Hello everyone. Thanks for taking the time to connect to our second quarter 2022 results conference call. This event is being recorded. Our speakers today will be our CEO Mauricio Ramos, and our CFO, Sheldon Bruha. Following the prepared remarks, we will have a Q&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. If you turn to slide two, you can see 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 this presentation. We define these metrics on slide four, and you can find reconciliation tables in the back of our earnings release and on our website.
With those disclaimers out of the way, let me turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio Ramos.
Thank you Sarah. Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today to discuss our second quarter. Let's get started right away on slide five. Earlier this year, we hosted our Investor Day. Back then, we shared with you our operational and financial plans to create shareholder value over the next several years. These plans are centered around our clear sense of purpose and reflect our commitment to focused ESG initiatives. The key message today is simply that we are on track to deliver on the commitments, financial and otherwise, that we made to you on our Investor Day. Since then of course, the Ukraine has been invaded, interest rates have begun to climb, inflation has spiked, and there are increased risks of a U.S. recession in the near term. Needless to say, we don't expect our business to be immune from a global economic slowdown.
But, and this is a big but, so far, the impact of these macro disturbances on our business has been somewhat limited. One, we had a very solid Q2, even ahead of our plans. two, although the going is getting tougher, for sure, and although we may lose some of the upside and leeway that we had hoped to have, as we look ahead, however, we remain very confident that we will deliver organic operating cash flow growth of around 10% on average over the next three years, as we said we would earlier this year. We also remain very confident the business will generate cumulative all-in equity free cash flow of between $800 million-$1 billion over those same three years, like we said at our Investor Day earlier this year.
We've also continued to make meaningful progress on our plans to create separate companies for our infra and our fintech assets and to carve these out from our core connectivity business in order to help them realize their full potential and for us to harvest the equity value we have embedded in those businesses today. In both cases, with the towers carve-out and the Tigo Money carve-out, we expect to begin unlocking and crystallizing some of this value with transactions in 2023. Again, on track with the 12- to 24-month timeframe that we set out earlier this year. During the second quarter, we also strengthened our balance sheet by completing the rights offering we had designed to help fund the Guatemala transaction. We also further advanced our ESG agenda with our climate targets now officially validated by the Science Based Targets.
Now please turn to slide six to look at some detail. Service revenue grew a healthy 4.5% in the quarter. This is consistent with our medium-term plans, is in line with our growth in Q1, and once again, a bit better than we had budgeted internally. For a fourth consecutive quarter now, every country and every business unit grew service revenue organically. The fastest growth came from Colombia, which was up 8.5%, and we will talk about Colombia in a bit more detail later. From a business unit point of view, mobile continued to grow steadily, driven by our push into postpaid. B2B had a very solid quarter, accelerating to 5.7%, as anticipated, and with every country contributing to our strong performance.
Home grew 3.5%, slightly below our plans, and there are various reasons for this. First is the shift to broadband-only subscription, which brings down ARPU. We mentioned this in Q1, and it continued in Q2. Whereas overall ARPU is compressed, the margins on our broadband-only product are actually higher, thus protecting our profitability. Our strategy to sell OTT products in what we call our content supermarket continues to advance quite well. Add this to our exclusive national soccer rights on many of our Tigo Sports channels and across our markets and the World Cup, which is coming around the corner, for which we have rights, and we should see more video add-ons in the second half of the year. The second reason is simply some more intense price competition, especially in Colombia.
The third reason is that we have ourselves, and actually quite proactively, decided to slow down our sales to lower income customer segments, particularly in Colombia. We know from experience that these customers are more likely to churn as the economy slows down, so we wanted to get ahead of that by raising the bar on who we sell to and by maintaining our installation fees. We also wanted to focus our firepower to start selling on the footprint in Bogotá that we will access to going forward, and I will talk about that in more detail in a minute. With this new footprint to sell and our build activity now ramping up again, we do expect to see renewed momentum in our home business in the second half of this year.
Now please turn to slide seven for a look at our EBITDA, which was up 4.6% organically in the quarter. Sheldon will give you a little bit more color on this later on. The key message here is that even with all the FX volatility and the rising inflation and the macro concerns that we're seeing globally, and to some extent also in our markets, we actually grew EBITDA in dollars both year-on-year and sequentially. Once again, as you saw during the pandemic, our ability to preserve and to actually grow cash flow is extremely resilient. It is also important to note that we have been investing in our Colombia mobile and Tigo Money businesses over the past year.
We're now starting to see the service revenue growth pick up massively in Colombia, and that growth is dropping to the EBITDA line as well, as you will soon see. Now on to how we're tracking to our operating cash flow goals. On slide eight, you see that the phasing of our CapEx spend has been more front-ended this year than it was last year. This has been by design. We told you at the Investor Day that we see annual CapEx normalizing at around $1 billion. You can see here that we expect to invest a lot less in the second half of this year compared to last year. As I said, this is by design, and this is meant to drive very strong operating cash flow growth in the second half of the year.
As you know, we're aiming to grow operating cash flow by about 10% organically on average over the next three years, and we're on track for that. Now let's turn to slide nine to look at Colombia, where we have now solved for two strategic challenges that have historically handicapped us in that market. First, on the mobile side as you know, we were severely handicapped by a lack of low-frequency spectrum. We have solved for that fully, and now we're growing very rapidly, just as we predicted we would. Mobile service revenue growth is now almost 20% this quarter. Postpaid is the main driver of that growth, and the shift it makes from prepaid to postpaid drove ARPU growth of about 7% in local currency in this quarter. This is good for EBITDA margins, which increased for a third consecutive quarter in Colombia.
The second challenge we had historically faced in Colombia is access to the fixed broadband market in the key city of Bogotá, the largest city in the country, where it was virtually impossible for us to build a citywide network, particularly in the most attractive neighborhoods of Bogotá. That's why we are so pleased to have announced a few days ago that we have signed deals with both ETB and Movistar that will allow us to use their Open Fiber networks to provide Tigo-branded home services in Bogotá. On a combined basis, these deals more than double our footprint in the city and give us access to sell an additional 1.5 million homes in Bogotá without us having to deploy any CapEx up front.
We actually look forward to serving more home customers in Bogotá in the near future, and we also expect that this will help sustain the very solid performance we now see in Colombia. Now let's talk about Tigo Business on slide 10. As you know, we refocused our B2B strategy just before the pandemic, so it is nice now to see the results begin to come in. B2B service revenue accelerated to more than 5% in the quarter. Every country is contributing to our success. This is because the strategy is pan-regional. This strategy, as you know, focuses on, one, adding SME customers, which is a key growth segment for us now and going forward, and two, deploying advanced digital and cloud services to our corporate clients.
As you can see on this slide, the new strategic design is working extremely well and making us continually very bullish for the outlook for B2B going forward. Now let me give you a quick update on our progress to carve out our tower and our Tigo Money businesses, beginning with the towers on slide 11. By now, most of you know that our portfolio of more than 10,000 towers is already the fifth largest in the region and that we're planning to build more than 1,000 towers per year going forward. There is significant growth potential for this asset just from the towers coming from us. The entity will also start out from a very low tenancy ratio, so there's further opportunity for value creation in that regard as well.
Over the last several months, we have completed most of the corporate structure planning and preparation, and over the next several weeks, we will be drafting the corresponding MLAs. We expect to start transferring towers later this year and into the early part of 2023, and we are on track to execute a transaction next year as we indicated during our Investor Day. As you know, we aim to bring in a partner to provide growth capital for the tower business. We want to allow this infra business to reach its maximum potential because we wanna own a part of this infra play to create value for Millicom. For now, we're keeping our options open in terms of whether we will sell a majority or minority stake, and on whether we will go with this financial or a strategic investor. We will cross that bridge when we get there.
As for Tigo Money on slide 12, we're also progressing very nicely. We have largely completed the initial software development that we needed to roll out Tigo Money 2.0. This will allow us to consolidate the three platforms in five countries into a single scalable platform across all our countries. We're also rolling out our merchant platform as planned and as on track. Two weeks ago, we started to pilot our lending activity. As you know, Tigo currently serves approximately 50 million mobile and residential customers, so we have a wealth of knowledge about their spending habits, which will be very helpful as we look gradually to expand in this area. Finally, we continue to work with our financial advisors to prepare the company to bring in an investor who can provide growth capital and some relevant fintech experience.
As we said during our Investor Day, we're targeting a transaction in early 2023. Finally, on slide 13, Q2 was an important quarter in terms of advancing our agenda as an agent of positive change in the region. We joined the White House Partnership for Central America, and we actively participated in the Summit of the Americas in L.A. just a month or so ago. On the right-hand side of the page, you will see that the SBTi recently validated our emissions reduction targets. We're on track on this commitment as well, and we're pleased to already be executing on our plans to deliver against those. Now Sheldon will go over the financials for the quarter.
Thank you, Mauricio. Let me now take you through the Q numbers beginning on slide 15. Service revenue was $1.3 billion in the quarter. That's up 39% year-on-year due to the Guatemala acquisition. Excluding the acquisition, organic growth was 4.5%, which is about the same as our Q1 and consistent with our medium-term target of mid-single digit organic growth. Our mobile business grew almost 5% and contributed more than half of the overall growth in the quarter. The majority of this mobile growth came from postpaid, which continues to perform strongly and grew 9% year-on-year. We continue to reap the benefits of the additional investments we've made in some of our mobile businesses over the past couple of years, especially in Colombia.
Finally, ForEx detracted from reported growth this quarter, largely due to the Colombian peso, which depreciated about 5% on average compared to a year ago. Like most currencies globally, the Colombian peso has continued to weaken compared to the U.S. dollar since the end of the quarter, but many of our other currencies, like the Guatemalan quetzal, has remained very stable. Going down further on slide 16 to service revenue by country, once again, every country showed positive growth, with Colombia leading the pack with 8.5% growth, fueled by the mobile business, which was up almost 18%, thanks to our very robust growth in postpaid, as Mauricio mentioned. The shift in the mix towards postpaid has also lifted ARPU, which increased nearly 7% year-over-year in Colombia.
Elsewhere, we saw El Salvador and Nicaragua maintain their strong momentum, with growth of about 7% in the quarter, with solid growth in all three business lines. Panama and Bolivia grew more than 2%, as did Paraguay, net of a negative one-off for that business in Q2 of last year. All three countries are showing good momentum on a sequential basis, with revenues higher in Q2 compared to Q1 in almost every business line. Guatemala grew 1% in Q2. This is similar to the growth we reported in our Q1 and in line with our plans for the year. There were also some positive signs in Guatemala this quarter. Our handset sales grew more than 20%, so consumer spending is in good shape.
We saw good growth in both our mobile and home businesses on a sequential basis compared to Q1, as we continue to solidify our competitive position in the market. Okay, turning to EBITDA on slide 17. EBITDA of $577 million was up 68% year-on-year due to the consolidation of Guatemala. Organically, EBITDA grew 4.6%, in line with our service revenue growth and a meaningful acceleration compared to Q1, which was flat. You'll recall that we are beginning to lap the investments we've been making in consumer acquisition in Colombia and in our Tigo Money Fintech business over the past year. Also impacting the year-on-year comparison was about a $10 million higher level of bad debt in the quarter versus prior year.
Most of this was related to our lower than usual levels of bad debt provisions in Q2 of 2021 as we adjusted to payment trends from COVID, and this has now reverted back to more normal levels in 2022. However, a smaller portion was related to a little lower level of collections in the current quarter, which we are actively managing and monitoring in light of the current economic environment. Finally, given the backdrop of rising inflation and the strong dollar, we're seeing some pressures on energy, labor, and programming costs. That said, our EBITDA margin for the group was just shy of 40% for the quarter, roughly unchanged from both the prior quarter and the prior year, demonstrating our ability to offset these pressures with savings elsewhere. Now looking more closely at EBITDA performance by country on slide 18.
Once again, El Salvador led the group with EBITDA growth of more than 10%, with margins improving year on year. In both Colombia and Panama, EBITDA grew by more than 8% after adjusting for one-offs that largely offset each other. In both countries, the strong performance in mobile is lifting margins. In Colombia, this is the third consecutive quarter of margin improvement, while in Panama, margins are approaching the 45% level. Bolivia performance improved noticeably in Q2, with EBITDA up more than 7%, although that's against an easier comparison. Nicaragua also performed well on EBITDA, but this was against a very robust Q2 last year, which is why growth was only 1.5% this quarter. Paraguay EBITDA grew 4%, but this was down 2.5% after adjusting for last year's one-off.
This decline was due to the phasing of some of the selling and marketing costs, which included a new campaign to support our Tigo Money business. Honduras was down 1% year-on-year, but the business continues to generate very healthy cash flow and returns on capital, and $65 million is the strongest EBITDA we've seen from Honduras since Q2 of last year. Moving to slide 19, you can see how our operating cash flow, that is EBITDA less CapEx, compares to the previous year. OCF more than doubled to $322 million in Q2 due to the consolidation of Guatemala. Organically, it was down less than 1%, and that's because of phasing of our CapEx for the year, as Mauricio discussed earlier.
We expect to see strong OCF growth in the second half as EBITDA is growing again and CapEx spend is not expected to increase too much from the first half to the second half of this year, as compared to the record CapEx we spent in the second half of last year and in Q4 in particular. The key message here is that we are on track with our plans for the year. In fact, our service revenue, EBITDA, and OCF were all slightly ahead of budget in Q2. We expect organic OCF growth for the full year of 2022 to land at around 10%, right in line with the plans we laid out at the Investor Day. The next few slides will cover capital structure and capital allocation, beginning on slide 20.
During the quarter, we completed the rights offering aimed at funding a portion of the Guatemala transaction, and we used the proceeds to repay the remaining $450 million on the bridge loan. During the quarter, we were informed by our former partners in Panama that they planned to divest their 20% stake, which we then acquired at the end of June for about $290 million as per the terms of the initial transaction back in 2018. Panama has become an important contributor for the group cash flow, and we are happy to now own 100% of this cash generating asset. On slide 21, we summarize some of the highlights of the Panama business. Number one in mobile and in fixed, and with very solid EBITDA and OCF margins.
An investment-grade and dollarized economy, and a much improved industry structure with the recent exit of Digicel from the market, as well as the merger of Liberty and Claro's Panamanian businesses. An industry that is in the process of becoming a two-player market. Finally, let me close on the leverage situation on slide 22. A lot of moving parts here, but let me try to summarize the movements during our first half of the year. Equity-free cash flow, excluding Africa, was negative $62 million. This is in line with our plans and consistent with the usual seasonal patterns, which primarily reflect the first half weighting of annual cash payments for income taxes, frequency and software licenses, variable compensation, and for higher levels of CapEx booked in Q4 but paid in Q1. As a result, most of the equity-free cash flow for the year typically comes in during Q4.
This negative equity-free cash flow was offset by $88 million benefit from the Forex translation on our local currency debt. We have the rights offering that we already talked about, and finally, the African exit, which basically offset the purchase of the 20% minority in Panama. We ended Q2 with just shy of $6.1 billion of net debt. That's down about $730 million since the start of the year, reflecting the rights offering. Net debt EBITDA after leases was 3.04x. If we include the leases of just over $1 billion, our leverage was 3.14x at the end of Q2 versus 3.46x at the end of Q1, a 32 basis point improvement.
Our plan is to use the equity free cash flow we will generate in the second half to pay down gross debt and reduce our leverage. We expect our leverage to be around 3x at year-end, slightly higher than our previous guidance, given the buyout of our 20% partner in Panama. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Mauricio to wrap up.
Thank you, Sheldon. As you can see, we had a solid Q2, slightly ahead of our plans for the year. Now, we're very aware that macro conditions have gotten tougher and that there are challenges ahead that we hadn't quite foreseen at the beginning of this year. We also know, and you know this, that we have the ability, as we demonstrated during the pandemic, to drive and grow our operating cash flow and our equity free cash flow, even in the most difficult of circumstances. Ours is a very resilient, cash flow resilient business. That is why we're confident, despite the more difficult circumstances, that we will be able to deliver on all the commitments we made to you earlier this year, the commitments that are laid out on this page. We remain confident and committed to delivering on all of them.
That is why I, the board, and my colleagues subscribed to the rights offering that we just finalized a month or so ago. It's a sign of the confidence we have in our business and a sign of the confidence that we have that we will be able to drive shareholder value for you going forward. With that, we'll take your questions now.
Thank you Mauricio and Sheldon for your remarks. We will now begin the Q&A session. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please let us know by emailing us at investors@millicom.com and we will add you to the queue. When I announce your name, please unmute your line and make sure that your device and camera are turned on. Please limit yourself to one question and to one follow-up so that we can give everyone an opportunity to participate. Finally, please unmute your line after you've asked your question. Our first question today will come from Klas Danielsson at Nordea. Klas, the line is yours.
Yes, thank you very much. Hi Mauricio, Sheldon, Sarah. Thank you for taking my question. A couple from my side for sure. Just starting on the cash flow side, I mean, it's clearly a strong outlook that you're giving for H2 on the OCF side here. Clearly, kind of growth from the levels in H1. I think looking at equity-free cash flow, that's still lagging a bit. My question is, do you expect the kind of incremental OCF in H2 to kind of fully drop through to the equity-free cash flow levels, or are there any kind of other dynamics affecting in there?
I'll give you Klas, and thank you for joining today, just you know kind of a quick overview, and I'm sure Sheldon will give you a lot more color. I think the key message today, the word that I would continue to emphasize is that we are on track to the metrics and the goals that we set out during Investor Day. That means that we're confident we're gonna deliver that OCF growth 10% on average over the next three years. That, if you work through the math, will get you to the equity free cash flow of $800-$1 billion that for the three years on a cumulative basis we'd set as a target. We're on track for that.
What we wanted to highlight today is, and as hopefully we did that quite well during the call, is that the nature of the animal here is weighted or backended towards the second half. That's when you began to see this quarter as we anticipated it would, that EBITDA has begun to accelerate on the back of the service revenue growth that we now currently have. That we expect OCF will accelerate significantly so during the second half, getting us to be able to deliver on those targets that we have set out. Sheldon, over to you if you want to add.
Yeah sure. Thanks Mauricio, and hi Klas. I made a few comments on this in the prepared remarks in the presentation, but we do have a higher level of cash outflows in the first half of the year versus the second half of the year. There's several reasons for that. You know, a lot of our income taxes essentially go out in the first half of the year once we complete the financial returns. We do prepay a lot of frequency and software licenses in the first half of the year for the full year.
Variable comp goes out as well as, you know, we had a high spend and high booking of CapEx late last year as we finished a lot of projects. The cash payments for those spilled over into this year. Those are kind of the working capital dynamics of our group. Higher cash outflows first half then it sort of recovers, you know, during the second half. That's the dynamic, you know, it played out in years past and what's playing out a bit this year as well. It'll be easier I think once we sort of lap this, you know, this first year here to be able to show you equity free cash flow on a rolling twelve months basis.
For the moment, you're kind of looking at it just on a six-month basis. You're seeing that dynamic, but only a partial picture of that. Look, we expect equity free cash flow to be, you know, a strong number or certainly, you know, a very material, you know, positive number this year and in line with, you know, the trend line of what we're looking to get over the next three years of $800 to $1 billion. Yeah, that's it. Those are just the comments I see on that.
Okay. Thank you.
Yeah. Just to give you a little bit more color, because I imagine Claus, this is super important, Colombia and the delivery of what we said we were doing, Colombia is helping a lot. Margins are expanding on EBITDA. We're lapping the investments that we had made before. We're adding subscribers. Service revenue is increasing. EBITDA margins are growing. OCF is expanding, so that's helping tremendously. Guatemala remains the equity free cash flow producer that we were very happy to buy, so that's helping on that level quite significantly as well. The investments we made in Panama, as you've seen from the results, are giving us one of our highest OCF growers and as a result, a strong contributor to equity free cash flow. Things are coming into place as we hoped and anticipated they would.
Fantastic. Just to kind of follow up, lots of questions here, obviously I would ask, but to try to limit myself to one question, I guess. Just on a kind of higher level on the CapEx side, I mean it's clearly been the case for you the last few years where you've been focusing on the 4G side and that's kind of-
Mm-hmm
Pulling back a bit. I mean, I did notice this quarter. I think both you and I mean, América Móvil launched 5G kind of still at a small scale in Guatemala. Still, and I think looking ahead there, do you still see the kind of investment cycle in 5G as being a few years away from now? Or how are you kind of envisioning that side from here?
A great question, Klas, and thank you for bringing it up because of course, you know, as we say these things publicly to you, our investor base, we also need to weigh in the way things are playing out politically in each one of our markets. I think the Guatemala example is a perfect example of what we said earlier during Investor Day. Just to answer your question holistically, we said back then, and we totally are beginning to see that to be the case, that there's really no gotcha moment here in terms of a CapEx spike up because of 5G or fiber investments, as you recall. We said that we expected our CapEx spend to be right around $1 billion per year on CapEx.
You've just seen us reiterate that and as a result of that consistently say we're gonna deliver on our OCF and as a result of that on our equity free cash flow target. Nothing really has changed. We also said back then that part of the reason we laid out these very careful three-year plans is because we already own a ton of 5G spectrum, and Guatemala is a perfect example of that. We launched Guatemala on the back of the 3-5 spectrum that we already had. Although there are no other planned 5G auctions, you know, politically there's always the moment, the discussion between presidents and others as to when it should or shouldn't happen. When you look at what the way Guatemala worked out is exactly what we said would happen. It is not a big gotcha moment.
There's no disruption in the marketplace as a result of this. It is a non-standalone 5G network. As a result of that, it can be done, has been done, and will be done within this CapEx envelope of a $1 billion that we described, and it's just one more operational delivery that we have done. As a result of that, when
Oops, we lost Mauricio there.
Yep.
Well look, I think I'll I'd like to just try to follow up there. I mean, I think we've, as is highlighted, I mean, there, you know, we still can. Oh, there you are. Mauricio, you're back. You just dropped off for a second. Mm-hmm.
Did you not hear everything I said?
We just missed the last 30 seconds. Mm-hmm.
Okay. Well, basically it said I think that the punchline was that the Guatemala launch is the perfect example of the concept that 5G for us will be done within the $1 billion CapEx, you know. We just launched 5G in Guatemala, largest market, no big gotcha moment for you. It's done. It's out in the market. Caused no disruption. We did it on a non-standalone 5G technology, as you would expect we would. We did it on a spectrum that we already own, and we're doing it within a CapEx envelope. We're not changing the $1 billion per year because there's no gotcha moment. It's gonna be done not on top of, but as a part of that $1 billion envelope. Thank you Sheldon for letting me know that the punchline had not been heard.
Sure.
Fantastic. Fantastic. Can I just sneak in one last quick question?
Sure.
Yeah. Great. Now just lastly, kind of there was, I guess, some commotion on you noting that you received a subpoena from the DOJ earlier this year within the rights issue process. Could you kind of update us on that? Has there been any developments or anything to comment around on that side?
Yeah. I think you're gonna hate my answer and how boring it is. I'm probably gonna be, you know, deliver no news for you. We did receive a subpoena in April of this year. You know basically what a subpoena is. It's a request for information. The only difference is that you have to provide the information. There's really not a lot more that I can tell you or anything that has really happened in terms of timeline or content with regards to that. We actually don't know what the DOJ is effectively investigating. What I tell you is that we are cooperating the fullest. When I say the fullest, I mean the fullest with the DOJ. Because we simply wanna be and continue to be that agent of positive change in the market.
As you very well know, since we self-reported some years ago, we have become and made significant investments to become what I deem to be the gold standard in compliance in the region. There's a part of me that is enthusiastic about showing that side of us to the DOJ, even if it's in the context of a subpoena. That part was not in the script, that part was not legal, but it gives you an idea of the fact that we really wanna showcase to them that we are really very compliant.
Yep. Fantastic Mauricio, Sheldon, Sarah, everybody, thank you very much for taking my questions.
Thank you Klas .
I get a little bit of help from the lawyers on that last point of h eck, that is what I feel.
Thank you Klas and Mauricio, Sheldon, our next question will be coming from Stefan Gauffin from DNB. Stefan?
Yes. Hello. Colombia is progressing really well. Right now what we are seeing is it's high inflation, really large currency movements in Colombia. Now you also mentioned increased cable competition in Colombia. Can you elaborate a little bit about this impact and how you are seeing that you can handle these issues? Especially I think that the pay-TV margin can be impacted by the currency movements.
Yeah. Awesome. Colombia, let me start with yours, Stefan, a very holistic question, so let me approach it in a very holistic manner because there's a lot of moving pieces in Colombia. Number one, the results are nothing short. About service revenue by mobile and with margins expansion, EBITDA expansion and OCF expansion. Pretty happy with the performance of Colombia. The macro outlook and political outlook, if you will, despite the spike in currency, is actually turning out to be less dramatic than we had ourselves prepared for and anticipated. When you look at all the cabinet members that the Petro administration has put in place, all of them have been a part of prior administrations.
The sense that you get is this is not a radical change, this is a continuity in the political elite that has been managing the country. We take some significant relief from that at the macro and political level. Now, at the operating level, I will speak a little about mobile. Your question kind of belies or underneath it is the notion that we really are working well now in mobile. All the questions before were about mobile, and today we're growing almost 20% of mobile and adding postpaid subscribers every quarter consistently. On the home business, which I think is your point here, I wanna point your attention to some of the things that are in the market and some of the things that we ourselves have been driving.
Earlier this year, as I alluded, we made the call to move away from selling in some of the lower socioeconomic sectors 'cause we didn't think we were getting a return on capital there, and we thought we should be doing far better focusing our efforts on the high socioeconomic sectors of the country. That already is beginning to work well, and you'll see that come through later on in the year and into next year. Obviously the transition period means that you have to reshift your sales and your distribution to new areas, and that causes a dip. That's part of what's going on in there. There is increased competition, as we mentioned, and I think América Móvil mentioned in there.
We're actually quite confident that we're gonna regain quite a bit of growth on Colombia because of the new sales strategy that is gonna be less churn, longer lifetime value of our customers, little bit better ARPU, but also for a number of other reasons which I think are very important. Number one, the World Cup is coming up, and that's gonna put a big push on sales. Number two, I think there's a little bit of just the ebb and flow of the pandemic, and I think that will wash out and we'll start to receive some growth going forward, so that's more of a short-term effect.
Most importantly, this will be, I think, relatively important. We now have the ability to sell into 1.5 million homes that we didn't have access to before, and I mean no access whatsoever. This is 1.1 million homes in Bogotá. They come as a result of the Open Fiber deals that we struck with Ufinet, and more importantly with ETB, which will allow Millicom Tigo Colombia to finally sell to that subscriber base in Colombia. That's important because, if you recall, two years ago we barely had mobile access to Bogotá because our network could not penetrate high-density, high-rise buildings, 'cause we were just basically on high-frequency spectrum.
Today, we will be able to service Bogotá, 30%-40% of the nation's GDP, with both a mobile product, which is winning in the marketplace, and a home or broadband product, which is really important in that marketplace. We will be able to do that second part on a CapEx slide or variable cost or success-driven model, which we're very eager to test in Colombia. Particularly because, of course, given that this is an area that already has some penetration of cable TV, we would rather come in, since we're not gonna be the new entrants there, we would rather come in with a success-driven model. We're very happy to achieve this model. I think you can expect a lot more of Colombia on the fixed side of the business going forward.
While I'm on fixed, B2B in Colombia, as elsewhere, is beginning to become a real engine of growth. It really grew at around 5%-5.5% this quarter, and with this we see nothing but continued growth there. Holistically, Colombia, at an operational and a financial level, is becoming a better place for us. I mean this significantly. The results are good. We're winning on mobile. We're bullish that we now have access to sell on cable. We've rejigged our strategy to the better part of the socioeconomic period, and we now have the ability to sell to Bogotá. Yes, there's more competition, but when you look at the whole picture, we are far better in Colombia strategically and into the longer term for our fixed business than we have ever been in the past, for the reasons that I just mentioned.
Can I just ask one question around the Bolivia, where you say you changed the commercial strategy, which resulted in loss of prepaid subscribers?
Yeah.
Can you just describe what you're doing and what you're seeing in that market?
Simple. These were. Sheldon, you may need to help me out here with the right wording for this.
Yes.
These were not good subscribers. All right? This is not a cleanup. This is basically very low ARPU, almost no ARPU subscribers that we were spending a lot of money trying to service and care. We basically, with the local team, agreed on the fact that, hey, that KPI is not gonna look good for a quarter or two, but you know what? What ultimately matters here is OCF and equity free cash flow, so just go ahead and shed them, and we'll be happy to not live with those subscribers, even if we have to answer a question or two on the matter, and we'll keep the good ones.
As a result of that, you see that the service revenue in Bolivia, on mobile I'm talking, the service revenue in Bolivia, despite the competition from Entel, is stable in Bolivia. By the way, on Colombia, please don't miss the ARPU stabilization and improvement that you've seen this last quarter. I probably missed the most important thing on Colombia. Sorry to go back, Stefan, but my mind lost a heartbeat there. On Bolivia, the issue is just as I described and, you know, we're happy that Bolivia with the difficulties that we're having is showing mid-single digit growth in home. We continue to build quite a bit in Bolivia.
As a matter of fact, it would be growing more than it has done in the first half of this year if we had not had some delays in the build in Bolivia, quite honestly. We're a little bit delayed in Bolivia, three months or so, and that causes some delay in our ability to grow our home in Bolivia, but we're back on track. B2B is also growing in Bolivia, so Bolivia is really, really improving, and you see that on the EBITDA, which is up this quarter 7% or so.
Okay. Perfect. Thank you.
Thank you Stefan.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please email investors@millicom.com and we will add you to the queue. Our next question will be from Vitor Tomita from Goldman Sachs. Vitor? I think you're still on mute, Vitor.
Sorry. Good morning everyone, and thanks for taking our questions. First one would be regarding the acceleration in B2B. You mentioned briefly the performance in Colombia and Bolivia. Could you give us some more color on which countries and on which types of digital services have been the main drivers there? That would be our first question.
Yeah. The answer is very straightforward, and I'll be fast and sweet on this one and then I'll elaborate a little bit, as I always like to do. The first part of the question is broad-based. It's across all countries, some more than others, but across all countries. Panama is doing well, Colombia is doing really well, Paraguay is doing well, Guatemala is doing really well. It's all countries, some more than others. Very simple. The second part of the question is: what about digital? It's basically cloud services.
Sorry we lost Mauricio. Hopefully he'll reconnect here just in a quick second. Look, I expanding on what he was saying around the digitals, these are cloud services. This is gonna be hosting and security.
Of our strategy.
Okay. Mauricio, we just lost you there for about 20 seconds again.
All right. You got the part on what the digital services are, Vitor?
Yeah, that's exactly what we
The two cloud services, yeah.
It's cloud, cybersecurity, and that's the ones. Now, there's two really segments that are working very well for us. Remember, this is a strategy that we put in place before the pandemic. During the pandemic, we took the time to continue to implement it and develop. By this I mean changing the product line, changing the distribution, training the sales forces, being a lot more focused on what we do. The two segments that are really growing behind all this is the SME sector. You know what that is. That is growing 8%-9%, and that is straight up. We've added to that sector maybe 30,000-40,000, I could be off on the right numbers here, just in the last year, so significant additions there.
The second sector that's working really, really well is the SMB, the corporates, and that's on the back of the digital services that I've just described, which encompass the three things that I just described. The growth there is volume driven. We've added some 10,000 accounts, give or take, but significantly ARPU driven because these services are really demanded for. It's allowing us to have nice volume, but most significantly, ARPU growth in corporate. We do expect this to be very resilient going forward, by the way.
Thank you. Just as a follow-up question to that, if cloud continues to be a main driver for B2B growth, do you believe that will have any implications for thinking about margins or CapEx, given that this can be more of a CapEx light segment, but might also require some infrastructure on the other hand?
It's early days for us, but as we began to analyze all these almost contract by contract, quite frankly, we love the returns on this because they are, I wouldn't say immediate, but they're very tangible returns. They can be analyzed very, very efficiently. We'll be happy to take that equation. Sheldon, I know you've been looking at this quite a bit, so feel free to jump in.
No, look, I think you're right. If you look at the what we're contemplating here around this expansion and growth on B2B, once again, easily, you know, accommodated within sort of our CapEx envelope. You know, we do look at these sort of on a project by project basis as well for these larger ones. You know, certainly all of these are meeting our return thresholds as we move through this migration and growth in our B2B segment.
Very clear. Thank you both very much.
You bet. There's also a part of me that loves the idea of building a significant data center business as we are on the back of all of this. You already know that we own 13 of those. They're all Tier 3. We keep building them up. There's a part of me that likes the notion that this is helping us drive the creation of basically a data center business. I'll stop there because I know what the next question is, and I really don't want to answer that next question.
Thank you very much.
Thanks Vitor. Our next question will be from Marcelo Santos at JPMorgan.
Hi. Thank you for taking the question. I would like to ask a little bit more comment on the fixed service environment in Paraguay, especially I think the piracy issue that you mentioned.
Yep. Got it. All right. Listen, piracy in Latin America, as you know, Marcelo, has always been an issue. Sometimes the grass, as I like to say, starts to become a little bit too high, and then the time comes for a severe cut down of the grass. We do that every year, and Paraguay was getting a little bit out of control on piracy.
Yeah. I'll just step in here again. It looks like his connection's challenged. No, look, we've worked with authorities there. We're able to sort of identify a particular large abuser of, you know, piracy in that country, and we're able to work with the authorities.
You did?
To shut that one down and, okay, you're back on. We lost you there for about 10 seconds again, Mauricio.
No, no. Keep going. Keep going.
No, I was just mentioning that we, you know, were able to work with the authorities to shut down quite a large piracy operation there in the country. I think what they seized almost over $200,000 worth of equipment, you know, as part of that. I think importantly is, you know, hopefully that remedies a bit of that activity. I think it also sends a strong message, I think to other participants sort of or other players in that arena within the country. Look, I don't think, you know, I think we do recognize that also this is ultimately a big part of the industry that we kind of play in.
As Mauricio sort of said, you know, this stuff will continue to pop up. We'll continue to be aggressive and try to work with authorities, quite frankly work with the content providers as well in trying to crack down on this and preserve sort of our, you know, our pay activities as we do so.
Two comments on this. Things that I saw that were significant Marcelo. Number one, the sheer focused involvement of the authorities in Paraguay. It is actually larger, more enthusiastic, more professional than I have ever seen. Number two, as a result of it and the media display that we put on it, a lot of these pirates have actually said publicly they're gonna get out of business. They don't wanna lose their investments as they have lost, and they don't wanna look at fines or imprisonment. On your home question, the base is growing. The base continues to grow. There is in Paraguay some of that migration from bundle, if you will, to broadband only. Piracy was a part of that, of course, right?
Of course, because you can pirate the content and you can pay only for the broadband connection. This will help in that. Our continued push into selling what we call the content supermarket, i.e., selling more OTT as an add-on service, will continue to work, because that's additional add-ons that are sold and nobody can add. Into the second half of this year, remember the Paraguayan soccer will begin in the second half of this year, so that will drive. You know, we hold those rights. Of course, there's a World Cup that will drive. There's some momentum that should restart in the second half of this year. That's the Paraguayan pay TV and broadband story.
Perfect. Thank you. Very clear.
By the way, while we're on it, you know, Paraguay is back on growth.
Just let that not be unnoticed. You know, both, you know, service revenue, subscribers across the board, et cetera.
Very clear. Thank you.
Thank you, Marcelo. Our next question will come from Andres Coello at Scotiabank.
Yes. Hello guys. Good morning. I'm trying to get clean numbers for equity free cash flow, and I was wondering if you can please help me clarify how much extra OpEx and CapEx was used to support your initiatives in infrastructure and also in the fintech business. How much money you are using to make this a reality next year in terms of OpEx and CapEx? A second question, if I may, on Guatemala. I would like to know when you expect Guatemala to go back to growth, how long that's gonna take you.
Well-
because we've seen a weakness in Guatemala in recent quarters. Thank you.
You bet. I'll take the Guatemala question and perhaps give you the first one to you, Sheldon, on equity free cash flow. The only thing I'll say on equity free cash flow before I hand it over to Sheldon is, fintech is basically, you know, accounting and
Okay. We lost his line again. Why don't I just pick up a little bit on your questions and try to give you some color on those two investments.
The, the-
Look, I think we've mentioned. Sorry, Mauricio, you were cutting out, but I'll just, I was just picking up perhaps on some of the numbers. You had asked just sort of the investment. I think we've highlighted earlier in the year kind of the total annual spend we're looking to, incremental spend we're spending on fintech this year. It's in the order of $40 million, you know, on the full year basis. That started ramping up very late last year and, you know, we're kind of seeing sort of a full year of that now, this year. Now most of that is gonna be OpEx.
There'll be a portion of that as CapEx, but from an annualized basis, you know, you should plan on about $40 million of investment there for the full year for that activity. Look, I think that's what's important to highlight is, you know, we've been commenting about our operating cash flow growth of 10% on an organic basis. You know, that's, you know, that is growth after absorbing about $40 million of incremental spend for MFS as we invest in that growth opportunity. That's MFS. You know, we haven't commented specifically on the towers investment for that carve-out. I will say there will be some costs ramping up on that.
You'll probably see that coming through our corporate costs a little bit as we move through the year, as we stand up sort of that entity and start investing, you know, in the aspects of being able to transact with that, as we've highlighted in 2023, which is our objective. I don't think we're guiding specifically on the number, but just expect some incremental corporate costs as we roll through the year to stand up that entity.
Okay. Thank you. Very clear.
To add to that, Andrés, as I seem to be back on Tigo Money, and I'm looking beyond this year. You know, we were all, including likely you, perhaps not as buttoned up on, you know, what would be the cost of ramping up and launching Tigo Money 2.0. The reality is it's demonstrating and proving to be less than we had anticipated. We're happy with the fact that the business launch, enhancement, Panama, et cetera, particularly into next year, is gonna be less expensive than we had anticipated. From my point of view, I am happy that is not a investment that important as it is strategically, is gonna continue to have meaningful impact on dragging our cash flow down. I'll stop right there because I'm gonna make some guys in the finance group really nervous.
I can already tell Sheldon kind of ready to push the stop button on Guatemala, which is a great question, because it allows us to now share with you a little bit more what our plan is and what it was on Guatemala. Let me begin with emphasizing that Guatemala is doing exactly what we expected it to do, which is to be a solid and steady grower with massive cash flow generation, and it's on track to do that for this year. It's just an engine of cash flow. That is what it's supposed to do for us. In terms of growth, rather than answering your question directly, because then I'll make everybody on the call very uncomfortable on the finance group, I will point you to the difference between Guatemala and some of the other businesses.
Guatemala continued to grow during the pandemic. We gained market share, we inched up in revenue, and we increased margins. What you're seeing now is just tougher comparisons than the rest of the group. I'm... I know you're very good at math, Andres, so you'll do that, understand that if you average out, Guatemala remains a steady grower. Now, when you look at what Guatemala is gonna do going forward, not just in terms of cash flow and what it does for the portfolio, but in terms of growth, which was your question, think of mobile for us as we having cemented our leadership during the pandemic. You know that we took some market share. We know that we're now in to stabilize that market and that we're now growing on postpaid.
That's what we aim to do, drive growth on mobile and postpaid. Now, if you look at the other business lines in Guatemala.
It looks like you got frozen again. Look, I think it was highlighting though that we have cemented our leadership here on the mobile side, you know, throughout the pandemic and what you're seeing now. I think quite frankly, where our growth within Guatemala-
Is high.
is predominantly coming from, on the home and the B2B side, where sort of, you know, we're actually now leveraging, you know, that leading market position and high market share position on the mobile piece and, you know, really into some of the other segments. I would say just in overall and generally, quite frankly, this is a great business that's, you know, it's really starting to benefit from the high margins and cash flow generation from our scale that we've created there. That's, you know, as it continues to be a, you know, extremely strong cash generating asset for us and it's, you know, benefiting from, you know, all the progress we've made over the last couple of years there.
Yeah. I'll just come back on and I'll explain why we keep coming back on and off in a minute, just to come clean with everybody.
Mm-hmm
We're actually quite bullish on Guatemala for all the reasons that I've just explained. Remember, this is a healthily managed macroeconomic country. All the numbers in Guatemala are good. I think, Sheldon was alluding to that. The industry structure is really good. It's not just a two-player market, but it's a market in which both players make money. Both of them are fairly rational. As we both see our cost structures pressured by inflation, I think there'll be a lot of rationality that will go into that market. That's the storyline around Guatemala, and hopefully that gives you a lot of good color. Now you all may be wondering, you know, what's going on with our connection. I happen to be in Africa in the middle of the Serengeti. In... I'm actually on a Tigo Tanzania connection.
Mm-hmm.
I just wanna make sure everybody understands that we're not looking for opportunities in Africa. We're done and happy with that.
Mm-hmm.
That explains why some of the connectivity issues that we're having today.
Thanks, Andres. We have time for one more question from Matthew at Barclays. Matthew?
Can you hear me?
Yes.
Thank you. Hi good morning. Thank you for taking the question. Mauricio, in your introductory remarks, you mentioned a tougher macro environment. In that context, I was wondering if you could give a little bit of color in terms of the impacts of this deteriorating environment. First, in terms of the energy, if you can remind us, update us on what kind of hedging you have for energy costs this year and next year. Looking at the other side of the coin, in terms of pricing power.
Yeah
I realize that in some markets it's quite consolidated, but, you know, how easy is it to pass price increases or more for more initiatives in your countries overall? Thank you.
Thank you, Matthew. It's a good question. As I said on the initial remarks, it's difficult to imagine that we would be absolutely immune to a global recession. We certainly are no superhero group here. The pandemic showed that we can be very, very adept at making our OCF and our equity free cash flow very resilient in the context of difficult macroeconomic crises. Now, this will sound a little bit strange, but as you see on the Q2 results, it's having little to no effect. Little to no effect. Now going forward, that's not the view we're taking, and that's why my remarks were more balanced. We remain convinced that we're gonna hit our targets. We are putting extra work to get there because we knew this recession, as everybody should have, was a possibility.
As a result of that, there are two sides to the equation. One is the cost effect and how we will be able to mitigate that. Some costs are indeed going up, like energy and labor in particular, but energy is only a fraction of our cost, 2% or so. Labor is a little bit more important. Some countries like Paraguay and Colombia have seen wage increases. We have successfully already mitigated those impacts throughout this year. These wage increases were actually made at the very early part of this year, and we've been able to manage through those by making savings elsewhere. A result of that, you see our EBITDA margins not only have remained flat, but consistent with prior quarters and our prior year in particular. We started working, as we always do, on everything to do with driving efficiency into the operations.
Just about every quarter since we've been around, we've driven OCF margins up and EBITDA margins up, and this last quarter was no exception. We will continue to do that on the back of efficiency programs that we put in place early this year in a very disciplined manner. They will be largely digital-driven going forward, but they're happening as we speak, because this is a consistent drive to get efficiency. That's on the cost side. Now, on the revenue side, our ability to pass on some of this inflation. Remember, in some countries it's only 5%, like Guatemala. In others it's a little bit more, like Paraguay and Colombia. How long will inflation last? Your bet is as good as mine. My personal view is that it won't be very long, because you've already began to see that peak in some of our countries.
The ability to pass on some of that to our subscribers has already been tested. We've been doing a little bit of that already in some markets more than others. The industry structures in our markets are very good. In five out of all our countries is a two-player market. In many of those, we compete against companies that are not only rational, but are also facing the exact same issues, so everybody's on the same boat. So we will have better industry structures and more incentives as an industry to pass on that perhaps operators in other markets may have. The last bit of this, because the ability to pass on is not just a function of the industry structure, it's also a function of the available money in the pockets of consumers.
I would only point you to something that you already know, Matthew, which is remittances. Two points I will make there. They've remained high and growing. As up until last month, June, which is the last numbers we've had, they continue to grow 20%, and this is on the back of really big numbers. In some of our markets they're 20%-25%. Bolivia in particular is beginning to see high remittances which we hadn't before. Guatemala and Nicaragua all continue to receive high levels and growing levels of remittances. As you likely know, in times of crisis, remittances actually tend to grow. This gives us, given our history in these markets, an important level of confidence. Remittances from the U.S., and a stronger dollar and inflation in the U.S. obviously would only help the absolute number.
Those are the reasons why we think we stand a fairly decent chance of being able to pass on some of the subscriber base. You can imagine how we're gonna play this. We're gonna play this on the cost sides with very clear goals on maintaining, sustaining our margins, growing that EBITDA margin continuously and that OCF, driving it to that 10% operating cash flow growth. Doing that by continuing to drive our OCF margins, which are already at 23%. We have a pretty decent track record in doing that. On the revenue side, on top of everything that I have just said, we're very cognizant that in times like this, volume remains our long-term objective. Our business plan is volume driven. Bringing more customer base to a fixed cost, great size and scale in our markets, in under-penetrated markets.
Throughout the shorter term, a lot of focus on ARPU is what helps win the day during these moments, and that is why we're so focused on defending ARPU during these inflationary times. I've already outlined how we aim to do that.
Great. Thank you very much.
You bet.
Thanks Matthew. That was our last call. Our last question, so Mauricio, I don't know if you wanna make any closing remarks.
Well, thank you for joining us today. We like the results we put out today. We believe we're delivering everything we said we were gonna deliver, and we're happy about that. We have renewed confidence, despite the macro headwinds, that we will deliver on.
Sorry. Look, I just, you know, just finished here from Mauricio. Look, like I said, I think we're very happy with the quarter. I'm very happy with the performance and to continue to see the, you know, the broad-based revenue growth that we've achieved, you know, across the business. As well as, you know, the momentum we're starting to see on the EBITDA side, year over year. With that, you know, Mauricio, I guess you're back on. I think with that. You know, thanks for your time, and I look forward to speaking with you next quarter.
I think you probably did a phenomenal job Sheldon. The key message is we're on track, and we're gonna deliver on that three-year plan that we promised out earlier this year. Thanks for joining today.
Great. Thanks.