIDR That other providers are putting into the marketplace. We view that as positive.
There are now today 2 open fiber providers in Colombia And that will help us get to those horizon levels in a much faster way, but also in a less capital intensive way, Giving us access, particularly one of them to the Bogota market where we have had very little access so far. So Colombia operationally, we think It is where we wanted to be. Now financially you've seen the numbers. Our revenue growth is 9.5%, top in the Hack, for sure. And we're happy, as I said, to reinvest that margin.
Because when you look at Colombia, and I want to be super clear with everybody here strategically, The name of the game is for us to gain volume at this point in time. So don't be surprised that the margins are depressed. They need to be depressed because we're gaining share in Colombia. Now
if you look at
the big picture strategically in Colombia, We now have a state of the art nationwide network. Mobile, we have both high and low frequencies. It is an empty network for us in Colombia when we only have 15% to 20% market share. So we stand to gain significantly. And as I've said before, we now have access to Bogota on mobile because we have the low frequency bands.
When you look at home, We now have a network in Colombia which is about 5,500,000 homes with HFC. But now we will have access to Bogota because one of the 2 key open fiber providers will give access to Bogota and that we stand to gain by having access to Bogota. So when you look at this, Bogota, which is 40% of the GDP in Colombia, is a market where we have historically had little access on both mobile And fixed. And going forward, we're going to have better access both on mobile with our new network that penetrates indoor and allows us to have access to that market. And also on fixed because we're going to finally be able to sell through this open fiber provider in Colombia to the Bogota market.
So when you couple these things on our state of the art networks, we're pretty bullish on our ability strategically to be better positioned today than we have ever been in Colombia And the ability to drive FMC in Colombia because we have both fixed and mobile networks. So when you put all that together, we don't only just like Cube results, we like the outlook for Colombia ourselves. That was a handful on Colombia, but hopefully that kind of gives everybody the big picture in Colombia and also answers your Questions in El Salvador, I think Tim, go ahead. You need to unmute.
One more holistic point on this that, yes, the margins were lower in Colombia, But the group margins were higher. And that's the way we manage the portfolio. We took a view that wanted to invest in Colombia. We're mindful of the margin progression of the group as a whole. And therefore, we can manage it as a portfolio.
That's the advantage of having So I just wanted to make that point because I think people are getting lost. The margins are lower in Colombia, of course they are. But for the group and for LATAM, They're still above 40%. Sorry, Mauricio, back to you.
No, no, no. It's a fantastic point. We like investing in Columbia, at this point in time, it's the right thing for us to do. So all this growth, all this additional growth that we have, we're like investing in our margin in Columbia because that's what's gonna give us the scale that we need In Colombia going forward. Now, El Salvador, if you recall 3 or so many years ago, we were struggling in El Salvador.
So we did the right thing. We bought some spectrum. We put money behind the network. We changed the management team and supported them strongly. We've increased our commercial distribution in El Salvador as well.
We've increased our focus on the consumer in El Salvador and just our service layers in El Salvador. And we have now the highest NPS we've ever had in El Salvador with a strong network and a strong commercial distribution. So no surprise, we are getting fantastic results in El Salvador. It is both execution and focus with investments.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thanks, Stefan. So our next question is going to come From Vito Tomita at Goldman Sachs. Vito? You're on mute, Vito. Vito, you're on mute.
Oops, sorry for that. So good morning, Mauricio, Jim, Michel and everyone, and thanks for taking our questions. Two questions from our side. The first is if you could elaborate Just a bit more on the accelerating growth in Guatemala despite the limited COVID impact in the Q2 of 2020. And the second question from us would be, if you would at all consider increasing buyback limits if cash flow and deleveraging Karma's growth better than expected over the next few quarters.
Thank you. Sure.
So, I'll take one and then perhaps let Tim think a little bit about 2. If you just let me, I'll give you the very It's a view, right? So, I like my I like our stock and I think we our outlook is improving on every little bit. So you need to have a balance here On that answer. So listen, in Guatemala, it's a Good industry structure.
It's a 2 player market, very well managed by the players. That's a summary of Guatemala. If you think about Guatemala, Think of the template that perhaps we should be getting towards in many of our other 2 player markets. Again, good industry structure, well executed. Now on the back of that, of course, there is investment in the network.
When it became a 2 player market, we decided to invest further in the network. We bought some spectrum in a very tactical manner. And again, put money towards the consumer. And that is what's yielding these results that you see today. Better network, better distribution, And a lot of focus.
And in Guatemala, you also see us growing in home. It kind of gets Bundled up with fantastic mobile results, but we have a growing home business in Guatemala that like everywhere else in the region, We think really underpins our mobile service. And on the buybacks, I mean, our logic on the buybacks, you've heard us The business is doing well. We actually have fairly bullish outlook going forward. Our leverage is coming down.
We're putting all the money we can into the organic CapEx investments. So we have Room to start the buybacks. And the more confident we grow, perhaps the more bullish we'll be. Over to you, Tim.
And look, the $100,000,000 that we announced today, in context, that is really just taking us to May next year, Back to the AGM. So unlike in the past where we announced 3 year plans with bigger numbers, this really is just an interim That would allow us to get to the AGM next year. And we'll take a view from there as to what we do next. I think it was very important for us to restart the buyback program. And I think as Mauricio has really sort of said it out, the stock stays where it is and our cash flow remains where it's going, then obviously it will be an option for us To look harder at that.
I mean, just to just give you complete view of how we view, we got We think we got very strong financial and operational performance, and our outlook is improving, we think. We got all the internal investments fully covered. I mean, you've seen us actually invest most in the business in CapEx this year. We got our EBITDA growing, so we're deleveraging rapidly. So we feel it's the right time for us to go forward with this buyback program.
And The more of these good results that we see, the more bullish we're going to be with buyback programs. That's the summary of it all.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thanks, Victor. Now we're going to go to Mathieu Robillard at Barclays. Mathieu?
Yes, good morning and thank you. I had a few questions. The first one maybe going to Panama. I think
This is
a country that obviously has been hit hard by the pandemic and you flagged in the past that it had a disproportionate impact in B2B Trends. I think in your release that in Q2 things remain a bit challenging. So I was wondering when do you see The light out of the tunnel, so to speak, in Panama. Is it something that is still a tough market for the next few quarters or could it be a driver for further growth? So that's the first question.
I'll go after that to the others, if that's okay.
Yes. So Panama is for us, the way to say this is We're kind of on the waiting room, if you will, or if you like horse racing, we're kind of on the starting stall, If you know what I mean, just with jitteries, ready to just let the horse go. And what's holding it It's simply the economy kicking into high gear. If you go back to the numbers we showed you, Matthew, the Consumer business really has had meaningful growth in terms of units, Both on fixed, which we have continued to grow and on mobile, which we have continued to grow steadily. We showed you the numbers on the back of cross selling.
And When you look at the B2B customer numbers, we haven't really lost any market share. We're just there waiting for the economy to come back. And this is why I said that we're so very well In Panama for when the economy comes back, it was 18% decrease last year. It's growing 5% to 6% this year. But and as you know, we met with the President a couple of weeks ago in the U.
S. President of Panama. And what we got was the sense that they're really, really well Into the medium term and long term. The 3rd line of the Panama Canal is going to be built for investment is coming back to Panama And there's ambitious projects. So I don't know exactly, Matthew, whether it's going to be next quarter or the quarter after that or whether we're going to have to wait a little bit longer.
What I do know for sure is that Panama is ready to go back to growth and that we are the best positioned because we've done everything there to be ready. It's not just that we've grown our customer accounts, it's that we modernized the network, we've changed the brand, we've integrated the businesses. If you were to go to Panama today, You would think that Tivo has been there for the last 30 years. That's how well we've done that integration. So again, Let the race start because we're going to go fast in Panama as soon as the economy recovers.
And on Bitfinity in particular, that's exactly the point.
I think also point out, Marcia, that we did 3% sequential kind of growth in Panama and service You've come up quarter on quarter. And our quarter number, I think, is the best number we've had since kind of The Q4 of 2019, which was, of course, seasonally sort of is always a stronger quarter. So I think we've seen very, very nice recovery in Panama. And the KPIs are extremely strong. So we feel well set for the future.
Thank you. Then I had a question on your OCF. Obviously, the H1 run rate Seems to be above the target, or at least easily meet the target. I think you pointed obviously that there's a bit more back ended CapEx In H2 compared to H1, but are there any other headwinds that we should be aware or you just As usual, being cautious.
Go ahead, Tim. Headwind. I mean, we basically we set our store out this year to do big investment And we saw how well it worked last year and we are continuing to modernize networks. But one of the biggest drivers for us is the customer Uptake, that is affecting the capitalization. And that's just good CapEx as far as I can see.
So, we saw that our EBITDA is running higher. And therefore, we felt there was a real opportunity to reinvest back into CapEx slightly higher than maybe you expected, but I think It will drive future growth.
Sure. And then lastly, maybe It's probably a bit difficult to know at this point in time how is the pandemic situation for me at least in the different countries. Obviously, There's a force wave in Europe and in the U. S. I don't know how important that is at the moment in the areas where you operate and if To some extent, you're allowing for that risk in your outlook for H2, 2020 and Q1.
Thank you for asking that, Matthew, because if you were to hear us just Not mentioned COVID on this call, you would get the sense that we're oblivious to what's happening in the markets. And we're not. We're not. We're very bullish and we're very optimistic because of 2 things despite what's happening in the One is we've demonstrated over the last year our strong resilience. Our cash flows are strong.
Our customer pickup is strong in the middle of a pandemic. So what we think is we got the way to work through it. We've gained confidence that despite COVID, we've got the tools and the focus to manage through it. So that's why we you hear us be so bullish despite fact that there is a 3rd wave out there in our markets. In terms of a little bit of detail, there's about 4 or 5 countries, Salvador, Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica that are reaching 25% vaccination rates.
The rest are less 5% to 10%. But the key to this question from a business point of view is not only how resilient we demonstrated we can be with reduced debt, we've Increased investment, gotten more customers in the middle of the pandemic because we know how to handle the situation. The key thing is that We don't expect that COVID will drive despite how harsh it is, will drive any more strong lockdowns that we've seen in this quarter. That's the key to it. It is clear that politically, economically, socially, there won't be any more strict lockdowns in our countries, Simply because people want to get out and work and when the economies to work and that is part of why we feel bullish about outlook.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mathieu. So we'll now go to Sumit Datta at New Street Research. Sumit?
Hi there. Yes, thanks for the questions guys. 2 or 3 please. And apologies if I did miss Some of this detail earlier. On the homes passed, there was a nice pickup in the Q1.
Can you give any granularity on where that is coming from and maybe some thoughts on The kind of run rate we could expect going forward and again maybe where we might be seeing some of that happening by market. And then secondly, and I guess this is probably a little bit related, just on the CapEx increase. Can you give any more Granularity again in terms of where, I suppose thinking how much of that is maybe wireless, how much of that is Cable, how much of that might be expanding the cable plan? How much of that is coming from More homes connected, if you could try to frame the increase a little bit more. That would be super helpful.
Thank you. And then I have one more, but maybe if we could do those first, that would be great.
Sure. So on the homes and they're spread out between Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia and Bolivia For the last couple of quarters, give or take. Going forward, we will adjust our 1,000,000 homes target per year, 3 quarters to 1,000,000 by the speed at which The open fiber in Colombia becomes available to us. And I think that's an important part of the conversation here, Sumit. So we're happy With the run rate that we have today, which is call it $500,000 to $300,000 because we've been really, really happy with increasing the network penetration.
It helps us with cash flow. It helps us with return on invested capital. And as you very well know, it helps us drive the sales forces to drive on Not only the new greenfields, but also sell on the existing homes. And that's just a better use of capital. But going forward, we have A fair amount of open fiber environment in Colombia, which we think is very, very positive, with at least 2 players there.
So we will adjust Our capital and redirect to spend to build in areas where OpenFiber is not available to us. So we'll find a way To adjust our home pass numbers so that it's clear to you that, you know, what of that we're building and what of that we're having access from the open fiber providers in Colombia. So I hope that helps you a lot on the homes past. And the CapEx before I hand it over to Tim to give you a little bit more, more visibility on that. The key thing On our CapEx is, yes, we built homes and we picked up the number of homes.
We've modernized networks last This year and every time we modernize or build a network, you see the pickup in revenue. Think of El Salvador, think of what's happening in Panama. So this year, part of the CapEx is going to continue to build the 700 megahertz in Colombia. We haven't finished that. So we're in the process of that year of that.
The most important thing is that it's very variable driven. It's largely CPEs now in homes and installation in homes And a lot of the postpaid as well on mobile. And that's really why on the prior question, We really can't manage our OCF for the year because a lot of the CapEx is just variable, it's growth CapEx. And over to you, Tim, if you want to add anything to Sumit's question.
I think you Pretty much covered it actually. I mean, clearly, the home installations causes a pickup in overall CapEx. I mean, That now is running at about 30%, 35% 30% to 35% of our overall CapEx. And you've seen the pickup in homes to build, which kind of it's not massive in terms of incremental CapEx, but it adds a bit. And we are looking at some modernization in the mobile space.
And, Greg, you saw the Ericsson announcement A couple of weeks back. So, I probably haven't got the numbers exactly to that time, but it probably is roughly the same equal Installation, home build out, mobile build out.
Okay, thanks. And maybe just one final question, if that's okay. You may have seen or not, I know you've been Super busy. But here in the UK, there was another big FTTH overlay announcement made With Virgin Media, and these seem to kind of come along on a regular basis now, I. E.
Kind of cable networks Overlying FTTH, I know you've probably answered this question more times than you'd like to have. But is there any kind of Are we edging closer to that sort of process for you guys?
Yes. So, 2 things needed to happen, for FTTH to precisely get to the point that you're One is the total cost of owning it going forward needed to be as good as a good HFC network. And number 2, The video environment needed to be one where you could the video ecosystem where FTTH could indeed deliver The product and both of those things have happened for us, the second point because of Android in our markets. So going forward, there's no doubt that our greenfields Will be fiber. There's no reason not to do fiber.
It's cheaper and the video ecosystem is good. So that's a good position for us to be in. I think we waited for the right time for all of our greenfields. Greenfields not a goal To be fiber going forward. And as you know, speeds in our markets are at a point in time where our brand new HFC See network allows us to compete extremely, extremely well.
So with the existing network, I don't think it's happening anytime soon.
Okay. That's clear. Thank you.
Thanks, Sumit. So now we'll take our what I believe will be our last question from Fredrik Lythl at Danske Bank. Fredrik?
Thank you. Thank you for taking my questions. Nice to see you all well. I had a few questions, if I may. Firstly, on Home, if you could Discuss a little bit around your pricing strategies in your various home markets, if you see any Sort of positive trends in that sense on pricing specifically, maybe now or maybe going forward or what your strategies are there.
And then I would like to sort of maybe put a question on spectrums on the mobile side. You have good sort of effects from the 700 spectrums in Colombia. It's a 4 gs spectrum. Would you want to go for more 700s in your other markets in order to improve your reach if that becomes available? Or would you want to go directly to Maybe the central 5 gs spectrum is 3.5 gigahertz in order to capture better speeds in cities and so on.
So how do you Put forward your strategies on the mobile side in terms of spectrum.
Thank you.
Sure. On the home pricing, We do Cable 101 when it comes to our pricing strategies. And we've been doing this now for a good number of years. And Frederic, you may have heard me say this before. We try to create space For strong net adds on home by basically giving higher speeds to the upper tiers, creating space for us to come We've made or lower tiers, speed tiers that do not take away from our ARPU.
It's been done in the industry for a number of years. That's What we do in every market to basically create tiering for speeds that allows our ARPU to be harvested positively going forward. And the proof of that is that our ARPU in dollar terms for the region has continued to inched up Just about every quarter. And you see that this quarter we're up 2.7% in dollar terms. I could be off on that number, but Michel can correct it.
And that's simply because of this tiering strategy and the high demand that we have for home. So we are just That home business is a growth driver for us and it has been for the last few years. As I said during the call, we've been put built a business that now has scale $1,700,000,000 It's got growth. We're adding 400,000 500 1,000 new net adds on a yearly basis. And with ARPU, that is actually growing On dollar terms, just about every quarter.
So it is a pretty strong business for us and one and I think back to Sumit's question earlier on, one that has Ton of runway for us because there's a number of homes that have not been built that we can we will continue to build. And perhaps now with access To fiber in Colombia, we'll be able to speed up our ability to penetrate those markets. So extremely happy with Home, Both on volumes and ARPUs and the growth going forward. Spectrum, over the last 2 or 3 years, we bought Spectrum In a number of places and everywhere we bought it and we've built the network, we've seen the success, Colombia and El Salvador, Obvious cases, but the same in Guatemala. We've added a new carrier on some spectrum that we bought there, and you'll see the results in Guatemala as well.
In Panama, we're using spectrum, AWS spectrum that we expect to finally buy from the government in the next Year or so and you see the subscriber pickups in Panama are strong and that's in the back also of using this AWS spectrum on a rented basis, if you will, during the pandemic. We're happy Overall, with our spectrum positions, we are in no need of spectrum just about anywhere in our markets. We've made some investments over the last 4 years or so that have corrected or improved our Position Colombia and El Salvador and Panama are the most obvious ones. So we have no need for additional spectrum at this point in time anymore. Now 5 gs going forward, some countries want to politically run faster than others.
And if those auctions do come into place, of course, that we're well positioned in all of the markets to be an acquirer of 5 gs. But from a regional point of view, 5 gs is just not Quite ready for prime time in our markets. We think the absolute Right thing to do for our economies is to continue to drive 4 gs penetration. That will have the highest impact On the well-being of our societies because it's still pretty low.
Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. Can I
just have a follow-up, a little bit of a housekeeping? The Ghana transaction, was that closed in Q2? Did it drag any Costs or did you have any items in it? Is it out of the books? Or should we expect something to show up in Q3 from the Gona transaction?
We haven't closed it yet, but all of the kind of costs and impacts are in Q2. There's no there should be or Certainly in the first half, so there should be no further impacts for
us. Perfect. Thank you.
Thanks, Frederic. I believe we had one last question actually just came in from Stefan Billing. Stefan, I don't know if you are In the queue, okay. Here we go. You'll need to unmute.
Perfect. Stefan, the floor is yours.
Thank you very much. Hi, everyone. Yes, a few questions. First of all, regarding the prepaid net adds this Quarter. I know you had a really good step up on the postpaid.
But given the strong Growth in remittances, as far as I understood, in some of your markets during Q2. Are you a bit surprised that the prepaid didn't Increase as much or did you deliberately keep it down? So that's the first question. The other question is a little bit on OpEx. I'm looking at some of your markets and I see some sequential increases in costs, At least I think I see it in Panama compared to Q1 in El Salvador and in Colombia.
Colombia, I think you have Answered already, but maybe you can say something about if there's some special things in Panama and El Salvador. And just the last thing, where are you do you think in terms of closing Tanzania? That's it.
So I think, I've used the line on Africa quite a bit About the movie Out of Africa, beautiful movie, but it's a long, long movie. And if you look at the edits at the end, They go on for a long, long time. So, Tanzania is on track. We're going through the motions of Regulatory approval, talking to the government, etcetera. But it's a slow process as everything in Africa.
I don't know, Tim, if you have any more color than that on Tanzania other than just be patient.
No, no. I mean, it's just going through its regulatory process. There isn't a model for these things, so they have to make it up as they go along.
And then on the OpEx and Tim you can add a lot Caller here. The markets that you highlight, Stephane, are very similar to Colombia. We were perhaps just focusing it on Colombia, but Countries that you highlight with higher OpEx, Panama and El Salvador, just like Colombia are the countries where we're getting a ton of Subscribers coming in, both Panama and El Salvador just have had tremendous user intake. By the way, both in mobile And in home, both Panama and El Salvador have had meaningful important home net adds. And it's also the markets where we've modernized and increased the Size of our network.
When we modernize the network in El Salvador and in Panama, we also pick up areas of coverage. And as a result of that, you see The OpEx highly correlated with our subscriber and revenue growth on both fronts. And lastly, on prepaid, I think the key to this is, of course, we have great Q4, we had great Q1. So the slowdown is only natural. But most importantly, think of all those net gains that we had on prepaid in the prior quarters As our fishing pond for postpaid, about half of the Columbia postpaid subscribers Came from our own prepaid base.
So we're basically using a prepaid net gains that we had in the prior Our quarters are as part of our fishing pond going forward. And that's what we should be doing because then of course we know the subscribers quite well.
Good. Thank you very much.
Absolutely.
So that's the last question. Mauricio, if you want to make Some final remarks?
No, just to thank everybody for being here with us today and for paying attention. Very happy with our Q2 results. I think it shows what we can do going forward. Very happy with the direction the business is going. We're Decreasing leverage, adding subscribers, revenue growth and EBITDA growth have come back.
And just about in every metric, we are higher than we were before COVID. And with this renewed confidence, we're happy to be able to We start shareholder remuneration with the buyback program that we mentioned earlier. As you can see, we're very bullish not only on our outlook, but on our stock. So thanks everybody and we look forward to hosting you in a quarter from now.