Hello, everyone, welcome to our fourth quarter 2022 results conference call. Before we begin, please take a moment to review the safe harbor disclosure on slide two of the presentation, which is available on our website, along with the earnings release. During the presentation, we will be referencing non-IFRS measures, and we define these on slide three, and we provide reconciliation tables to the nearest IFRS metric in the earnings release and on our website. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Mauricio Ramos.
Good morning and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Let's go straight to the highlights for the year, starting on slide 5. On the left, you will recognize the value creation framework that we presented at our Investor Day almost one year ago today. Back then, the global economy was bouncing back strongly from the pandemic, the economic outlook was quite positive. That changed quickly after Russia invaded Ukraine, energy prices spiked, inflation and interest rates moved up sharply. Despite this abrupt change, we have stayed the course and continued to execute on our plans. We're actually quite used to executing and delivering through uncertain times, that's what we did in 2022. We delivered on our objectives with a good outcome for the year, as you will see during today's presentation.
Operationally, we focused even more on our customers, and we invested further in our networks and into our people. All of this produced strong financial results. Organic OCF growth was a strong 8.4%, and Equity Free Cash Flow all-in was $171 million. All of this is consistent with our plans, and as we said we would, we used that cash flow to reduce leverage. Our leverage was down to three times at year-end. We also made very significant progress in our plans to carve out our tower portfolio and remain on track for a transaction later this year. Tigo Money continued to execute on its own plans to accelerate growth, which we expect will generate interest among potential investors who can bring expertise and capital to help the business flourish and get to the next level on its own.
Finally, 2022 was a big year for us on ESG. Our science-based targets were validated formally, and we also made important commitments towards diversity and inclusion. These and many other actions have further strengthened our Sangre Tigo culture and are helping us cement a position as an employer of choice in the region. In 2022, we ranked number 2 in Latin America and number 5 in the world in the Great Place to Work survey, alongside other global household names like DHL, Hilton, Cisco, and Salesforce. We're entering 2023 from a position of strength and with great confidence on the strategic plans we laid out a year ago. Let's get to some detail. Please turn to slide 6 for a look at service revenue in 2022.
Service revenue grew 2.3% during the fourth quarter and 3.5% for the full year. As expected, growth slowed in the second half with a change in macroeconomic conditions. When you look at the full year picture on this page, you can appreciate how strong our business is, with every business line in almost every country growing, despite a much more challenging macro environment. As I mentioned last quarter, there are some shifts in the way we're achieving our growth. This is consistent with the general trends in our markets. It's lower growth in Home, offset by stronger growth in Mobile. We believe that this is at least partly related to increased mobility and less dependence on home broadband, as kids have gone back to in-person learning and parents have returned to their offices.
This is happening in the context of a weaker economy where consumers are having to cut some of their spending. Yet, meanwhile, B2B continues to perform very, very well, as you can see in more detail on the next slide. Service revenue from our B2B business grew more than 5% in 2022, accelerating from only 1% in 2021. As a reminder, we revamped our B2B team, our strategy, and refocused our product offerings for Tigo businesses just a few years ago. With the pandemic now behind us, this is paying off, with stronger customer growth, especially in the SME area, and very rapid revenue growth, with about 40% coming from high-end digital services that make up close to 20% of our overall B2B business now.
This part of our business has continued to perform strongly in the second half of the year. We have created a strong pipeline of new projects, which gives me a lot of confidence that we can continue to drive solid growth in B2B going forward. Let's look at our mobile business on slide 8. As I mentioned earlier, our consumer mobile business grew more than 3% for the year, postpaid has been the main driver of this growth. We added three-quarters of a million new postpaid subscribers during last year, this drove 9% service revenue growth for the year. About half of these customers are migrations from our prepaid base. We do this with selective segmentation and based on consumption reloads and payment histories, we will continue to increasingly use data to drive our personalized offerings to drive our postpaid penetration.
Note that postpaid still accounts for only 16% of our overall mobile customer base, but it now contributes 35% to our mobile service revenue and 20% to our overall total service revenue. Final point I want to make on mobile is that we continue to implement price increases in most of our markets to catch up with inflation, we're encouraged by the competitor response so far. We're starting to see this translate into ARPU improvements in some countries. ARPU improvements indeed will be a very important area for our focus in 2023. Let's talk a bit more about Home on slide 9. As I said earlier, the softer net adds that we saw in Q3 continued in Q4. This was caused by, one, the post-pandemic shift in demand from home back to the office, as I described earlier.
Two, the more difficult macroeconomic environment, importantly including civil strikes in Bolivia during the quarter and throughout the year. Three, we're choosing to remain disciplined on price. We continue to implement price increases and to charge installation fees even if some competitors do not. This dampens net adds in the short term, but builds a much better and stronger business for the long run, which is what we're all about, because we remain very optimistic about the long-term growth potential for residential broadband in our markets. That's why we continue to invest to expand our network and to strengthen our content offering. As you can see on this page, this year, we accelerated our home build to add more than 800,000 homes passed, and about 40% of those were FTTH.
On the content side, we told you last quarter about our deal with ViX, which gives us access to LaLiga sports content. We're very satisfied by the early results we're seeing, particularly now that the World Cup is over and our customers' focus shift back to the local and international soccer leagues. Let's look at two of our largest markets. Starting with Guatemala on the left, we continue to invest in sales, marketing, content, and our network to maintain our market share, especially in the prepaid market, where competition picked up some intensity last year. We're very pleased with our results. Our prepaid market share remained unchanged from a quarter ago. Meanwhile, all of our subscription businesses, postpaid, home, and B2B, continue to perform very well, showing acceleration in the quarter compared to Q3, and we also have some positive help from the World Cup this quarter.
Overall, another year of solid performance from our largest operation, with very robust and sustained market share positions and strong free cash flow generation. In Colombia, the story hasn't changed much since Q3. We continued to gain share in mobile, especially in postpaid. The shift in mix to postpaid is driving ARPU higher. The good news is that ARPU for our prepaid segment is now also growing nicely and contributing to the 15% mobile service revenue growth we're now seeing in Colombia. As we saw in Q3, the growth in mobile more than offset the softer trends in home, as we discussed previously. Overall, service revenue growth was over 7% for the year in Colombia. A strong performance considering the challenging macro environment we have been facing.
Now please turn to slide 11 for a summary of our network investment in 2022 and the recent years. On the left, you can see that we have now upgraded and modernized all of our mobile networks, that all of our markets are now 5G NSA ready. In fact, we already launched 5G in Guatemala during the year. Because of this, as we have said before, launching 5G NSA in our markets, when that happens, will be within our existing CapEx envelope, as we just did in Guatemala over the past year. On the fixed side, our network is very new and fiber-deep, and increasingly so. We now have over 12 million home passes with HFC, already including 730,000 homes passed with FTTH across six of our markets.
Last week, we announced the completion of a new fiber network that connects Paraguay and Bolivia. Importantly, this provides a new key fiber route linking the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This is a culmination of a multi-year project that will improve quality and lower the cost of connectivity in South America. All of this investment has been undertaken within our stated CapEx envelope of about $1 billion per year, which translates into a healthy CapEx to sales ratio of around 18% on average over the last three years. Now look at Tigo Money on slide 12. 2022 was a breakthrough year for this business. Over the past two years, we've invested in the business, first by building a strong team and bringing in new and expert fintech talent.
During the past year, the team was very busy redesigning and rebuilding a new, more robust digital platform that can fully scale. We launched a new app and have been rolling it out across the footprint to drive adoption, and we're now starting to see the results. Digital users, that is, those people who transact online using the new app, almost tripled. We're monetizing that growth. Revenue from these digital users more than doubled. It is still early days, and our digital user base is still small, but we're very satisfied by the early take-up. Meanwhile, we're also working on driving increased engagement with our digital user base, rolling out our new merchant platform. In the last several months, we have signed up about 45,000 new merchants.
That's up from close to zero one year ago. Expect to add a lot more merchants in 2023, leveraging our Tigo business relationships. Over the last several months, we have been piloting our new lending business, originating more than 100,000 nano loans. The average loan size is about $40-$50, and the average maturity is only about 20 days. Clearly, there's a big opportunity for us in this area. We're using this pilot to fine-tune our algorithms before rolling these out more broadly later this year. Finally, we also signed an alliance with Visa, giving Tigo Money customers access to the Tigo Money Visa Card, allowing them to use their Tigo Money wallet balances anywhere Visa is accepted. Now please turn to slide 13 to review the progress of our tower company, carve-oute.
By now, you all know the reasons why doing this can create a lot of shareholder value. We've made a ton of progress over the past year. The key message here is that we're on track with the timetable we shared with you one year ago. We continue to expect a transaction towards the end of this year. The project and the company now has a name as it's coming to life. It's Lati, which will see the light of day very soon. Last but not least, I want to take a moment to comment on the important progress we made on the ESG front during 2022, as you can see on slide 14. On societal programs, we continue to focus on providing tools for employment in the digital economy, training key socioeconomic sectors such as women, children, and teachers.
On the environmental side, we validated and announced our science-based targets, committing to reducing Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2030, and to achieve net zero over the long term. Our achievements in 2022 were made possible through the dedication and the effort of our 20,000 employees. I have no doubt that the continued hard work will contribute to even more success for our business in 2023. With that, I will turn it over to Sheldon.
Thank you, Mauricio. Before we review the financials, let's recap the macro context on slide 16. We continue to closely monitor the macroeconomic situation in our countries. On the left, you can see how inflation has been tracking over the past year or so. It peaked at 8.5% in July and has fallen to about 8% in December. On the right, you can see the latest GDP growth forecast from the World Bank. Our markets on average are expected to grow about 3%, with all of our largest cash generative markets in excess of 3%. This is faster than regional peers like Mexico or Brazil, which are expected to grow less than 1%, which I think speaks to the resiliency of our markets in the face of a potential global recession.
Let's look at our Q4 performance beginning on slide 17. Service revenue was $1.3 billion in the quarter. That's up nearly 11% year-on-year due to the Guatemala acquisition. Excluding the acquisition and the impact of FX, organic growth was 2.3%. Our mobile business grew just over 2.5% and contributed about two-thirds of the overall growth in the quarter. For a second consecutive quarter, all of the mobile growth came from postpaid, which has had its best performance of the year, growing at 9.6%. Investments we've made to some of our mobile businesses and networks in recent years, especially in Colombia, continue to yield positive results.
Adverse FX trends impacted our revenue growth negatively this quarter, largely due to the Colombian peso, which depreciated 18% on average during the quarter compared to a year ago, as well as the Paraguayan guarani, which depreciated about 5%. Drilling down further on slide 18 to service revenue by country. Mauricio already talked about Colombia and Guatemala, I won't cover those again. Elsewhere, our performance in most of our other markets was solid. El Salvador continued its strong performance during 2022 and was up 7.5% in the quarter, with every business line contributing to this growth. Nicaragua also maintained their strong momentum with growth of about 5%. Paraguay grew for a seventh consecutive quarter and was up 4% with solid performance in mobile and B2B.
Panama had flat growth against a tough comparison due to some large B2B contracts in Q4 of last year. Bolivia was down 4.5% as we felt the impact of a change in regulation on mobile overage rates that went into effect in August, as well as a strike in Santa Cruz region, which impacted economic activity and our install capabilities during the quarter. Honduras, which we don't consolidate, had its strongest quarter of the year, growing almost 5% with growth across all business units. Okay. Turning to EBITDA on slide 19. EBITDA of $548 million was up 19% year-on-year due to the consolidation of Guatemala. Organically, EBITDA was up 1.8% as revenue growth was partially offset by the net effect of higher direct costs and lower OpEx.
Direct costs increased due to the higher content costs related to items such as soccer rights, both our new agreements with ViX and the World Cup. We also saw our bad debt expense increase over the past year as this largely reflects growth in our postpaid and B2B subscription businesses. Operating expenses declined due to lower selling and marketing spend, which offset the impact of inflation on our energy and labor costs. Now looking more closely at EBITDA performance by country on slide 20. El Salvador and Nicaragua both had very strong EBITDA growth from operating leverage, and we saw margins expand roughly 200 basis points over the past year. Paraguay returned to positive growth this quarter, posting an almost 7% growth.
As Mauricio mentioned previously, Guatemala had a stronger Q4 with EBITDA growth of 2.6%, although revenue from the World Cup contributed to some of the sequential improvement. Colombia was up 4% and margins were just shy of 31%, which is our highest level since the entrance of the new competitor in Q2 of 2021. We remain very focused on improving profitability in our second-largest market. We continue to gain scale in mobile, and we are also taking steps to adjust to our cost structure and mitigate the effect of the 16% increase in minimum wage that went into effect in January in that country. Panama EBITDA was down slightly in Q4. This is because of some large B2B contracts in Q4 of 2021. Our full year performance is more representative of the trends we are seeing there.
On a full year basis, Panama EBITDA was up more than 6%, which was a good result in a year where our main competitor was not allowed to raise prices under the terms of their merger approval. Our OCF increased over 20% during the year in a dollarized market. Bolivia EBITDA declined almost 12% as we saw a full quarter impact of the regulatory change from last quarter, which dropped straight to the EBITDA line. Additionally, results were impacted by the strike in the Santa Cruz region, which slowed commercial activity during the quarter. Honduras, which we do not consolidate, had impressive growth of 13%, reflecting both improved revenue trends in Q4 of 2022 and an easy comparison against a muted performance in Q4 of 2021.
Honduras is the one country where we recently upgraded our mobile network, as Mauricio outlined earlier. We have seen revenue growth accelerate nicely in the second half of the year in this market. Looking at EBITDA margins on slide 21. Margins were broadly stable and even improved compared to last year's Christmas selling season of Q4 of 2021. We achieved this despite the investments in our carve-outs and the tougher macro situation. Energy costs were up almost 11% on average during the quarter. We have seen higher minimum wage increases in our footprint given the inflationary environment. We continue to invest in preparing for carve-outs of our Tigo Money and TowerCo businesses. This impact moderated somewhat in Q4 as we begin to lap some of the earlier investments in Tigo Money in particular.
Meanwhile, we continue to implement price increases across our businesses in Q4, and we will continue to focus on price increases in 2023. Finally, we are starting to implement our efficiency program, Project Everest, which we expect will help us achieve our financial targets. Let me spend a moment providing more details on Everest. As you can see from this slide, Everest is a very broad-based efficiency program that will touch every part of the business and in every country, including our headquarters. This will include revenue initiatives around convergence, commercial OpEx savings from improved churn and customer base management and truck roll costs, network OpEx savings from energy optimization and NOC consolidation, IT savings from simplifying platforms, and CapEx avoidance with improved reverse logistics. This is not simply a cost-cutting exercise, but improving the way in which we operate.
We've been working on this for the past several months, the program is the result of a very detailed bottom-up assessment of all of our operations, we are now implementing phase 1. We expect savings from Project Everest to ramp up to an annual run rate of more than $100 million by the end of 2024. It will be a key pillar of our EBITDA and OCF growth over the next couple of years as we focus on delivering our Equity Free Cash Flow targets. Moving to slide 23. You can see our operating cash flow, that is EBITDA less CapEx, performed in 2022 compared to 2021. OCF more than doubled during the year to $1.264 billion, mainly due to the consolidation of Guatemala.
Organic OCF growth was 8.4%, which adjusts for both the acquisition of Guatemala as well as for the OCF that we spent in Africa prior to exiting in April of 2022. Excluding the one-offs we called out in the previous quarters in both 2021 and 2022, organic OCF growth would have been 8.6%. This organic growth was due to organic EBITDA during the year, as well as lower CapEx, as we completed some key investment projects that began during the pandemic. Slower home customer growth also means that we spend less than expected on installs and customer premise equipment, which typically is one of the biggest components of our annual CapEx spending. Let's look at Equity Free Cash Flow on slide 24.
As Mauricio outlined, we generated $171 million during the year, in line with the guidance that we gave you during our third quarter call. This was the first year that we provided guidance on this metric, I wanted to provide you a bit more visibility on all the main line items that go into our Equity Free Cash Flow, which Mauricio describes as being after everything. Starting with EBITDA of $2.25 billion, we then deduct cash CapEx of about $960 million. This was a bit below our guidance of around $1 billion, which reflects the variable nature of a portion of our CapEx related to CPEs for customer home additions. There was about $1 billion of fixed charges for financing, leases, and taxes.
There's another $200 million for working capital and spectrum, these items can vary somewhat from year to year. Finally, we add back repatriations from our Honduras joint venture, which was just north of $80 million in 2022. I should point out that we owned Tanzania through early April, all the numbers above include about three months of Africa. We removed the net effect of that down at the bottom to give you Equity Free Cash Flow from our current footprint. Now please turn to slide 25 for our usual debt bridge. Net debt is down $1 billion in 2022, with a reduction of more than $200 million in Q4 due to the very strong Equity Free Cash Flow generation during the quarter.
We ended 2022 with $5.8 billion of net debt and net debt to EBITDA after leases of 2.94 times. This is down more than 30 basis points from 3.28 times at the end of 2021. If we include lease obligations of just over $1 billion, our leverage was 3.04 times at the end of Q4, well aligned with our deleveraging targets. With that, we are now ready for your questions.
Thanks, Sheldon. We'll now move to the Q&A portion of the call. As a reminder, analysts and investors who would like to ask a question should contact the IR team via email at investors@millicom.com, and we will add you to the queue. Before we begin, let me also provide some additional ground rules for today's Q&A session. As most of you are aware, we published a press release on January 25th, in which we confirmed that we are having discussions with Apollo Global Management and Claure Group about a possible or potential acquisition of all outstanding shares in Millicom, and that there is no certainty that a transaction will materialize, nor as to the terms, timing, or form of any potential transaction.
We have no new updates on this topic today. And for legal reasons that should be clear to most of you, we cannot and will not be taking any questions on this topic. With that, we'll take the first question today from Froylan Mendez of JPMorgan. Froy, go ahead.
Hi, guys. Thank you very much for taking my question. You mentioned the Everest project efforts to increase prices across the regions. We wanted to understand what are the key levers for the further free cash flow acceleration into next year? What is the main source of that acceleration? If we could expect a similar seasonality as the one that we saw in 2022. The second question would be if you could give additional color on the competitive environment in Guatemala mobile market and what has the impact been on prices. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Froy. Michel, you scared me more than all the lawyers did over the last few days with those comments. We got our CFO here who's been around now for over one year. He can fully tackle number 1, Froy, and then I'll talk a little bit about Guatemala. How about that?
Okay, great. Hi there. Good, good afternoon. Yeah, first of all, just on our Equity Free Cash Flow. Look, we're not giving guidance specifically on sort of 2023 versus 2024 in our thre-year range. I think what you picked on, what's underlying or underpinning our three-year Equity Cash Flow target is ultimately sort of our 10% organic OCF growth that we expect over that three-year period. The key levers there, I think you've picked up on them most. At least what can we do on the top line or what we expect on the top line. Price increases will be a big component of that. It's something we started introducing in the second half of 2022.
It's something that's going to be, you know, a focus in 2023 and beyond. That'll be a, you know, that'll be a key piece of driving that as well as then of course, how we drive margins. Project Everest is going to be a big component of that. You know, we'll get to, as I said, exiting 2024 at 100, you know, in excess of $100 million of benefits. You know, 2023 will be ramping towards that. I wouldn't say it's exactly a straight line ramp. There will be some, there'll be some one-off costs, probably a bit more, you know, in the beginning part of this exercise, versus what you'll probably see in 2024.
it won't be exactly a straight line, you know, to that $100 million exit, but that'll be a big contributor for, you know, for both years and propel us to that 10% organic OCF growth over the three-year period.
Thank you.
On the beautiful country of Guatemala. A little bit of history to provide the context, of course, as you all know, over the pandemic period, we took a lot of market share. We were just active and investing. As we did the acquisition of the asset now about 15 months or so ago, we had expected that our competitor would want some of that back. We prepared and budgeted for that. We invested also here in sales and marketing and network, and we launched 5G, all simply to make sure that, you know, Guatemala will remain as healthy as we are now. The updates on that, if I can take them holistically, Foy, I think this was your specific question is, number 1, Q4. No deterioration whatsoever in competitive environment in prepaid as we know is specifically your question.
That's a result of the way I think we handled the year and budgeted for the year. The market remained in Q4 stable on prepaid. I believe the way we responded was smart in preserving the long-term health of the business, but it also allowed our competitor to not be in a position where they needed to escalate, and they have not. We've returned to a more stable prepaid market there as we imagined it. The second point, the other businesses, call them the subscription businesses, home, B2B, Postpaid, they all continue to grow. Although they are smaller on a relative basis in Guatemala, they're growing very, very well. Point number 3, which is I think holistic and important to bring up since this is a year-end call. Just kinda take stock of the year in Guatemala as a whole.
It's also been about 15 months since we bought 100% of it. It's a good time to kind of figure out how we're doing. Point number one on that assessment is we've sustained market share, same market share we had before. Number two, was actually improved our network to a better network than we did before. We launched 5G throughout the year. We're the first ones to do that. It's NSA 5G, as I've said a number of times, so it doesn't really change the CapEx envelope. It's kind of in our normal CapEx envelope. Doesn't create a CapEx spike. We've actually improved our spectrum position. We were able to pair 700 MHz spectrum that we had bought some while ago, allowing us to light up some 700.
We now have sustained market share, better network, improved spectrum position, and most importantly, sustained Equity Free Cash Flow, as you just saw, out of Guatemala with the ability to put more debt down, which of course is increasing our return on equity in Guatemala. We're very happy with the key outcomes of the year in Guatemala on this keeping on it. There's three things that are also important for the long-term future. We've accessed 100% of the tower portfolio there, so that makes Lati be more viable. Two, as you've seen, our B2B business is something we're putting a lot of emphasis on, and now we can use Guatemala as part of the B2B portfolio. It is easier for me to spread the product stream since we own 100% of it. We're relaunching Tigo Money in Guatemala.
Again, it's easier when you own 100% of the business. You know, you can incorporate everything in a more streamlined manner. All of those things were part of the acquisition plan. All seem to say 15 months into this, it's all working out according to the acquisition plan. That's Guatemala in the holistic and the operational manner.
Thank you so much, guys.
If you have any questions, I got nothing more.
Thanks, Froylan. Next, we're gonna go to Stefan Gauffin of DNB. Stefan?
I had a terrible, so hopefully you can hear my question. I was gonna touch upon development of the, and your build-out plans. You have clearly accelerated the practical build-out, so you had 800,000 homes passed, which is target of around 1 million homes. Half did have not taken off. A thousand, way lower than the target of around. I know there is some heightened some back to work effects, in order to accelerate the... Without better sec, would you consider slowing down your network build, until demand picks up? I'll start with that, and then I can work. Short question.
I think our, the connection was not helping. As good as my Swedish is right now, your English is far better, Stefan. I think the connection was not helping out, but I think we got the gist of the question, which is around home and the build, the penetrations, our commitment long term. I think we got most of that. Kind of short term, sort of what we're seeing this year and why the slowdown in the net adds and how that makes sense in the context of us continuing to build for the long term. The slowdown we think is due to one, macro. You can see that because the slowdown happened sort of in the second half of the year. That makes sense to us. People are watching their consumption a little bit more.
Number 2, that's also consistent with what I call the ebbs and flows of mobile versus home in the context of coming out of the pandemic. The demand shifted from the home towards the office, and that's consistent as people wanna, in the context of point number 1, slower macro, wanna watch their wallets. There's also some, you know, specific country issues which relate to Bolivia, where the strikes were not just the last quarter, but throughout the year, they were very meaningful and not allowing us to sell or install. Despite that, Bolivia still added a few, some 40,000 or so. The most important one of all of these, Stefan, is we've been extremely price disciplined. Whereas some of our competitors who may have not fully taken price increases, we have.
Whereas some of our competitors may have not put or stayed the line on installation costs, we have. We think this is what preserves the long-term healthiness of the business. Even if we take some short-term pain that we have to explain to you on the net adds, it preserves what we think is a very valuable business going forward. That gives you an idea of why indeed we keep adding these homes, because we think you gotta take a longer look on the home than you normally do on other businesses, because those penetrations will come. The underlying factors for that build are still there. Young populations adopting digital, household formation, middle class formation, and low penetration will all generate increasing demand for broadband services at home in the long term.
We wanna build the networks as we have been doing that and cater to that and fulfill that demand. We're very happy with the build. Now, do we need to adjust according to the demand? Yes. In the short term, yes. We need to slow down according to the demand, so we don't need a lot of capital. We don't need a lot of capital out there that's not being put to immediate use. Overall, you will see, as you have seen now for a few years, that we will manage the business so that we sustain the economics of the residential broadband, which is 30%-35% network penetration. We will always adjust to try to get there and not get ahead of ourselves or behind of ourselves. We're happy with what we're seeing.
In terms of deploying our network, 800,000 is a good rhythm. 40% of that is already fiber. It's a pretty good number, we think. You know, we've done the logistics to work. That's not an easy thing. Getting the logistics to work in six of our markets where we're now deploying fiber. Of course, as we've said, we think going forward, we'll be able to ramp up the percentage of that fiber till we get to the 90s very, very quickly. All of this simply to say we remain extremely bullish and confident that deploying fiber and residential broadband services is the right thing for the business. Won't even go into FMC, which will remain great leverage as a mobile company. I think I've got your question, but feel free to comment. You're giving me a blank look on face, Stefan.
Yeah. You had some MFS business, but you have $50 million of MFS business. Could you just update where you are for on total?
Did you get that?
I'm not sure. The $50 million.
Maybe you want me to... I didn't get it, but Sheldon did, so he's gonna have a go at it.
I think he was asking where we are in MFS revenues. Is that what you're saying? This year versus what we've been talking about historically? $50 million. Is that the question? Yeah. Okay. Look, we haven't disclosed the numbers, but, you know, we're growing this at sort of high single digits to low double digits year-over-year. At this point in time, I think the important point to note around MFS is, you know, we've essentially spent a lot of this year, as Richard was saying in the prepared comments, on establishing the new platform, you know, and rolling out the new platform this year. That rollout was really happening, you know, in the second half, frankly, the latter part of the second half of the year.
A lot of the benefits, you know, from that which haven't come to realize at this point in time. I think it's, you know, we've been encouraged by sort of the digital adoption and the like with, you know, on this platform, but it hasn't sort of translated into sort of within year revenues in 2022. We're expecting that to ramp much more in 2023.
This is one where I would have wanted to give you Q4 numbers, but it would have been really inconsistent and everybody enjoying the presentation would be like, "Oh, what are you doing? Talk about full year and Q4." It's really in Q4, actually November, December, that you see the ramp-up that MFS is having. You see the digital subscribers coming in, the merchants coming in, the revenue coming in, and significantly the NPS really staying on very, very high. With some of the really early good results on our trials of the micro, the mac, the nano loans. All simply to say that we're happy with the ramp-up in the last quarter. I'm sure I made a whole bunch of people very uncomfortable with not doing full year on that one.
Okay.
Thank you, Stefan.
Okay.
Thank you, Stefan. We'll now go to Klas Danielsson at Nordea. Klas? Klas, you're on mute.
Yeah, I saw that. Sorry. Some issues with the mute button here in Stockholm, so. No, I was only gonna ask questions on the acquisition, but Michel scared me a bit too here, so I'm gonna avoid that. No, but just
The compliance guys gave me a red card. If anyone goes online, you just show this. I was like, "Okay, that works.
Cool. It's a good gesture I think, for sure. No, I, a couple of follow-ups, I guess, on Stefan's questions on CapEx levels. I mean, you had cash CapEx of roughly $960 million in 2022. You guided for $1 billion previously. I guess that's been the kind of headline numbers, I guess. That's kind of despite inflation being what it is to a certain degree and just the impact that that is having. I guess it's partly due to a slowing momentum in home during this year. I think with Project Everest, I mean, you're guiding for kind of additional CapEx cuts, but then on the flip side, you still wanna invest in the home business.
Could you maybe talk about some of the kind of puts and takes within the CapEx folder? Is this a sustainable level in the long term, or what should we be expecting in absolute CapEx spend over the next few years?
I'll give you some color, and maybe Sheldon can bring it down if he wants to some more specifics in a minute. We've been investing, as we showed in the presentation, we usually say around $1 billion just to give a like a number. Obviously, we're coming in below that number, with what remains an extremely healthy CapEx to sales ratio or CapEx intensity over the last three years. That's because, Klas, we've been investing quite a bit in the business. I often say to the group and to the board, we're coming out of a big investment cycle. Most of the big things that are not variable in nature are behind us, and that's important. What are those things? We modernized the network. Done. We showed you all of them over the last three years.
We put 5G cores mobiles. I'm talking mobile now, NSA cores in every operation. That's important not only because the cores are there, but also because it is our view that 5G will be NSA in the medium. That's a very important point because it means that the CapEx associated with it is similar to, consistent with what you would expect us doing on other technologies. We've also spent the last few years expanding coverage.
That 80% coverage is important because what it means is going forward is less coverage, far less coverage on 4G and a lot more variable CapEx or capacity CapEx, if you will, which should have traffic and revenue associated per year. Of course, as you surely know, we are almost done with the Colombia 700 network build, you know, which is in this envelope in the past. On fixed, we actually just had a bit of a chat with Stefann's question. You know, our build continues to be heavy, you know, in fixed. We're now almost at 13 million home passes. 700 of those are already fiber, and we've got the ability to build fiber in many locations.
The most important thing, as we said in our Investor Day, is that our existing network is fiber deep with deep, deep capacity. All of the copper upgrades, remember those? They're done. We got maybe 200,000-300,000 homes still with copper that, you know, we just get in a trickle manner get upgraded. On fixed, it's really. We've ramped up the FTTH machine, which means we're gonna get our reverse logistics to start working there. All of the, for lack of a better word, fixed heavy lifting, if you will, on CapEx is sort of behind us, and from here on it becomes a lot more variable. We even did this year the finalization of the Panama Bolivia fiber, which, you know, we're very happy about it. It's not only relevant for us, but it.
Always after having invested first in the network and the business. That's all I got.
I would just add, as we would on Project Everest. I mean, from a CapEx perspective, you know, I wouldn't expect to see a lot of savings from the CapEx side, at least in terms of what ends up in terms of being our bottom line number that we're reporting. I mean, there's some opportunities there on CapEx. I think that also just means sort of more, you know, from from what we're spending than actually a reduction in spend. We'll be getting more out, I think, the more bang for our dollar on the CapEx side. Just the other point on CapEx is kind of we've been mentioning kind of throughout the call.
I think the other variable on our spend for next year is gonna really come down to, you know, the demand and pace of our home, net adds. You know, that was a little bit lower this year. Therefore, you know, we're seeing just a little bit lower spend on that, you know, in terms of what we reported this year.
Yeah. Everest is all about doing things more efficiently, better, more digitally. This is what you would expect us to be doing over the long term. It's not about cuts. There's a part of it that's about cut, but it's about efficiency going forward.
All right. No, very good. Just a quick follow-up also on that side, but the other line, I guess on the spectrum and licenses part, because there you're also tracking a bit lower down than what we were kind of expecting since the CMD. Is this the kind of full level or again, what should we kind of expect on that side?
I think we said, you know, spectrum on our Investor Day would track to 100-150, kind of where we were from where we were before. I'll tell you, Claes, the spectrum is very lumpy. Very lumpy. Any given year you have up, down. Depends on whether something happened, didn't happen, got delayed, didn't get delayed. Don't read too much into any given year, and rather take the averages and go back some time. I'm sure part of your question has to do with the Colombia spectrum events. I would imagine there's a large chunk of that. I'll just preclude the question if it's gonna come up later and use yours as a good segue to go into it. We're in the middle of those negotiations this year, as you're very well aware.
I'd rather not comment too much. Only to say that we're not really expecting any surprises against our targets for the long term, because we've been conservative in that regard, as we should be. It does not mean to say, Kls, that spectrum prices in Colombia don't remain higher than they should be from international benchmarks. It just means that we're conservative and realistic in our approach to forecasting. As a result, we don't expect surprises.
All right. Thank you very much, gentlemen.
Thank you, Klas. Next, we're gonna go to Mathieu Robilliard at Barclays. Mathieu?
Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon. Can you hear me well?
Perfect.
Perfect. Yes, we can.
I had three questions, please. The first one was if you could give a bit of color in terms of your pricing activity in the different markets. You've talked about some of them already. You know, when I take a step back, look at the inflation, look at your service revenue growth, it seems that it's hard to catch up with inflation. Maybe if you could help us understand a bit more how that's playing out. Are the price increases front book, back book? Are you seeing spin down? That's the first question. The second question was on Everest. I just wanted to clarify that the $100 million annual saving, that's something that should enable you to reach the guidance or potentially even go above the guidance.
Within that, although it's maybe not part of Project Everest, I imagine that the higher financing costs due to the high interest rates could also have an impact on your free cash flow. Maybe you can comment on that. Then the last question, which may give Mauricio the opportunity to use its red card. I feel a bit safe regarding Michel because there's an ocean between us. The question is, when you consider the deal, are you, do you need to follow the U.S. rules, the Swedish rules, both? How is the context there? Thank you.
Definitely the red card was going to be used for that fourth one. We're not going to be going there. The first three are good for you, Mauricio.
All right. I why don't I, hand over the Everest to our Everest expert, right? He may actually end up climbing Everest, by the way. We'll hand that one, and I'll take the pricing one, right after that. I'm not sure what the third one was.
What's the record? Yeah, two of them just on Everest. You were asking, you know, is that does that kind of propel us, I think beyond sort of what we're talking about from an Equity Free Cash Flow range or... I think I kinda mentioned some of the earlier comments, you know, that helps underpin the 10% organic operating cash flow growth that we've been talking about. That is that just helps support, you know, that target. It's not sort of supplemental to that target. With regard to the interest expense cost, you know, look, from that perspective, I comment quite regularly.
You know, we're pretty well-positioned, you know, in this environment of, you know, of increasing interest rates. You know, you know, more than 80% of our debt is fixed rate. We have a very little component that's actually floating and exposed to that. We don't have a lot of debt maturities here in the near term, which we've, you know, we've shown our in our maturity profile. You know, there's not a lot of need for us to be going out and repricing debt in this current environment. You know, that's positive.
Of course, you know, even better than that, you know, we've generated some good cash here that can be used to, you know, to reduce leverage and even probably, you know, even reduce our need to go out and hit the capital markets for, you know, for financing. On a deleveraging standpoint, which is a positive from, you know, from that perspective too. I think we're pretty insulated and well-positioned in this rising interest rate environment.
Okay. Let me, let me try the pricing, Mathieu, in a constructive manner with a little bit of detail and also some big picture associated with it. Let's leave the question in the segment so that you get a better feel for what's going on, because it's different whether you're talking prepaid, post-paid or residential, broadband, or so. Prepaid because it's dynamic, and we price literally on a daily basis, or as soon as a new top-up is finished, and we can price the market. It largely is done, of course, on the gross basis. In most of the markets, we've been adjusting as much as we can. The issue there, of course, is price sensitivity, as you pointed out, elasticity.
With the exception of some markets where we're being more careful, like Panama, we've already talked about, of course, and Bolivia, where our competitor has kept competition significant on prepaid, we've not been able to do that. With the exception of those two markets, everywhere else on prepaid, we've been pricing up to the new offer as much as we can in general terms. When you look at post-paid, the same is true. We focus the price increases on the new offers rather than on the base. We're a lot more careful with the base because we don't want to create a big, massive difference between the two. Generally, we've been very good at doing that, particularly in Salvador, Paraguay, and you see that in the results. We've actually been able to do that in Latin America as well.
We've held back in Panama for the reasons that I think Sheldon mentioned. We've also been a little bit more careful for the same reasons in Uruguay. That gives you an idea on, on that. Then on home, which I talked about as being very price-disciplined. We've been slowly putting price increases, and we do this on a cohorts, right? We don't do it to everyone on the same day. We do it slowly over time. This is across the region, in a measured way, with some delay in Bolivia till we get the political backing to do it. Now your question had an element to it, okay, what's the mismatch, I think is the word you used, or at least the one I wrote down. There's a mismatch in timing.
Inflation, which was part of your question, it hits the cost base immediately. It hits us right on. We've shown you the impact on energy, which we've been able to observe, on labor, which we've been able to observe, you know, on the bottom line, but we're not able to pass on inflation on pricing with the same level of expediency in terms of timing. There's a mismatch in timing. That's, I think, what Sheldon referred to as managing our book a lot more into next year. That's part of managing that mismatch. Now, being careful with expectations, we all know that this business does not have elasticity of one as we price inflation into customers. There's some screening down, there's some affordability issues, et cetera, and that's just part of this industry.
I hope I've given you a lot of color point on the timing of it and some expectations on this. This is difficult to pass it on.
Absolutely. Just to follow up on the home, just to make sure I understand clearly, you are also increasing the front book and the back book.
Mm-hmm.
Both. Okay.
Yeah.
Great.
We call it based on the gross, but it's the same.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mathieu. Next we're gonna go to Phani at HSBC.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I have a couple of questions. It's been nearly a year since, you know, you went to the Investor Day and gave some guidance. I wanted to understand where we stand on the couple of issues there. First, at the time, we expected that organic service revenue growth would be mid-single digit. Is it still viable now, or is it that the Project Everest would offset any weakness there? The second one is, I know we saw that the share buybacks would be expected to commence in 2023, was what we had released at the time. Is that in the plans or it's still too early to say anything? I'll ask other questions later.
Sheldon's having a lot of fun today because these are both for him. Trial by fire, my friend.
I think just the first one, I think you're just asking sort of the underlying, some of the targets we had at the Capital Markets Day and sort of the, you know, you know, are we reiterating them? I think the key ones we mentioned were just the ones in the press release, and we mentioned earlier in the call, right? The operating cash flow, organic cash flow growth of 10% over the three years per year. Then of course the Equity Free Cash Flow over the three years of $800 million-$1 billion. Those are the ones, you know, that targets we pointed to.
There's also the de-leveraging target, you know, that we'll also be, you know, striving towards the, you know, 2.5 times by year, by 2025, and then, you know, down to two times thereafter. We did comment at the Capital Markets Day about an intention to do share buybacks in 2023. I would say that's still our ambition. You know, clearly a lot has changed in the world over the last 12 months and, you know, we're now operating in a higher risk environment and tougher capital markets and higher interest rates and the like. You know, but it's February, let's see how the year plays out.
You know, in the immediate term, we're gonna continue to prioritize de-leveraging and paying down our debt because we think that's the appropriate allocation of capital for the business to ensure we meet those de-leveraging targets. You know, near term buybacks remain our ambition.
My soccer coach used to say, "Never forget that soccer games have 90 minutes." Nowadays, a little bit more with the new rules, "And make sure you play all the way till the end of whistle.
Okay. The other question that I had is regarding the repatriation from Honduras. I mean, it's kind of making more than 50% of your equity free cash flow. I think, you know, you had $88 million of free repatriation from Honduras, I believe. Is that sustainable going forward or what's your, you know, what is in your target for the next couple of years?
Well, look, we're not giving guidance for repatriation for, you know, specific segments. Look, I would point out that I think your comment, it's about it makes 50% of our Equity Free Cash Flow. You know, we've talked about in the past that, you know, that Guatemala, you know, actually generates $450 million plus of Equity Free Cash Flow. You know, that's, you know, you can't, I think, isolate one single country's contribution because there's also, you know, interest costs and costs essentially the center that needs to be absorbed. I'll just kind of caution you against that point and trying to, trying to think that our operating cash flow is overly dependent on Honduras, which frankly, you know, that's not the-
It only looks that way because of the accounting, right? It only looks like it's 50%, but in reality, every country is a contributor, as you know, with the exception of Colombia. They all get lumped in with the headquarter costs. Then Honduras looks like that simply because isolated, right? That's just the way it looks, not the reality of it being 50% of our Equity Free Cash Flow. It's 10% of other country. Okay, I think we got that one. That's a good question because it helps us clarify that. We were worried by the way it looks, thank you for the question.
Just a final question on, you know, the fixed, competition, issue. You said that the competition is not responding to your pricing increases. Is there any specific markets that is not responding or is it a broad-based kind of a response from the operators?
Do we have any specific markets where competitors are not responding to price increases?
Yeah, good. Jesus, you have more questions than our board, Fannie. Good. That's good. Questions are good. We talked about Guatemala at length. Colombia, which is very important, we talked about this. The market has talking mobile now. I already talked about fixed in Colombia. Mobile in Colombia has been recomposing in pricing significantly over the last few quarters. You see that our prepaid ARPU in local currency is up, memory about 6%, postpaid is also up. Both of those lines of businesses, prepaid and postpaid, are now contributing to our mobile in Colombia, which is growing 13%-15%. Both volume but also pricing. Mobile pricing in Colombia is being recomposed. An important element of that. You've seen Honduras as well.
There's a fair amount of good behavior in the market, which is consistent with, you know, the notion that it's a two-player market in which market shares are healthy, 60/40. You know, we expect that like Guatemala and Panama, that would be a two-player healthy market, share market. We talked about Panama a little bit as well, in the sense that there's been a hold back on any price movements simply because we don't wanna price ourselves out of the market. We'll see what 2023 has to offer in that regard. Paraguay, very constructive in mobile pricing, but also reconstructing on home pricing or residential pricing. We've seen that now. Paraguay has had now six or seven consecutive quarters of service revenue growth, margin expansion, and reconstructing of the financials. What am I missing?
Bolivia we talked about, I don't think I need to go back there. I think I've covered them all. Phani, I hope that's helpful.
Sure. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you, Phani. That was our last question. Mauricio, back to you if you want to make any final remarks.
I can just use two words. We're on track. That's it. We had an investor call about on year ago. We laid out a number of initiatives, and as Sheldon pointed out, we gave a three-year outlook that is composed of three key targets, 10% operating cash flow growth in average for that period, cumulative Equity Free Cash Flow of $100 million-$1 billion, and reducing leverage to 2.5 by 2025 and 2x by long term. All I need to say is that the 1st year of that puts us on track, and that's really the summary of this. The second point is we made a couple of big acquisitions over the last few years, both Guatemala and Panama.
Both are working, as I hope you can see after a year of Guatemala or a year of Guatemala and about three years of Panama, that they are on track to our acquisition plans and the building of a portfolio play. With that's really it. Those are the remarks I can give you. Thanks for joining today. Thank you.